After a brief pause in the whirlwind of his early career, Thomas Headon returns with a new EP, determined to find balance — and ready to fight for it. Read our latest Hype cover feature. Words: Abigail Firth. Photos: shotbymelissaa.

This year, Thomas Headon logged off. For the first time in the five years he's been putting out music, he put the phone down and found a new perspective. "I deleted Instagram and TikTok and everything for probably a month. Coming back, I was like, what is a Brat Summer?" says Thomas in his first catch-up with Dork in over a year. Strikingly, he doesn't seem to have changed much. He's still the same giddy kid we've always been met with, but the music he's putting out and the stories he's telling suggest he's a very different person. (And if you needed any indication he's changed, he recently regretted a tattoo of a loaf of bread on his arm before he'd even left the chair. That's growth.)