Signing Laura Misch’s debut album to Björk’s label One Little Independent

Laura had built her career as a self-released artist. The goal wasn’t just to find a label, it was to find one that matched her artistic vision as closely as she matched her own work: a team that would support the album without asking her to compromise it, while also getting the music heard by a wider audience than she’d reached alone.

Alongside the label search, there was a second goal: get Laura back on the road. She hadn’t toured in two years. The ambition was a first headline tour across UK and new EU markets, built around high-profile press and radio support.

You never fully know how a label relationship will work until you’re in it (or any relationship for that matter). With One Little Independent, the alignment was there early, as we had been introduced through a mutual connection, and reaching that point meant finding a label not only willing to back the project but also who shared the same values and had put out creatively aligned work. The team at OLI are some of the smartest, most professional, creative and supportive people I have worked with in this industry.

Funding was a constant pressure point, given the scale of what we were aiming for. One Little Independent didn’t just provide financial backing for the album; they helped us apply for, and win, funding to support (for example for touring support in the UK).

A recurring question throughout the campaign was what actually counted as the right opportunity, not always the biggest door, but the one whose audience and direction matched the artistic vision most closely. This was especially true when it came to tour dates and press. With far more press interest than we could take on, thanks to strong relationships across the PR teams and the label, every opportunity had to be weighed: where Laura’s input mattered, where the team could step in, and sometimes, where the right call was to pass. The guiding question was always what actually served the project, weighing Laura’s and the team’s capacity against an opportunity’s reach or fit.

The main lesson from this project is the importance of value alignment with the team. Everyone needs to understand the artistic vision and the goals of the project the same way. Expectations, values and vision are just as important as commercial goals, and setting a clear framework from the beginning allows bigger teams to tackle every challenge and opportunity together. Everyone has the same willingness to listen and co-create, and care for one another along the way.

I identified and made the case for One Little Independent specifically because the fit went beyond genre, it was a team that invested in Laura as a person and an artist, not just the record. That judgment call, over a label that might have offered more on paper, shaped everything that came after it.

Laura Misch and One Little Independent continue their professional relationship today, OLI having further supported two more albums after ‘Sample The Sky’.

Day to day, my involvement spanned supporting the album’s visual identity collaboratively with Laura and One Little Independent’s designer, developing clear guidelines and mood boards from the start. I co-led the marketing campaign with the label, and worked to keep Laura’s storytelling consistent across every channel, PR and visuals.

That meant coordinating across a genuinely international PR team: La Mission in France, Beehive in Australia, Tailored Communication across Europe, and Terrorbird in the US, while mediating between artist and label on press opportunities with the full campaign in view.

I was one of the few people involved in choosing the album’s cover, alongside Laura and her grandmother.

Years later, after I’d left Starling Works and was working independently, Laura and I reconnected. She wanted to build a more sustainable, slower way of working for her second album, Lithic, off the back of her Slow Tour, and asked me to lead that process specifically because I already understood how she worked. Together we unpacked what hadn’t worked well in the pace of the first campaign and built a framework designed around her actual capacity, not just the industry’s usual rhythm.

Sample The Sky became Laura’s breakout release, and not only. It was a project that reached beyond the horizon of what had previously been possible for her career until this point as a self-released artist. This project has shown me what it looks like when creative people are given the full support to do their best work. Without diminishing in any way the incredible hard work poured into this project from everyone involved, it does come easier when everyone on the team is fuelled by the same passion, and the artistic vision is so genuine and strong that it serves as a clear guideline throughout the whole project. Challenges will always be there, so you want to have the right team on your side and be able to approach difficulties together. Furthermore Laura’s presence, on stage and anywhere else, is absolutely infatuous. This project has also shown me that we are all human and it is important to listen to other people’s boundaries and tune into that early.

Laura Misch assembled a standout live band, with Tomáš Kašpar on electric guitar and Marysia Osu on harp, for her first headline tour across the EU and UK with 26 dates, and sold-out shows in Berlin (Berghain Kantine), Amsterdam (Paradiso), and London (EartH). The tour also opened new markets in Spain, Italy, and Denmark.

Press coverage included The New York Times, The Guardian, The Line of Best Fit, CLASH, XLR8R, The Fader, The Autumn Roses, and Record Collector, with a cover feature in Composer magazine. On radio, the album’s singles received support from BBC Radio 6 Music (Lauren Laverne, Marianne Hobbs) and BBC Radio 1 (Tom Robinson, Jess Iszatt), alongside placements across Spotify’s Ethereal, State of Jazz, Jazz UK, New Music Friday, and Orbit playlists, including a cover placement on Jazz UK.

The video for “Hide and Seek” premiered on Nowness, reaching their 2M-strong Instagram audience, and the campaign drove a 48% increase in Laura’s Instagram following, alongside her first TikTok video reaching 9.2M views.