Music
In this new chapter, the LA musician is no longer battling for dominion within a collective. Fostering new connections, embracing his own quirks and zany musical impulses, Champion is creatively re-awakened, finding joy and redemption within the dimensions of a studio.
Matt Champion is enjoying being rooted. In his days as a core member of BROCKHAMPTON, the doe-eyed singer-rapper had to exercise a larger-than-life bravado in a revolving line-up. In their prime, the group destabilised the notion of a heteronormative rap collective. Although at the time of their disbanding in 2022 fans were shocked by the news, this corrosive Motley crew of interdisciplinary artists were always fated for a premature end, blighted by myriad personnel changes, controversies, and a faltering sense of unity. Today, less than a year before he turns 30, Champion is on the other side of those upheavals.
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Speaking from the backyard of his Los Angeles home, the morning’s remnants in Champion’s voice echo through the speaker. “Let me know if it’s too loud?” he asks on our virtual hangout over the cacophony of distant traffic and birdsong. Raised in The Woodlands, Texas, Champion has lived in LA for seven years, the backdrop to the seismic transitions of his twenties: the zenith and dissolution of his supergroup, and the incipient phase of his foray into solo stardom. “I’m pretty deep in east LA, so it’s pretty calm and quiet out here,” he says. “It feels like home, and I really do love it here. It’s the best of both worlds; you can go to the beach, the mountains or experience city life all within a couple of hours.”
Luring the horde away from those storied sessions at London’s Abbey Road Studios, BROCKHAMPTON were captured at the CLASH studios and announced as cover stars in late 2018. The self-proclaimed “Internet boyband” were at a career apex, their synced-up creativity and show of solidarity shining in luminous hues on their first, and only, Billboard No.1 album, ‘Iridescence’. Amidst the canonised struggles that befell the group soon after, Champion has fond memories of his fleeting time in the capital. “We’ve had some incredible moments performing in London which have stayed with me,” Champion says of those epoch-making Brixton Academy shows. “As visitors, we didn’t venture too far in the city. I do remember walking through Hampstead (Heath). It makes me realise I’ve got much more exploring to do in London, but now through a different lens.”
What Champion has inherited from his time in BROCKHAMPTON, is his love of creative repartee, interplay and collaboration. “I think working with that many people for that many years teaches you how to create with the same goal in mind,” he explains. “I loved that part of BROCKHAMPTON; being at a house, or being in the studio, trying to come up with ideas whilst pushing ourselves to the limit. That camaraderie is something I look forward to and really embrace.”
Two months have passed since the release of Champion’s solo debut when we connect. Even as he works to extend this era with subsequent singles and live shows (“I’ve been deep in the waters figuring out how I want to do that. It’s another thing that’s so different from the group, where I’m so used to being on stage with a bunch of people,”) the cogs in his machine are starting to turn again. Is he already masterminding his next release? “I feel there’s something turning in my brain. It’s been bubbling lightly,” he laughs. “That’s one of my favourite things about all of this; the beginnings of the process and then the making of it. The recording process is my favourite part of what I do, so I’m always, endlessly, going to be thinking or mapping out whatever it is that comes next. That’s my happy place.”
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The seeds of Champion’s solo album overlapped for a few months with BROCKHAMPTON’s eighth and final release, ‘TM’, which marked his first production credit on a BROCKHAMPTON project. Faint sketches became full-blown ideas during the course of 2022 as Champion hunkered down in the studio with producer Henry Kwapis, introduced by fellow creative livewire Dijon. Out of an internal chemistry, over three years, ‘Mika’s Laundry’ was formed. “We just clicked,” he says of his production partnership with Kwapis. “At the beginning we were feeling each other out but after that we formed a healthy working relationship. Henry was there from the first song till the end. Every sound, every choice he made, I agreed with. It was an exciting way to work because we were really bouncing off of each other.”
The charm of ‘Mika’s Laundry’ lies in the way it rejects the beats of a linear love story, even as it gestures at one. It’s a “relationship album but not necessarily a romantic relationship album,” focused more on existential unease, ephemeral connections and inner tide changes. Its free associative form is intentional, mirroring the shift in Champion’s authorial voice. “I wasn’t wedded to a particular concept on this album,” Champion shares. “Even when it came down to writing, I would lay some things down and a week later I’d realise what it is I was talking about. Things would often take shape after. This album is more the relationship I have with myself and my emotions, and you get that when you form relationships with other people.”
In the visual for the discofied up-tempo ‘Slug’, Champion performs lyrical choreography flanked by a troupe of dancers in a domed time-craft. Champion embraced the freedom that came with bodily expression, moving, literally, out of his comfort zone. “I hadn’t danced very much before and I’m not much of a dancer,” he explains. “But ‘Slug’ needed a dance and I loved learning how to do it. The choreographer employed this punchy style that felt less like a contemporary pop dance; it’s a lot weirder, more fluid, broken and staccato. The dancers were so good and I fed off of their energy.”
