Before the pandemic, the musician, producer and co-founder of Veta Music, Matt Harris, found himself in Berlin with his band HAVVK. “I got into some electronica out there,” recalls Matt, when talking with Post-Burnout. “We were in a bar… – it was a weird name for a bar – …I think it was called ‘Keith’ or something.

“It was a random British name of some sort and you always go in just to see what it’s like, and they were playing vinyl records, and one of them was The Maze to Nowhere, which is an album by Lorn, and I remember turning to Chris [Handsley], who was in HAVVK at the time, and just saying, ‘This is really good. What is this?’, and he went up and chatted to the DJ and said, ‘It’s this.’

“So, I immediately started listening to loads of that, and I was like, ‘Imagine if this had a vocal on it. It would be unique, quite interesting,’ because it’s very instrumental, the Lorn stuff. Then I started listening to other bits and pieces, and I just thought, ‘Yeah, I could make weird noises like that and it might be some fun to do that.’

“So, I started working on some instrumental bits in Berlin, and then, in COVID, obviously, there were loads of musicians that I’d bumped into or worked with, and everybody was looking for things to do, so I just started firing out messages to people, saying, ‘Would you fancy doing a vocal on this?’, and I’d say four or five of them kind of progressed.”

But Matt was uncertain of the new music that he was making, as it was so different and experimental and outside of his wheelhouse. In Belfast, the musician and producer Rocky O’Reilly of Start Together Studio had an established working relationship with Matt.

“I think I, maybe, met Matt about eight years ago,” Rocky says. “I just shot him a message when HAVVK were in Ireland for a day, and I asked them to come up and hang out and just make some music. From there, we have done more and more and more and started doing other things – working on Maria Kelly and other stuff.

“I can’t remember when it was, but Matt said in passing one day, ‘I’ve got these tracks. I’ve been sitting on them.’ I don’t know if you were stuck on them or if you were just needing a bit of influence.” “I was,” responds Matt. “I definitely reached a point with, I think, maybe four of five of them at the time.”

At this time, Rocky had been working as a producer for well over a decade and had worked with a plethora of national and international acts, which expanded his tastes and made him very receptive to collaboration. He says, “I think every project… – this sounds like a cliché – …but, genuinely, every project I work on…well, maybe not every one, but, certainly, all the ones I care to remember, people bring in things.

“[…] I think I’m really good at taking little parts of those and moving them into other avenues. So, there’s tons of indie pop influence in some of the doom metal I record and, likewise, there’s some of those processes that come into folk music. So, for me, that’s my favourite thing. It’s why I love being in the studio rather than being on the road all the time, is that you get to make, like, a million ideas a year, rather than twelve songs.”

In Rocky’s studio, the two worked together to flesh out Matt’s initial ideas that he had crafted during the pandemic. With a new project somewhat informally begun, all they had to do was give it a name. “We were kind of talking about names for a long time,” Matt says. “I would say – what? – for three or four months, we were working on tracks, and we were like, ‘Well, we need a name for this.’

“We thought we had it a couple of times, but it just wasn’t quite there. I can’t remember…what was the one we nearly went with?” “I was just thinking about that!” Rocky responds. “I had had a stack of pints at Ireland Music Week and was texting you on the train on the way home. I was thinking of scanning back to it. There was one that, at that moment, I thought was perfect, but, the next morning, I was like, ‘No, probably not.’”

Eventually, the two landed on Birthday Problem, named after a probability theory stating that in a randomly selected group of people of a certain volume, two within the group will share a birthday. “I think we just wanted something a bit sci-fi,” Matt explains of their decision. “Like, we just went through a massive list of paradoxes, and I think this was the only one we roughly understood.” (For the record, we asked if they shared a birthday, and the answer was no).

The sci-fi element of their name also expanded to the work itself. When it came to crafting the album which would serve as the introduction to their project, Matt says, “Honestly, for the first time, I can say we had the theme from the get-go.

“I was playing Fallout 4, which was a long time ago, and Fallout 4 is just a massively dystopian experience but with a sense of humour and a bit of fun thrown in there. I’ve always been a bit of a sci-fi nerd and I just liked the idea of the songs being…And, if I listen to Lorn, it just takes me into outer space. It has a sci-fi quality to it.

