Louis Maxwell Cole was born in Los Angeles on December 4, 1986, into a musical household. His father, an emergency-room doctor who plays jazz piano in his spare time, and his mother, who played bass, gave him his first musical education. He began drumming at eight, playing along to a James Brown CD, and worked through jazz standards with his father. He studied in the Jazz Studies program at the USC Thornton School of Music and graduated in 2009. Bob Mintzer, who chaired the program, described him as a model of the modern musician: someone who writes and produces, understands how music is documented in sound and video, and can work as a player in many settings.

After USC, his friend Jack Conte encouraged him to post videos online. Cole and fellow USC jazz graduate Genevieve Artadi formed the electronic funk-pop duo Knower, and in 2010 he released both his self-titled solo album and Knower's first album, Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi. Album 2 followed in 2011, and Knower added Think Thoughts (2011), Let Go (2013) and Life (2016). Knower played Bonnaroo in 2013. That November he joined Mintzer at Vitello's for a set of big band arrangements of music by Sly Stone, the Isley Brothers, Sam and Dave and James Brown, an early sign of the second life his big-band writing would later have.

The wider world noticed in the mid-2010s. Cole co-wrote "Padded Cell" on Seal's 7 (2015), and he and Artadi appeared on Snarky Puppy's Family Dinner Volume Two (2016), where Cole is credited as guest drummer and as co-writer, with Artadi, of "I Remember" and "One Hope," both arranged by Knower and Michael League. In 2017 his split-screen video "Bank Account," showing him on keyboards, drums and vocals, was shared by Björk and John Mayer, and Knower opened for the Red Hot Chili Peppers that year. He co-wrote "Bus in These Streets" and "Jameel's Space Ride" on Thundercat's Drunk (2017) and is credited there with drums, programming and keyboards. The Thundercat connection led to a contract with Flying Lotus's label Brainfeeder.

Time (Brainfeeder, August 10, 2018) was his third solo album, written, played, mixed and mastered by Cole over two and a half years in his Los Angeles garage, with guests including Artadi, Thundercat, keyboardist Dennis Hamm and the pianist Brad Mehldau on "Real Life." The same period built his live big band. WBGO covered an all-star New York big-band concert at Public Arts and a booking for the 2018 Newport Jazz Festival, and in May 2019 Cole and Artadi joined Mintzer and the WDR Big Band at JazzFest Bonn, with solos from both drummer and bandleader. By 2022 the Louis Cole Big Band was playing the Ottawa Jazz Festival with a twelve-piece lineup of horns, rhythm section and two backing vocalists, Cole on drums and vocals. He also wrote "Planet X" for Grand Theft Auto Online in 2020 and released the live album LIVE 2019 that July.

Quality Over Opinion (Brainfeeder, October 14, 2022) is a 20-track album recorded at home, with Cole playing most of the instruments and guests including the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel ("When"), the saxophonist Sam Gendel, the drummer Nate Wood and Artadi. "Let It Happen" was nominated for the 2023 Grammy for Best Arrangement, Instrumental and Vocals, and the album was nominated for Best Alternative Jazz Album at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards in 2024, the first year that category existed. On July 8, 2022 he had played North Sea Jazz with the Metropole Orkest under Jules Buckley, and that collaboration became nothing (Brainfeeder, August 9, 2024), a 17-track album with the Dutch orchestra for which Cole wrote the arrangements and orchestrations himself, reworking pieces from Quality Over Opinion. In 2024 he also performed original choral music for a 40-person choir at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, a setting he discussed with NPR.

Alongside the solo work he plays in saxophonist David Binney's Action Trio with bassist Pera Krstajic. Their album Action (Mythology Records) came out on July 21, 2023, with Cole on drums and writing and mixing the piece "Outer Moat." In March 2026 the Metropole Orkest's 80th-anniversary record Arakatak, conducted by Miho Hazama, closed with Cole's "Doesn't Matter." At the 2026 Montreal International Jazz Festival the big band played for thousands, and Cole said there that he was writing every day with the next project not yet defined. He is booked to appear with Binney at Ronnie Scott's in London on November 9, 2026. He is based in Los Angeles.

Cole is a drummer first, and a multi-instrumentalist who also sings, plays keyboards, bass and guitar, and produces his own records. Most of what he releases is funk and pop rather than jazz in the strict sense: hard grooves, bedroom-built electronic textures, unusual chord progressions, and lyrics that are often funny and sometimes vulgar. AllMusic files him under Pop/Rock and Jazz, with the styles left-field pop and jazz-funk, and a fair summary is that the funk and the pop are the surface while the jazz training shows in the harmony, the horn writing, the improvising and the way he leads a band. He has said that jazz is open and experimental in a way funk is not, and he credits his father's jazz playing as his musical education.

His stated influences include his father, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, Boards of Canada, Nate Wood and Skrillex, along with video-game and science-fiction soundtracks. For Quality Over Opinion he named Gustav Mahler, György Ligeti, Miles Davis, Meshuggah and Morten Lauridsen, plus Super Mario Kart. In 2022 he described recording most nights into the early morning and practising an instrument for about four hours a day. The big-band and orchestral work, built on funk, breakbeat and electronic grooves written out for horns and strings, is where his USC jazz studies and his pop sensibility meet most directly.