Three years ago, Matt Maltese co-wrote a stripped-back piano ballad called Magnolias about imagining his own funeral. He thought little of it until whispers reached him that Rosalía had heard the song. Six months ago, the Spanish pop star sent him her demo, and the track ended up as the final song on her new album Lux, currently in the UK Top 5. Maltese first heard the finished version on a jet-lagged walk in London after a US tour. 'It's extraordinary,' he says. 'It's a gift from someone, somewhere that it fell into her lap.'
The 30-year-old British-Canadian has quietly built a successful career across six solo albums since 2018, blending indie-pop balladry with the wry humour of his hero Leonard Cohen. With six million monthly Spotify listeners and over 1 billion streams, his latest album Hers was his first to chart. He has won fans in Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, Frank Ocean, Laufey and BTS's V, and has written for Celeste, Joy Crookes, Jamie T and Tom Misch.
Last year, Maltese wrote music for a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Twelfth Night in Stratford-upon-Avon, which comes to London's Barbican next month. 'Co-writing with Shakespeare – that's probably the best one, right?' he smiles. Growing up in Reading to Canadian parents, he moved to London in his teens and became part of the south London scene centred on the Brixton Windmill pub, though his soppy style stood out among post-punk bands. 'They're 'fuck the world' and I'm like, 'ah, but the world is such a nice thing'.'
In 2015 he signed to Atlantic Records, who called him 'the voice of a generation', but his 2018 debut album Bad Contestant underperformed. He was dropped after refusing to record John Lennon's Happy Xmas in a major key for a BBC trailer. 'I needed that blow,' he says. With £50,000 advance left, he calculated he had eight months before he'd have to quit music. He hibernated in his bedroom, worked on songs, and released his second album Krystal independently in 2019, starting a 'positive spiral'.
His career took off in 2021 when his 2017 track As the World Caves In – an apocalyptic ballad imagining Donald Trump and Theresa May together – went viral on TikTok. Charli xcx and Shawn Mendes posted about it; on one day it was the second most streamed song worldwide by a British artist behind Dua Lipa. 'They are making all the right decisions now,' he says of the industry, but he remains independent, valuing creative control over major-label pressure.
