On the heels of being announced as part of this year’s Camp Flog Gnaw lineup, Matt Champion shares new song “Faye.” The song is an extension of the world Matt first introduced with his acclaimed solo debut Mika’s Laundry released earlier this year.

 

 

“Faye” is part of a series of songs that Matt will release over the coming weeks as he expands the immersive world of Mika’s Laundry, which he depicted through a series of visuals that he co-created with director Anna Pollack. Matt’s debut represents a defining sonic shift for his solo work that he developed alongside Henry Kwapis, Dijon and a handful of other close collaborators.

Matt Champion is evolving in ways nobody could’ve predicted. Cutting his teeth as a rapper in the sprawling collective Brockhampton, he’s now matured into an artist of honesty and experience, with a glitchy, soulful sound, blurring the lines between rapping and singing while stacking and shaping his vocals into supernatural forms. His debut solo album, Mika’s Laundry, paints a dustbowl vision of the future that crystallizes his radical shift.

“The whole process of this album was trying to find something without looking for it,” Matt says. Instead of formally writing lyrics, Henry would press record and Matt would play with the textures of his voice, arriving at ideas naturally.

Two weeks of sessions in 2020 with Dijon and Henry led to the warbly “Aphid” and a bunch of dead ends. A two-hour drive out to Mountain Center, CA, is where his next undertaking really blossomed. In the remote desert, he, Henry, and a small cadre of collaborators experimented with a cyborg soul style inspired by the video game-like world Matt was building.

Matt took his time—actual years—slowly fitting together these threads into the sequence of Mika’s Laundry, which serves as a proper introduction to Matt and the curated sound of the future he’s envisioning.