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Reuben Vaun Smith hadn't intended to be a musician. He was supposed to be on the football pitch. He was signed to the Leeds United youth team as a rising talent. And by 16 he'd been spotted and signed by Sevilla in Spain. But the dream was over before it really began.
At 18 years old he suffered a life-changing knee injury, catastrophically stopping his career in its tracks for good. With no back-up plan, Smith moved back to Yorkshire and contemplated what to do next.
Not long after, his grandfather bought him a MIDI keyboard - and despite never having had a music lesson or touched a keyboard in his life, Smith retreated to the shed at the end of his garden and started to teach himself music production. From that moment on he turned his dedication and rigid discipline for playing football into an obsession to learn and play music. For a solid year he spent every day in his studio at the end of the garden.
"First off I hope people catch the rawness of these tracks as they are all 1-2 hour improvised jam sessions with myself," says Reuben. "For this first release I hope people catch that, I could have gone back and tweaked things here and there but for this I preferred to leave them as they were in the moment."
It was this raw energy that shines through the lo-fi recordings that landed in Soundway boss Miles Cleret's inbox one day and caught his attention. Obviously influenced by the Balearic sound of the late 1980s but also by contemporary artists that draw on that tradition has become incredibly prolific - sometimes recording a new track every day, all recorded live and all recorded in the shed.