“[…] The theme I liked was the idea that it’s the future and imagine if we’re continuing to just indulge all the worst parts of humanity and what do we think those worst parts are? And, at the time, in Berlin, Trump had just been elected, Brexit had just happened, and I thought that so much of that was motivated by listening to the selfish parts of humanity, motivated by listening to what makes us different than what makes us common.

“At the time, and probably more so now, I’m just noticing that a lot of people are motivated by those things, and it’s like, ‘Well, if we don’t do anything about them, where are we going to end up?’ So, that was the kind of question. It was kind of dystopian.”

With this concept in mind, Matt and Rocky used their connections to pull a bunch of collaborators to write and record about the future as laid out by Matt’s idea. In November, Birthday Problem’s debut record, The Language of War, was released and featured contributions from HAVVK, Nerves, Wood Burning Savages, Runah, Róisín Nic Ghearailt (formerly of M(h)aol), Ailbhe Reddy, and Molly O’Mahony.

They allowed the collaborators a lot of control over their piece, with Matt and Rocky happy to rearrange or completely redo instrumentals to accommodate the artist, but there was one thing Matt was set on: “What we’ve always been trying to encourage is to do something outside the box, something a bit different to what they’d normally do,” he says.

“So, if it’s a singer, we’re like, ‘Maybe try a bit of spoken word?’ If it’s someone that’s doing really heavy music, just dial it back and try and do something different. So, trying to give everyone a chance to find another side of themselves in the project is something that we’ve tried to encourage, and it doesn’t always work. Sometimes, someone is just amazing at something and we’re just like, ‘Let’s just do that!’ So, it’s not always as creative or alternative as that, but it’s been a fun process, figuring out how to make the right piece of music for the collaborator we have in mind because it’s been a bit different every time.”

“I think that’s another cool thing about this project, is it casts a net so wide,” Rocky says. “Like, we are working on things from all over, and that’s truly my favourite thing about music, is connecting with people that, otherwise, you wouldn’t, and we’re making something with them that then spreads even wider to more people. So, that’s the greatest part of all this, of the collaboration or the fun, party side that I talk about. That is definitely the coolest part.”

The collaborations were partly recorded with Rocky in his studio and partly recorded remotely and sent to him. For Rocky, there were benefits to both of these methods. He explains, “I think I’m always a fan of being in the room, nearly always, because then you’re bouncing off each other and you’re getting into it, and that’s good connections forever, but there’s something incredible about getting a vocal track in your inbox. It’s like all the decisions and work has been done, so, instantly, it just feels ten times more exciting because that’s your starting point. You’re gone from there.”

The Language of War is not the final final version of the record that Matt and Rocky have been toiling over for the past few years. Matt says, “So, the key thing is that isn’t the finished album that you’ve got there. We’re – what are we? – eight tracks in? Nine tracks in, at this stage? I can’t even remember, but there’s still more to come, so the full body of work.

“We imagine the full body of work will come to a conclusion in March/April of [2025], because there’s probably, I’d say, three more tracks that are a part of this batch, this kind of concept.”

The plan is to release a three-part series on the concept of what the future will bring, with Part I serving as conceptualising what will happen if humanity continues to indulge in its base selfishness. Part II will deal with the future if we recognise and correct those decisions. Part III is, at the time of publication, undecided.

Despite their hectic schedules (which they are both good at handling), Matt and Rocky are committed to the Birthday Problem project for the long haul. They are currently debating if and how they could adapt the project to a live setting.

“I’m quite an emotional guy; it doesn’t take much for me to start getting teary about stuff,” Matt says of the significance of Birthday Problem and hearing other people’s stories while making it. “This project…I think my cat has opened that door to that part of me, first and foremost, but this project has definitely found a layer of that.”

Birthday Problem’s debut album, The Language of War, is on all streaming platforms now. You can keep up to date with the project via their Linktree.

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… tonight at 21:00 (IST) to hear this interview in full, where we go into further detail about the collaborations on the record, working with the collaborators and their individual pieces, scheduling and the logistics of the project, and much more. Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music Podcasts.

Aaron Kavanagh

Aaron Kavanagh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Post-Burnout. His writing can also be found in the Irish Daily Star, Buzz.ie, Totally Dublin, The GOO, Headstuff, New Noise Magazine, XS Noize, DSCVRD and more.