On ‘Slow Motion’, a powerhouse collaboration with BLACKPINK’s Jennie Kim, the pair fashion a beguiling K-drama soundtrack about starstruck lovers out-of-sync but still holding out for each other. Sung soft and close over unobtrusive drum and bass-lite production, the duet charts two stars forging their own paths away from supergroup status; a fact Champion hadn’t considered when bonding with Jennie before they hit the studio. “I didn’t think of it like that but I can see the correlation between our worlds. I guess I didn’t think about it because it felt so natural. I’d met her beforehand, through a friend and we just hung out, went to dinner and kept things light,” Champion recalls. “It’s fun working with somebody that has a different style of voice, that was probably the missing piece of the puzzle on the album.”
On much of the project, there’s microscopically intricate gems freighted with wonder and possibility that take sharp detours, pin dropping the listener into an interdimensional expanse leagues away from where they started. The industrial-trap clamour of ‘Gbiv’ sounds familiar and self-referential for much of its runtime, but halts to a stop before morphing into a cosmic symphony of strings, keys and harp. Taking cues from the choppy, stop-start rhythms of Swamp rock progenitors Little Feet, and avant-pop empress Caroline Polachek, Champion syncopated his reality through re-sequenced, fragmented, suite-link songs.
Synthesising this medley of sounds was both a challenge and the ultimate reward for Champion. “There’s so much stuff all over the spectrum. It was a feat trying to figure out how to make all these disparate sounds feel cohesive and not like a compilation, but we agreed that the abruptness when going between different genres felt like it was part of the same world.” He drew on his own experiences listening to albums that had a disarming effect on him. When asked what three albums currently inspire his melodic literacy, Champion namechecks ‘Love Is Overtaking Me’ by Arthur Russell, Tirzah’s ‘Devotion’ and Big Moe’s ‘City Of Syrup’ – a chopped and screwed rarity in the Southern rap pantheon. “I love big ideas and big sounds,” says Champion. “Albums can be fun if they have the same through line but I also think it’s fun to have that variation; a drastic pace shift that grips you into listening or even confuses you. It pulls something out of you.”
When Champion finished sessions for the album, he began establishing a visual identity informed by the audio – a petri dish of imported ideas, titles and allusions that formed a new Arcadia. Grasslands, insects, flora and fauna coexist in a time lapse of harmony, elemental destruction and renewal: a loose allegory for Champion’s personal transformation. Pulling from post-apocalyptic and sci-fi-inspired macro-cinematography, Champion fashioned a world within a world; a fictional in-between hub where dwellers stopover on their journey to somewhere.
“I fleshed out these ideas for a utopia, this centrepiece in this world I imagined,” he explains. “It’s this small strip of dirt, like an outdoor dystopian pitstop for people. It’s the glue that holds everything together.” Juxtaposed against the tender, buoyant sonics of ‘Aphid’, the accompanying visual heightens the deceptiveness of Champion’s world. It features scenes of Champion lying motionless on grassy plains, scenes of him institutionalised, scenes of foliage being extracted from his body by scientists – who could be acolytes of a shady corporation, or saviours – and other dreamlike viscera rendered with director Anna Pollack. “It was me and Anna creating a portal into the world of a small thing happening in a bigger machine. These people could either be good or bad. I think they’re both, and that kind of ties into the contrasts of the album,” he says.
The eponymous track on BROCKHAMPTON’s seventh studio album, ‘The Family’, is Kevin Abstract’s farewell to the band he founded and cultivated. Paying tribute to each member, past and present, he acknowledges their respective talents and the inevitability of their solo careers. ‘Matt, I know you a perfectionist but now you free,’ is a poignant testimony to one of its most versatile members. Champion’s first solo project isn’t a tale of perfection or absolutes; its jagged edges and non-sequiturs reveal an artist-in-progress, shaking off the cobwebs and starting anew one experience at a time.
“I don’t think you’re ever free from trying to be perfect,” Champion concludes. “But now I don’t want to be perfect as much as I want to push myself to get the right outcome. Sometimes that comes at a cost, when you’re pushing yourself too far. So, you try to find balance. I think I’m working from a place of freedom now, something I didn’t have to this extent before.”
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As seen in CLASH Issue 128. Order your copy here.
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Words: Shahzaib Hussain
Photography: Daria Kobayashi Ritch
Wardrobe Styling & Makeup: Tavia Bonetti
Creative Director: Rob Meyers
Prop Stylist: James Rene
All clothing sourced by 194local.
