Four albums deep and still throwing darts at the wall; Matt Corby wouldn't have it any other way.
There’s a particular kind of artistic courage in refusing to make things easy for yourself. Matt Corby has built a career on exactly that: the uncomfortable, the counterintuitive, the choice to sit inside a difficult feeling and figure out what it actually sounds like.
His forthcoming fifth album Tragic Magic, out April 17, is perhaps his most assured expression of that instinct yet: fatherhood and grief and isolation and joy, all wrapped in liquid basslines and soaring falsetto and the kind of sophisticated soul he does so well. You know it, I know it; it’s why we love him so.
Beat caught up with Corby ahead of the album’s release and his national tour to talk about holding heaviness lightly, the long road to trusting yourself, and why the best things in the studio often happen without anyone saying a word.
Matt Corby – Tragic Magic
- Wed 3 June | Adelaide
- Thu 4 June | Perth
- Tue 9 June | Melbourne
- Sat 6 June | Gerringong
- Fri 12 June | Newcastle
- Sat 13 June | Sydney
- Sun 14 June | Brisbane
- Tickets here
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The first thing that strikes you, or at least it did me, about Tragic Magic is the contradiction at its heart. Heavy themes, death, isolation, the bruising cost of love, delivered in a sound that is frequently funky, light, fun.
“I think it’s always good to juxtapose,” Corby tells me. “If something is really heavy it can become real cheese, real quick if you’re not coupling it with something a little counterintuitive.”
Where the album does pull back, most strikingly on the haunting, cinematically expansive Know It All, it reveals the other Corby: the one who grew up singing soul songs before he ever wrote one, who cares deeply about real instruments played by real people, and who has spent the better part of a decade making himself indispensable in the recording process.
From Rainbow Valley onwards, he tells me, he made a conscious call to play as much as the music would allow. On Tragic Magic, he co-produces every track and performs the majority of instruments himself.
“I’m getting more hands on in production naturally because I’m doing that a lot more as a job for others,” he explains, “and I feel like I have more to offer on that front as time goes on.”
But he’s not precious about where he’s at.
“I feel I’m still in my apprenticeship of figuring out how to record music and put it together and engineer it properly. I’m close to finishing that apprenticeship. I’ve learnt heaps from the people I work closely with, and I’ve got a really great circle of musical friends, most of which are other producers, and they’re all really happy to share their tricks.”
That circle is small and deeply trusted. Long-time collaborators Nat Dunn, Chris Collins (Royel Otis, Middle Kids) and Dann Hume (Genesis Owusu, Tones and I) return across the record, and Corby is unambiguous about what those relationships give him that no amount of fresh energy can replicate.
“There’s something so good about people knowing where you’ve come from, sonically. What I like about them and what I think they like about me is we’re not trying to ever do the same thing. Well, we’re trying; sometimes you fall into patterns in writing and playing.
“We’ve developed a level of telekinesis shit in the studio. There’s not a lot of talk, we’re just moving as one which is nice.
“It’s nice to keep the crew small. I’ve got enough craziness myself, let alone adding four other people into a room.”
Tragic Magic is, at its core, an album about love. Not the simple, movie-perfect version, but the real one. The one that costs you something.
Lead single War To Love, co-written with Hume, puts it plainly: Corby was raised to believe love is a choice, and sometimes it’s not an easy one.
“The act of choosing love is at the expense of your own selfishness and ego,” he’s said of the track. The album doesn’t flinch from that.
It’s also the emotional thread I found myself most caught up in. Having recently fallen in love for the first time, I found language here that could make sense of something that felt enormous and magic and terrifying and transformative all at once.
So I asked him directly: how do you actually get there? How do you take something that complex and huge and find the words for it?
He barely lets me finish the question before he’s shaking his head. “I don’t think I do that very well.”
I interrupt and tell him I strongly disagree, that the album landed for me in ways I wasn’t expecting. He pauses, then pushes back on his own instinct toward self-deprecation.
“I guess I am hard on myself on every front.
“I think I’m just very conscious about not sensationalising things, and the older I get the more I’m trying to understand the point of things, especially when writing.
“Sometimes you can be direct, sometimes I can get this point across by saying ‘that thing over there,’ which sheds light on why this feels good or bad.”
Nat Dunn is central to that process. “We can have a conversation and she’ll be getting right in there like my therapist, and then it evolves into key lines that we can build the sentiment from.”
A lot of it, he says, is finding ways to encapsulate real-life moments, then working out how the lyric and the melody serve each other.
“Music isn’t just the lyrical message or melody, it’s about how both of those things work together and how all three can create an emotion. I do think one thing I’ve always been good at is creating emotion from my voice. So if I just find the other two things to work with it, every now and then we pull it off.”
He grins.
“Songwriting can be weird like that. Sometimes you think you’re killing it and then you listen back and go, oh! That’s a pile of shit. Great, I thought I was a genius yesterday.”
The national tour that follows the album’s release is, by Corby’s own admission, something he’s approaching with more optimism than usual. Playing theatres four albums in comes with a particular challenge: you don’t get to road-test new songs the way you once did, playing them into shape across months of small gigs before anyone hits record.
“Your first album or EPs, you are playing those songs non-stop before you record them, road-testing them to the nth degree,” he says. “Four albums deep you’re just throwing darts at a wall figuring out if that’s going to feel good or not.”
Some songs that sound enormous through speakers collapse the moment you’re standing in front of people. He knows this.
But something is different this time. He’s been quietly workshopping the new material at home, guitar and piano, kids running around, and the results have surprised him.
“The few I’ve had a crack at feel really good. I’m pleasantly surprised.” He’s realistic that a couple of tracks will be “fucking near impossible to do live and make them feel as good as the record,” but he’s excited about the ones already evolving in the practice room. “I think there’s a bunch that feel better, and I’ve already felt they’ve evolved in me just practicing them.”
I asked whether that intimacy, an album this personal, this interior, presents its own challenge in translating it on a stage to a room full of strangers. He thought about it for a moment.
“I actually think it’s going to feel really good, and I don’t say that lightly because normally I’m quite intimidated before I put a show together.
“I hope people come along. It’s hard right now and being four albums deep putting on theatre shows, I think people are struggling to get out to anything and arts is always the first to go which is such a shame. I’ll put my everything into it for those who come see me play.”
Four albums in, still playing theatres, still genuinely uncertain whether the next song will land, and clearly, genuinely fine with that. It’s maybe the most Corby thing about him: the willingness to keep himself guessing. To want the thing he probably shouldn’t be attempting, just because he wants it.
“I’m amazed I’m still playing and people are still coming to shows,” he says. “Even to get four albums deep and still be able to pay the mortgage, I’m really lucky. But maybe some of that is due to me being weird with some of my choices, keeping myself guessing, keeping others guessing.”
He shrugs. “I kind of like it like that. And the older I get, the more I’m like: if it feels good, it’s a thing.”
Tragic Magic is out April 17. Matt Corby tours nationally from May 23.
