Tom Sless turns reinvention into theatre on his upcoming EP

Tom Sless has never followed the most conventional route into rock music. An accountant at Deloitte before walking away from corporate life, buying a van and spending years crossing America in pursuit of songs, stages and some broader sense of purpose, his story already carries the shape of a reinvention narrative. But with his forthcoming EP, that transformation becomes something far more deliberate.

At the centre of the project is Tommy Turbo, a theatrical, larger-than-life alter ego that allows him to push his music into a more exaggerated and self-aware space. Across six songs, the distinction between performer and person begins to blur, with swagger, doubt, humour and sincerity all competing for room.

‘I’m Not Famous’ leans into bravado with an obvious wink, turning ambition and self-awareness into part of the joke. While ‘Heart Wants’ moves in the opposite direction, stripping away some of that armour and allowing a more vulnerable instinct to emerge. By the time ‘Rock N Roll Forever’ arrives, he’s fully embracing the fantasy, reaching for the kind of oversized, unapologetic rock spectacle that would once have felt completely at odds with his former life.

Musically, the project draws heavily from glam rock and 70s Americana, but there’s little sense that he is treating those influences as museum pieces. Throughout, they become tools for character-building. Big guitars, theatrical gestures and classic-rock excess help exaggerate Tommy Turbo into something almost mythic, while the more grounded songwriting keeps pulling us back towards the person underneath.

Previous offerings like ‘Don’t Save My Soul’ and ‘Country Butter’ hinted at this transition, but the wider Tommy Turbo material now gives that moment a clearer context. What began as permission to loosen up has developed into a broader examination of performance, identity and the strange freedom that can come from stepping into a character.

For Tom Sless, this new era feels like an amplification of what came before. Behind all the glam-rock theatre is a songwriter testing how much of his confidence is performance, and how much simply needed the right stage to finally appear.