Artist Profile: Matté

Matté, the multi-faceted, Los Angeles-based alternative R&B artist, has been surrounded by music and musicians since he was a child, and he has been pursuing music professionally for almost half a decade. Yet, with the release of his newest project, CANCEL ME LATER, and its looming sequel, FORGIVE ME NOW, he feels as though he has finally brought out an edge to his sound that has been lurking in the background, displaying the full range of what he is capable of as a dynamic and talented vocalist while working to bring each track to life from the ground up.

Growing up in Atlanta, Matté was part of an undeniably musical household. His father played the keys and the organ and was a vocalist as well, and his older siblings followed suit. Often, when Matté was a child, he would attempt to join in with his family in their creative endeavors, but he would often feel outmatched and outnumbered.

As he grew older, his tastes separated from what his family members were into, perhaps reflecting a desire to carve out an independent creative identity. Rather than the ‘80s and ‘90s soul and R&B of his parents, Matté’s first musical loves belonged to country and alternative rock.

“Those individuals [were influential], especially Green Day on the rock side. I feel like Green Day was just super crazy and super bad*ss because they would just do what they wanted to do. How they would just deliver it vocally was just so cool: the pockets that they would find and then just the storytelling as well. I felt like they were telling a story. Country music tells a story. R&B tells a story as well, but there are certain elements that go into other genres of music that I felt like I resonated with growing up.”

Yet, once Matté reached high school, it was artists such as Beyoncé, Frank Ocean, and SZA that began to speak to him, and, as he sang more in public settings, his growing confidence led him to attempt to emulate some of his favorite artists’ sounds in a home studio setting.

Nevertheless, the early teenage years are an awkward time for any male trying to find his identity, especially as a vocalist, and the interest pretty quickly fizzled out of Matté’s life as athletics took its place.

During the COVID-19 Pandemic, however, Matté’s brother invited him to the studio to help him record a demo for a song he was working on, and he reluctantly accepted to accompany him. Once there, his brother fell asleep, and Matté was left to his own devices. He made the demo completely on his own, and, while he admits that it wasn’t very good in hindsight, it re-ignited a fire within him.

While Matté had been out of music for years, he had continued pursuing other forms of creative expression during that time, and, when he got a taste of what it felt like to write and create music again, this latent energy began to burst forth.

“I think it was a birth of something that I thought no longer existed. I think it just really pushed me to explore and spread my wings a little bit further than what I thought reality looked like for me.... I had an opportunity to express myself in a way that I didn't have to always talk, and I just took it as a form of journaling, except instead of me just writing it down, I was singing it as well.”

In Matté’s eyes, his first two projects, RED EYE and Echoes of Alchemy, represented a period of feeling out his sound and his intention as an artist, with the former representing a rawer, more lyrically sparse step in his development and the latter representing a more polished, R&B-driven product.

Yet, CANCEL ME LATER, through each of its four tracks, represents an entirely new sort of confidence that is, in some ways, absent from these first two projects.

“I feel like I've always tried to play it safe, and I think, specifically with this project, I wanted it to be very bad*ss. I wanted to say things that I wouldn't normally say and sing as high as I could and as hard as I could as well. So it just evolved because I felt like I was cutting myself short… I knew how to sing with my voice and use my voice, but I felt like I kept diminishing it just a little bit to fit a specific box that I thought people would perceive better.”

On “LIE TO ME”, the project’s first song, Matté pushes his vocal range over surging waves of guitars and synths, displaying a distinct energy that serves to set the tone for the rest of the EP.

On “BASS IN THE TRUNK” and “BOUNCE ON IT”, Matté returns to some of the hushed tones and subdued lyricism that defined some of his earlier output, except, this time, he is accompanied by a deep rumbling of 808s and bubbling production that communicate an insuppressible energy.

On “PERSUASION”, the project’s final track, Matté pushes the alternative R&B envelope further than he has ever taken it, riding the crest of the song’s irresistible hook through the dynamic highs and lows that his voice soars and craters into throughout the course of the track.

Each track of the project was built from the ground up in a studio setting with his collaborators Shakale Davis, Carter Vogel, and Daniel Cunningham, and the resultant energy that has been injected from these sessions leaves each song with its own distinct vivacity. 

In short, CANCEL ME LATER, and its second half, FORGIVE ME NOW, represent something entirely new for Matté, and each track contains an implicit conviction of his own growing abilities as an artist: those that have been in development since his highly musically-involved childhood.