Dallas psych-folktronica artist Matt Of Matts has shared “Part of Your World,” the final single before the November 20 release of the debut album Strange Hymns, a collection of haunted melodies about death, divorce, fatherhood and madness.

FFO: Smog / Bill Callahan, Mount Eerie, Magnetic Fields, Caribou

Today, Dallas, TX-based psych-folktronica artist Matt of Matts is sharing their new single “Part of Your World” the final pre-release single from their debut album, Strange Hymns, out November 20. Strange Hymns is a collection of haunted melodies exploring death, divorce, fatherhood, and madness and features previously released singles “To An Ancient Power,” “Matching Horses” and “Come Thou Fount of Unforgetting.” On the Disney cover, Matt says “The Little Mermaid came out when I was 14, and I’ve known every word to this song ever since. I don’t know any work that better captures the sense that our reality is really the underworld, and that we somehow lack the equipment to access our true home.” “Part Of Your World” can be shared via Bandcamp.

The firstborn son of an evangelical exorcist, Matt of Matts adopts the language and posture of piety to explore various flavors of apocalypse. Wrestling with the residue of decades of religious trauma, Matt finds metaphors for the End of all Ends in divorce, parenting a struggling child, the martyrdom of an obscure saint, stellar death, and old age.

“Somewhere along the way I learned to sing to what I most fear,” says Matt. “In the past that’s been the fear of losing my mind. Later it was displaced by the fear of losing one of my children. The whole record probably falls into one or the other of those camps.”

It’s no accident the album opens with “Matching Horses,” an unstable synthpop dance number that casts the end of a marriage as a kind of initiatory wedding itself. “John Darnielle taught us that every divorce song should be at least a little danceable,” says Matt.

Another is a reworking of the classic hymn “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” infused with a post-Christian sense of reverent dread. Elsewhere, Matt transforms a song from The Little Mermaid into what he insists is a gnostic allegory for the universal longing to return to the pleroma.

Self-produced, Matt of Matts’ sound combines bespoke synth textures, analog drum machines, uncanny melodic tonescapes, homemade effects pedals, lo-fi glitches, and experimental contrasts with imagery rooted in fundamentalist horror. The result is intimate, strange, and occasionally hummable, a collection of anti-hymns for anyone drawn to raw sincerity, sacrilege, and a little madness.

Strange Hymns Track List

1. Matching Horses
2. Come Thou Fount of Unforgetting
3. Psalm V
4. St. Pelagia of Tarsus (ft Nicole Marxen)
5. To An Ancient Power
6. Matching Horses (Lvl 5 Bard Version)
7. Part of Your World
8. Earth Hymn
9. Listen in 60ish Years
10. You Are Holy Ground

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