REMI WOLF

Matt’s musical niche might be one that instinctively sounds calm and inviting, but it’s been a journey of self-acceptance to truly get to that place. “I’ve been in what I felt was always this middle ground between someone going down a more conventional, no holds barred mainstream [path] but then idolising indie darlings, and being in the middle where I don’t really have an issue listening to Iceage but also listening to Keane. I like both,” he explains. “But that’s not really talked about in this music business. People are one side or the other and I’ve never been comfortable with that.

“I did have to step away from that and forge my own path where like, Warp Records might think I’m pop trash, but I have to wake up and not care. I have to wake up and not care what Steve Lamacq thinks of me, because it becomes like the cool kids at school,” he continues. “And I think the indie music scene in this country can be so toxic, because it can make people so repressed in trying to be idolised by people they don’t even like. And it can fuck up what you’re making, and what you feel about yourself.”

He recalls racking up the sort of plaudits - shout outs from Jarvis Cocker; nods from ‘credible’ media - that he’d long dreamed of, but that never truly satisfied the itch. “I’d rejected all these commercial paths in favour of being respected by certain people and then you get to the end of that road and it’s like, as if I thought this was gonna make me feel fulfilled and whole?” he says, shaking his head. “And then realising the thing that makes me feel the best is never thinking about those things, and stepping away. And I’ve maybe ended up where I am now by not really caring anymore what those people think. And I say that really genuinely, because there are so many times in my life where I’ve said that and wanted it to be true but I really don’t care anymore, and it’s so nice. It’s hard enough to traverse life without all that.”

n Album Three, then, Matt is writing

Onot necessarily for himself - “I don’t make music for myself, god knows I don’t. I make music to pay my rent and to connect with people” - but he’s also not writing it to please any lofty musical gatekeepers, either. And of course, because such is the fickle way of the world, the result is a record that will likely end up with a bigger audience than ever before.

Penned during 2020 and all that came with it, writing was an escape and a way to find a modicum of normality within a period filled with “juxtapositions of [living very small] and then these massive moments from the past hitting you like a bus”. “I think life is in the tiny details, and life felt so small in that time as well as so big,” he muses. “I’d watch Episode Five of Normal People and then suddenly be bawling my eyes out about something that happened six years ago.” ‘Good Morning…’ reflects this duality perfectly. On one hand it is, like always with Matt, an album obsessed with the big theme of love: the having of it and losing of it, and a conscious nod to showing both sides. But there are small moments and lyrics that ensure that, even when courted by the mainstream, he’ll always trojan horse it to some degree. “I found you watching porn today / Maybe you’ll swap it out for me,” sighs ‘Outrun The Bear’; “Can you cook the lovers’ set menu for one person?” muses ‘Lobster’.

Recently, Matt has also been branching out and writing with other people, from Joy Crookes (see sidebar) to a clutch of bona fide A-listers who he’s keeping schtum on for now. Across lockdown, he estimates that he penned four songs a week for nine months for other artists, yet even that has been an exercise in allowing himself to do what he genuinely wants. “Four or five years ago, I’d have days where I’d be a snob about stuff, and cuss people out and never dream of writing with who I am now. But who the fuck am I to think like that?!” he says.

More than ever, Matt Maltese seems to have found his right path and, whether by fate or by sheer algorithmic luck, the universe appears to be rewarding him in tandem. “If this [spike in popularity] had happened on Day One Year One, I might have a very different sense of it all and think that’s how it’s meant to be. But I have no sense of that, and I take every success as it comes,” he decides. You can lead a man to the waters (or muddy lakes) of internet fame, but you clearly can’t make him drink. Matt Maltese is happy just floating in the middle.

FRIENDS UNITED PT 2

MATT MALTESE ON WORKING WITH JOY CROOKES

“She’s got an astonishingly commanding presence and I was so shy at first, this spindly bomber jacket white boy. But she was amazing, and we talked for five minutes and there was just such a click. She lived three minutes away from where I used to live, so we’d hang out and go to the gym together, and the third day we hung out she had this very difficult thing going on in her life that we wrote a song about (‘Skin’). I feel so lucky that, in this time, I’ve met someone I feel genuinely connected to. You meet very few people where their artistry just bleeds out of them and it really does with her.”

‘Good Morning It’s Now Tomorrow’ is out 8th

October via Nettwerk. DIY

With eye-popping lyrics, an album full of bright and brilliant funk-pop earworms and a perhaps unexpected emotional honesty, Remi Wolf is the 360-degree pop star the world has been waiting for.

Words: Elly Watson. Photos: Daniel Prakopcyk.

t’s not too often that you find a

Ipop song that simultaneously references the infamous Two Girls, One Cup video, horror nightmare The Human Centipede and Chuck E Cheese within the first minute. But then, it’s also not too often that you find a pop star like Remi Wolf.

Raised in California, Remi first got the music bug after she created a pre-teen girl group called Citrus with two of her friends, which went onto become a slightly more serious (and less fruit based) production during high school. “We would busk on the street, and I think that was the moment where I really started to think that I could do it as a career,” Remi recalls. “We were performing on a street corner at this art fair and were out there for two hours. We made, like, $180, which at the time was unfathomable. And I was like, holy shit, this is a career! That’s where it kind of clicked for me that maybe people liked my voice and what we were doing. Before that it was pretty much just our parents being like, ‘Good job, girls!’”

It was upon heading to LA’s USC Thornton School of Music in 2014, however, that Remi’s journey to the fully-fledged technicolour pop star we see before us today truly began. Residing in a “bit of a trap house” with 11 other people studying alongside her, she would spend her days surrounded by people living and breathing music for the first time.

“We were non-stop partying for three years, but also non-stop writing music and hosting shows,” she recalls. “I was meeting people through all these parties we were having, and I was writing songs with all my roommates all the time. And we were just jamming for like, six hours a day in our living room! I think that, as much as we were kind of just like fucking degenerates, I also learned a lot through that house and I found that it just really expanded my mind. I had a very limited idea of what the fuck was going on when I went into college, but I came out of it like my world had just been so broken open.”

And it’s these early, all-consuming forays that helped Remi hone the lyrically-wild funk-pop sound that’s now become her trademark. Learning how to push the limits of her songwriting, the results led to the “pretty fucking crazy” tracks that decorate self-released 2019 EP ‘You’re A Dog!’, its 2020 follow-up

“I think people [see] my music as a beam of light. It’s just such a difference to what’s actually going on in my life.”