Cameron Winter, Geese frontman and current patron saint of “wait, am I attracted to him?” is everywhere. In a cultural moment when men are thinking about their appearance more than ever, he arrives onstage with the vague disorientation of someone who couldn’t care less if he is idolised for his looks or not (“Cameron looks so different when he washes his hair,” reads one comment on a video of the band performing). And everyone laps it up. But Winter is only the latest example of a much older truth: musicians have always occupied a special category of attractiveness, one that relies on something more atmospheric and difficult to pin down than just looks. 

Since the 1840s, when Hungarian composer Franz Liszt caused hysteria with his performances – women would fight over his gloves and locks of hair, wear his portrait on brooches, and faint in his presence – musicians have inspired admiration and devotion. Part of this comes from the ‘halo effect’ of talent, where competence, confidence and passion in a high-emotion activity, such as singing, playing the bass or even just the storytelling of music, spills over into perceived attractiveness. 

“The emotional IQ it takes to create a beautiful album says so much. I know that’s someone I want to sit and unpack life with. This is someone I want to spend my time with,” says 26-year-old Sabrina, from London, whose dating history looks like a festival lineup and is currently crushing on MJ Lenderman. This is backed up by Sarah Louise Ryan, a psychotherapist and professional matchmaker. “When someone performs music, they are demonstrating emotion, vulnerability, confidence and creative intelligence in real time,” she explains. “Those are all qualities deeply associated with attraction, and this creates a feeling of connection.”

Alongside that, says Ryan, is the spatial psychology of it all: standing in a crowd and looking up at someone under a spotlight, or watching from a balcony as the room orients toward them, literally positions the performer as a figure of heightened importance, a person granted symbolic power by the architecture of the venues we queue to get inside. “They represent freedom, creativity and emotional depth as much as the individual themselves, which is why the attraction can take on an almost mythic quality,” she says. “The stage creates an amplified version of the self that feels both authentic and slightly untouchable, which encourages audiences to project desire and to desire what is often so far ‘removed’ from them – fantasy and emotional meaning are often projected onto the person performing.” 

For someone to be a good blank canvas on which we can project our fantasies, the more mysterious and aloof they are, the better. It’s why modern stan culture depends on the artist being out of reach, with that distance punctured only sporadically by small digital moments.  Even before the internet gave us the possibility of unprecedented access to celebrities, this mystique was alluring – think Bob Dylan and his aloof, poet-genius persona, or Prince, flamboyant and inscrutable at the same time. Today, it often comes in the form of a digital absence – or at least disinterest – which hits especially hard for a generation raised online. 

Having no Instagram is one kind of hot; it suggests a monkish disengagement from the algorithmic circus. But having an Instagram with nothing on it is arguably hotter. It’s a curated void, a nonchalance so complete it triggers curiosity. After my second mk.gee show in London, I immediately scanned his IG, searching for clues about who he is. The attraction hinged on that irresistible ratio: minimal self-promotion against extreme talent. We now harvest attention for a living, but he seemed like a musician from an older world, someone who wanted to play rather than perform the idea of musicianhood online.

“I’m tired of men who try,” Alex, 29 and a self-proclaimed groupie, says. “There’s all this weird curation nowadays of self and being, and I just feel so outside of that. With musicians, it’s fun to see someone fully in their element and really uninhibited. Especially at live shows. Or in the studio, my ex just became someone else entirely in that space and I loved it.” Tasha, 26, who is currently dating a musician, adds, “some musicians are a brand, yes, but when I think of someone like Alex G, for example, it feels like he arrives just as the person he is with himself.” 

Because we often don’t know the musicians we admire personally, it’s through their lyrics that we form our ideas about who they are. And in a time when the dating scene is worse than ever, situationships reign supreme and, particularly, men seem to have lost the art of romance, it’s no wonder sensitive love songs inspire passionate or aroused feelings in fans. “I need your feet more than you do” is absurd, almost embarrassingly obsessive, but also deeply poetic and romantic in that way that Winter has. Then there’s lyrics like “The only heaven I’ll be sent to/ Is when I’m alone with you” (Hozier); “You showed me love / Glory from above” (Frank Ocean); “You’re my end and my beginning, Even when I lose, I’m winning” (John Legend).

“Creative expression signals emotional depth,” says dating and relationship coach and TV expert Persia Lawson. “Someone who can channel their feelings into music and lyrics is literally demonstrating emotional range in real time – and that’s incredibly magnetic.” These lyrics, alongside performances and a social media presence, even a minimal one, creates an element of parasocial intimacy, Ryan says. “Fans feel as though they know a musician, even though the relationship is one-sided. This creates what can feel like a pseudo connection… that one-way dynamic can actually intensify desire, because the mind fills in the unknown parts of the person with imagination and idealisation.”

From Lisztomania to the TikTok lust for Cameron Winter’s unwashed hair, the alchemy hasn’t changed all that much. Maybe the reason musicians are so hot is that they give us a place to put our longing. They offer rhythm to our (sometimes deluded) projections, a shape to our fantasies, a body to house all the feelings we don’t know where else to put – especially in a dating milieu governed by ghosting. They stand under a spotlight and let us imagine, for a moment, that someone out there still believes in romance enough to sing about it, that indeed, in Winter’s case, love takes miles.