Good Morning It's Now Tomorrow Matt Maltese
Album info
Album-Release:
2021
HRA-Release:
08.10.2021
Album including Album cover
- 1 Good Morning 02:51
- 2 Shoe 03:37
- 3 Everyone Adores You (at least I do) 03:23
- 4 You Deserve an Oscar 03:36
- 5 Lobster 04:11
- 6 Outrun the Bear 03:52
- 7 1000 Tears Deep 03:14
- 8 We Need to Talk 03:09
- 9 Mystery 03:43
- 10 Oldest Trick in the Book (feat. Bedouine) 03:21
- 11 Looking 02:56
- 12 Rat Race 02:58
- 13 Krakow 03:23
Info for Good Morning It's Now Tomorrow
“A lot of this [new] record is escapism,” Maltese explains of Good Morning It’s Now Tomorrow, written and recorded between his London home and Echo Zoo studios on England’s south coast during the U.K.’s year-long lockdown. “I’ve had to find more meaning out of the small parts of life. I want this record to celebrate the theatre in all the small things. It’s so cheesy to say it, but I think life is best when you try to make the ordinary extraordinary.”
This sense of embracing positivity and romanticising the everyday runs throughout. “The love songs in particular I think feel in hindsight like they’re me stepping outside of the present, touching on moments in the past or daydreaming what tomorrow might look like,” Maltese explains. “They’re everything I want and think love to be - too-romantic, genuine, strange, a little gross, silly, normal, imperfect, all at once.” In his quest to capture the intensity of the feelings we share each and every day, the record represents Maltese’s biggest step forward so far.
Understandably, for an album written entirely at home during a worldwide pandemic, some feelings of helplessness also crept into the writing process. Never is that more striking than on ‘Good Morning’, a breezy pop song studded with dark lyrics about witch hunts and armageddon. “It’s about the slow moving beast that moves everything forward,” Maltese says, reflecting on a rare moment the album dives into something like realism. “No matter how many people are dying and how much tragedy there is, society still moves forwards. I wanted to reflect on that and talk about how a lot of everyday life is about making peace with that powerlessness. There were a lot of moments last year of thinking, “Fuck, how do we change things and will these systems of power ever really change until it gets literally apocalyptic?” It’s a little bit of me saying I don’t know what I can do but I’ll think every day about how I can be a better part of this world.”
Where once he would have stared impending doom in the face and found a way to make fun of himself for basking in its darkness, now Maltese is more determined than ever to look to tomorrow and find a positive way forwards. “It’s a real coping record,” Maltese says of making his most optimistic work during “the worst period” of global unrest in his lifetime. “The pandemic made me very aware of the small things and the important things. It made the past feel even further away which is why I think the album is so hopeful. It made me realise which relationships and connections are real and a true source of joy. It made me latch onto those things more than ever.”
Getting away from the character he created for himself on previous albums has led to a more grounded and content place for Maltese. Lead single ‘Mystery’ captures a snapshot of his immediate world and the strangeness of the vast planet on which we all live. It’s a song that states the obvious in many ways, capturing the fact that nobody truly has a handle on how life works but trying to reach a place of being able to enjoy that lack of understanding. “In many ways this album is me simply being in awe of everything and confused but at peace,”Maltese says when summing up the album. “I never want to sound hopeless or like I get it, because I don’t. Life feels like a search but that’s the whole point.” Finally comfortable in life’s many uncomfortable positions, the new album is Matt Maltese admitting that he doesn’t have the answers he once thought he did and, most importantly, finding peace in knowing that none of us ever will.
Matt Maltese
Matt Maltese
Themes like the banality and loneliness of life have consistently weighed heavy on 23-year-old London artist Matt Maltese’s records. Following his 2018 debut album Bad Contestant and acclaimed 2019 album Krystal, which endeared him to tastemaker outlets like NME, NPR, Line Of Best Fit, Vice, Interview, DIY, Dork and more, his appropriately titled forthcoming EP Madhouse isn’t just a score for the everyday boredoms we encounter. It’s a musing on us human beings’ “ever-hopeful quest for meaning and love.” Madhouse, like its predecessor Krystal, is another home birth - largely produced by Maltese himself, but with contributions from Bad Contestant producer Jonathan Rado (Weyes Blood, Whitney, Father John Misty) and Ben Baptie (Rex Orange County), plus The Lemon Twigs’ Brian D’Addario’s guitar and Sorry’s Asha Lorenz’s vocals on “Queen Bee.” Maltese has always nailed lonesome provocations with idiosyncratic dry wit but madhouse reckons with those emotions in a way the half British, half Canadian hasn’t yet fully explored until now. “I’ve found that sometimes the majority of the emotional journey of love and life is actually the search for an understanding of it. And these songs try and make peace with all of that, poke fun at it and, ultimately, embrace it.”
This album contains no booklet.