Matthew Young emerged onto Soundcloud shrouded in mystique, as he began to seep his future-sexed alt-B tracks across the internet, building into his first major project titled ‘DIVE’, released
mid 2015. This revealed him as an artist who blah blah blah – then I had a nervous breakdown and went off the deep end.
That’s what happens when you’re living with undiagnosed bipolar disorder while trying to build a music career. Sounds bleak but whatever, it happens. I spent a good part of the end of 2015 in my
bed staring into the middle distance or watching end-on-end Simpsons episodes on my laptop (got thru like 11 seasons) and slept about 2 or 3 hours a day and got back to it. The months following that are pretty blurry, but mostly consisted of trips to the shrink, spending time in bars (on more than a few benders) and collecting a new family of friends to distract me from my own crazy life.
2016 was a bad trip for pretty much everyone and my constant flux of being either way up or way down seemed to swell in harmony with the life altering shit we all went thru (like losing Prince), but somehow, in spite of all the bad, I started making progress again. Coming thru months of being under medicated, over medicated or feeling like the guy from Silver Linings Playbook, I finally figured some shit out and got to making music again.
I wrote and recorded, what felt like a million demos between mid 2016 and mid 2017, sharing a few with my team and getting some finished up, with co-production from Josh Fountain and Djeisan Suskov, including tracks ‘Fix Me Up’ and ‘Problem’, which we’ve had mastered and sitting in the vault since late 2016. After finishing these tracks, we couldn’t quite figure out what to do with them, and some concern over my ability to cope with the pressure of this industry created further delays.
So I went back into the studio, hermit crab style, and kept making more. I wrote and produced a song titled ‘Collect’ which I then took to Josh Fountain for the finishing touches. We all agreed it would be a good reintroduction for me Рto jump back into actually releasing music. Soon after it came out, it got picked up by a few online publications and radio stations, including Triple J who put it on high rotation and it started to stack up a few spins on Spotify.
A little while after that I found a beat I made while trawling through one of my external hard drives,titled ‘DYLPC’ Рnamed in inspiration of ‘Escape (The Piña Colada Song)’ from Rupert Holmes. At that stage it was just drums and guitar, but it felt like a good vibe, so I decided to finish it off and it became the song ‘Hey’, which has been my greatest success to date Рwith over 3M plays on Spotify.
I’ve spent a lot of time on a lot of things over the last 2 years Рmostly concerning my general wellbeingand trying to maintain a healthy state of mind. Theodore Roosevelt said something along the lines of: “nothing worth doing is ever easy”, and that’s never felt more true to me than it does right now, but in saying that, I have learned that easy is a reward for hard work and hard work really does pay off.
I’m generally pretty reclusive. Self promotion doesn’t come naturally to me and I hate social media.I’m reluctantly writing this bio, because I was told I needed one, but I didn’t want to give you the same old puff-piece style, overly embellished, hype reel type of shit you’re used to seeing in the ‘About’ section of an artist’s Spotify profile Рthat feels too impersonal, so instead I wrote all of this (except for the first sentence).
I named this EP ‘Fruit’, because this is the fruit of the most fruitless season of my life.