November 2025

Al Matcott‘s debut album, Summer’s Coming, was a full-throated howl against global warming and the forces behind it. Featuring caterwauling guitars, driving rhythms, and incisive lyricism, it earned him a Double J feature album.

Now the Naarm/Melbourne artist releases his new, second album, Fake The Days Away, featuring the focus track ‘There Is Much Wrong I Have Done‘.

Fake The Days Away often explores how the electronic hallucinations of the internet have pushed reality and nature aside and are now, foot-to-the-floor, driving us into a death spiral of lies, paranoia, hate, and—above all—utter, dogshit stupidity.

The album touches on themes of loneliness and isolation, toxic masculinity, Ben Roberts-Smith, liars and fake people, and the importance of friendship. Strikingly, the album is counterbalanced by some of Matcott’s most personal writing. There’s even a love song.

Sonically, it dials down the distortion of Summer’s Coming, with a lush, varied, and more naturalistic sonic palette. What remains is his penchant for earworm melodies, the rich timbre of his vocals, and his engrossing narratives. Folk and country meet garage and psychedelic rock as Matcott turns his earworm melodies and memorable one-liners to the hyperreal wasteland of our digital lives.

‘There Is Much Wrong I Have Done‘, one of the album highlights, is delivered initially over a sparse drum and guitar backing as he details failings and misgivings in the face of love and devotion, the song adds swelling synths, pedal steel, and piano, adding emotional gravitas to Matcott’s heart-laid-bare songwriting.

To celebrate the album’s release, the song is accompanied by a Richard Clifford-directed music video. Highlighting the melancholic mood of the song, the video is a vignette of the every day joys and devastations of long-term love.

The album’s first single ‘Wouldn’t Expect To See You Here’, received widespread national support across community radio. It’s a song that tumbles forth like a lost outtake from The Stooges’ Funhouse before morphing into a sound that seamlessly blends into a sound akin to both The Replacements and The Strokes. The surprises don’t end there! It’s a song of two halves, with the fuzz-drenched riffs and shout-along choruses giving way to mournful and melancholy pedal steel and piano.

Matcott’s second single from the new album was the opening track ‘All Night‘, which has also picked up strong radio airplay. It’s a compelling statement of indie rock, overflowing with vocal, guitar, and bass melodies all surging along with invigorating momentum as Matcott writes about the feeling of limerence (“a state of involuntary infatuation with another person, characterised by obsessive thoughts and a longing for reciprocation of feelings”).

As Matcott explains, “‘All Night’ was inspired by the poetry of Alejandra Pizarnick. The song explores the stark contrast between how obsessive and all-consuming night can be, in contrast with the barren desert of the morning after.”

Elsewhere, Matcott sings about billionaires investing their ill-begotten wealth into fantasies about cheating death and immortality while the world burns around them on ‘Saint Haven‘, artificial intelligence and constant surveillance on ‘One By One‘, and the manosphere, pickup artists and angry dudes, viewed from different angles, on the darkly comic and subtly psychedelic ‘Rebel Without A Clue’, and the baroque and brooding ‘I Decide’.

‘When The War Is Over‘ takes a strong and principled swing at the much-publicised Ben Roberts-Smith, Australia’s most highly decorated war soldier who was found, in a civil defamation trial, to have committed murder and other war crimes while deployed to Afghanistan.

“There’s so much about this shit that annoyed me,” says Matcott. “The main thing that stood out was how he killed Ali Jan. He kicked this defenceless prisoner in the chest and off a cliff. In following the case, I discovered Roberts-Smith is obsessed with the movie 300. His troops even called him Leonidas. So it’s likely he was re-enacting that “This is Sparta!” scene from that movie, on a defenceless farmer. Just so utterly sickening.”

With the blurred and dreamy psychedelia of ‘Song For A Ghost‘, the album ends where it began, lonely and obsessing, late at night. Staring into a phone.

ALBUM CREDITS

All songs by Al Matcott

Al Matcott – vocals, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, drums
Miranda Holt – drums
Phoebe Neilson – bass, vocals
Brendan West – electric guitar, vocals
Elizabeth M. Drummond – vocals
James Bowers – piano, synthesiser, organ
Rob Muíños – acoustic guitar, funk box phone app, space echo
James Gilligan – pedal steel guitar

Produced, Recorded & Engineered by Rob Muíños
Mastered by Jordan Power
Artwork by Hamish Mitchell