6 days ago
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Three years back, Matt Maltese was in a casual co-writing session with some friends. Out of it came a song called Magnolias, a stripped back piano ballad about imagining his own funeral. “I didn’t think anything of it,” he says. “And then two years later, we heard some quite bizarre whispers that Rosalía had somehow heard it.” It was true: six months ago, Maltese was sent the Spanish pop star’s demo of the song. He tried not to get too excited, even when, a few weeks back, a blurred-out photo of a Rosalía album tracklisting appeared online. “On the WhatsApp group we were like: I think that says Magnolias!”
Magnolias ended up as the final track on Rosalía’s new operatic masterpiece, Lux: one of the most talked-about albums of the year, currently sitting in the UK Top 5. Maltese first heard the finished song the day the album came out, when he’d got back to London from a US tour. “I took a long jet-lagged walk and listened to the whole album to contextualise it. It’s extraordinary.” On Magnolias, Rosalía changed some words, he says, “and dramatised it incredibly. It’s exquisite. It’s a gift from someone, somewhere, that it fell into her lap.” It’s all anyone has wanted to talk to him about since. “I’ve had a lot of follow backs on Instagram,” he smiles.
The 30-year-old British-Canadian has quietly become a successful and influential figure. Across six solo albums since 2018, Maltese’s indie-pop balladry mixes a modern type of male sensitivity with the wry humour of his hero, Leonard Cohen. Aided by a viral TikTok moment, he has six million monthly listeners on Spotify and over 1bn streams combined; his latest album Hers, a lush distillation of longing and desire, was his first to chart.
It’s won him A-list fans in Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, Frank Ocean, Laufey and BTS’s V, and made him a songwriter in demand. Maltese has written for and with artists such as Celeste, Joy Crookes, Jamie T and Tom Misch – even the Bard himself. Last year, Maltese wrote music for a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Twelfth Night in Stratford-upon-Avon. Next month it comes to the Barbican in London, where we meet by its lakeside terrace on an unseasonably warm afternoon. “Co-writing with Shakespeare,” he smiles. “That’s probably the best one, right?”
Growing up in Reading to Canadian parents, Maltese moved to London in his teens, falling into the “great community” of the burgeoning south London scene centred on the Brixton Windmill pub. But among alternative post-punk bands such as Goat Girl, Shame and Sorry, he was very much the odd one out. “I was like, I’m the soppiest one here. 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 off the back of promising Soundcloud demos. “They told me I was the voice of a generation.” But that didn’t save him when 2018 debut album Bad Contestant didn’t perform to Atlantic’s expectations. He was an ill fit for the major label system, he says: “As a snobbish 19-year-old, I said no to a lot of things.” He was once asked to cover John Lennon’s Happy Xmas (War is Over) for a BBC Christmas trailer. “And I insisted that I would only do it if I could record it in a minor key.” He starts laughing. “It was atrocious.” It never got used, and he was subsequently dropped. “But I needed that blow. I wasn’t treating it enough like a job.”
He looked at what was left of his £50,000 advance. “I worked out I had eight months before I’d have to quit music and get a job.” So he hibernated in his bedroom, sore from Atlantic’s rejection and “some messy personal relationship stuff”, and worked on songs. “That period was good for me because it made me comfortable in my own skin. It really made me write songs even more from the heart.” His independently released 2019 second album Krystal started a “positive spiral”.
His career really took off in 2021 when his 2017 track As the World Caves In, an apocalyptic ballad that imagined Donald Trump and Theresa May spending the last night on earth together, blew up on TikTok. Charli xcx and Shawn Mendes posted about it; on one “ridiculous day” it was the second most streamed song worldwide by a British artist behind Dua Lipa. After Atlantic, it was vindication, to a point. “They are making all the money from it,” he smiles ruefully: around £20,000 a week at the song’s height.
But it brought him a whole new fanbase. “It used to be divorced dads and students.” Now, he has screaming fans in the 18-23 age range. “Especially in America,” he says, where he’s just headlined the 5,900 capacity Greek theatre in Los Angeles. “But it’s so funny to self-identify that I’ve become a TikTok person. I think that skewed a lot of people’s impressions.”
Maltese’s real passion is the craft of songwriting. “I didn’t come out the womb with a mic on.” Hence his embrace of the co-writing sideline. Sometimes within a group – Magnolias was written in that session with Danny Casio, Sophie May and Daniel Wilson – but often intimately with the artist themselves.
He has a particularly close relationship with the chart-topping jazz-pop singer Celeste. “She’s great at disrupting the norm.” Once, uninspired by the expensive studio environment, she took him to a grotty rehearsal space. “It was January and it was freezing, a big dark room with no heating. We wrote there for a week.” They ended up with three songs for Celeste’s wonderful new album Woman of Faces – destined for the Top 10 this week – and the standalone track Everyday.
Joy Crookes is another artist Maltese is close to: after 2021’s Skin, he co-wrote Crookes’ 2025 single Mathematics. When he heard the finished track, he was amazed that UK rap legend Kano had added a guest verse. “I am a white boy from Reading; to have a credit with Kano is just insanity.” Even after Rosalía, Maltese is still getting used to his growing imprint on pop. “I don’t necessarily feel like I’m hugely culturally relevant. I’m just someone obsessed with songwriters from the 70s. I feel very lucky that people care.”
