Born in 1990 in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, Croll grew up in Trentham where he became interested in music after suffering a rugby accident in his teens. At age 18, he moved to Liverpool to attend the Paul McCartney-founded Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. While there, he won the national Songwriter of the Year award presented by the Musicians Benevolent Fund, and the attention the award generated eventually led Croll to sign with Turn First Records early in 2012. The label released a debut single, "From Nowhere," in the fall of the same year, with a second single, "Compliment Your Soul," following in the spring of 2013. His debut LP, Sweet Disarray, arrived on Decca Records in March 2014. It was a Top 30 album in the U.K. and landed on the Billboard Heatseekers chart in the U.S. With production by Ben H. Allen (Matt and Kim, Washed Out), his second full-length, Emerging Adulthood, saw release by independent label Communion Music in the summer of 2017.
Looking for a creative change of pace, Croll left Liverpool in February 2018 and moved to Los Angeles. There, he spent the next year writing songs which he eventually recorded at Virginia's Spacebomb Studios with Matthew E. White. An EP showcasing several of the songs, including "So Dark" and "Honeymoon," arrived in May 2020 and paved the way for his full-length, Grand Plan, that August. ~ Steve Leggett, Rovi