For the future Dublin-born-and-raised musician Matthew Sutton, being the youngest sibling in a family of five exposed him to music at an early age. “Growing up, I had three older brothers, and I was the youngest, so I was very much influenced by their musical tastes,” he explains when he spoke to Post-Burnout just before Christmas.

“So, when I really think of the first kind of bands or, like, seminal years, it was probably in or around when I was ten or eleven, when you had, like, [Laughs] unfortunately, this wave of nu metal was kind of a thing! So, I guess I was ten or eleven then. A lot of that probably inspired my early, early kind of musical tastes, but, as I grew up, it moved a little bit away from that.

“I think, being at that age, I picked up an instrument from around ten. I think I probably started playing the guitar. There was just an acoustic laying around the house – it was banged up and there were holes put through it and stuff, but it still managed to have a few strings – and I think I just picked it up one day and made some noises on it and it interested me and kept my interest. That time, when you’re a teenager, it’s probably the best time to learn an instrument because you don’t have a whole lot else going on. So, I just kind of saw that as my in to play this.

“I think my brother played drums, and he had a drumkit that he had built, and borrowed, and stole lots of bits off of other people who had drumkits, so it was kind of this hybrid of pots and pans with maybe a snare or something. [Laughs] But, you know, we grew up in a council estate in Clondalkin, so anything we could do to keep ourselves occupied, we were happy to do. [Laughs]”

Matthew soon began taking the instrument more seriously. “I think I had one friend, who was probably a little bit better off than us, and he had a guitar, and he had all these tab books, and he had no interest in them, so, by the end of it, I was just stealing all of his shit! Because he wasn’t using them!” laughs Matthew.

“He was just like, ‘Ah, whatever.’ So, I was playing all these Metallica tab books. At that stage, I figured out, ‘Oh, I’m actually figuring this out, and I’m not terrible at it,’ you know? So, I think within that first year of playing that stuff and figuring that out, I nagged my mom for a year. I’d say, ‘Look, I’m playing on this fuckin’ bust-out acoustic guitar. Can I please have an electric guitar?’”

Eventually, his parents got him a Washburn starter pack combo with a guitar and an amp. “I played that thing to death!” Matthew remembers. “I probably blew the speaker out and everything! It was well and truly dead by the time I stopped using it! Definitely within the first year of figuring stuff out on an acoustic, I transitioned to this electric guitar, and I still have it but it’s not really playable anymore. But I had it up until I was twenty-four, I would say, is probably when I retired that guitar. So, it served over a decade of my life of me playing music.”

Matthew began playing around with the amp’s settings to try and create a tone. It would be a while before he would incorporate pedals. “I got this multi-effects Expression, Zoom thing, that had, maybe, thirty-five settings on it, and that was it for me for years,” he says. “Until, probably, I was closer to eighteen, when friends had pedals that they didn’t use or I got a distortion pedal.

“I remember I found a delay pedal – like, a digital delay pedal – and I think it’s the brand GLR, maybe. It’s not a very expensive one, but I remember when I first got that, I was like, ‘Holy shit! This is next level!’ You could probably pick it up for thirty or forty quid if you dig deep enough for it.

“But that Zoom pedal, I remember when I got it, it had this delay function on it, that it would come in five seconds late, and it would just keep building – it wasn’t like you could stop it and play with it – it would layer and layer and layer, and I figured out looping with that, and that’s when I felt like, ‘Oh, I can kind of write music for five seconds with this Zoom pedal, with the delay function.’ […] I swear to God, I probably wrote a lot of songs [Laughs] with that thing, until that thing eventually died.”

This ability to craft through budgetary restraints was significant to Matthew finding his sound. “I don’t think I owned a guitar amp until I was in my twenties,” he says. “And figuring all of that stuff out later on, down the line, was definitely living within those means of what you could do and how you could make stuff work with that.

“Pedals and all that probably didn’t come along until I was in college. Thankfully, I was so poor that I got the Government free education, you know? Means tested, my mom was poor, so cool. ‘You get free education.’ And it came with a maintenance grant, and that was the first time in my life that I had money, so [Laughs] that’s when I started buying guitar stuff and being like, ‘Oh, cool! I can afford to buy a guitar pedal now!’ So, when I was in college, I was just buying really shit guitar pedals and stuff, and being like, ‘This is the best thing ever!’, you know?”

Matthew did a PLC course in Fine Arts before moving to Galway to earn a Bachelor’s Degree at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. It was there that he started delving into music earnestly. “Me and my brother had started a band with two friends, probably when I was eighteen,” Matthew remembers.

“We played a lot of gigs, but, funnily enough, we were all metalheads that didn’t want to write metal music. The four of us were very influenced by a lot of very different things. I’m pretty sure it’s OK [to say that] I was the fundamental writer of the band, so I was trying to glue everyone’s weird bits together. So, there was a lot of writing from probably the age of seventeen or eighteen with that band.

“But, really, when I got to Galway was when I tried to do something, properly. I was doing this band, it was a two-piece. Me and my friend, Mosey [Byrne], we had this really long-named band called It Was All a Bit Black and White. We kind of done this in Galway for, maybe, four years, and we played loads of gigs.

“We played with so many cool bands, like And So I Watch You From Afar, and God Is an Astronaut, and, like, all these mega bands in that instrumental scene. We did it [as drum and guitar], and it was me on guitar, and I had looped everything; it was all live looping kind of stuff, so there was a bunch of Loop Stations.

“It was all chaos. I don’t know why we didn’t just get other people in the band [Laughs], but we just thought, ‘Yeah, we can do this.’ So, it was this noisy, kind of post-rock, no singing kind of thing. And that’s probably when I really first got into writing and honing in on stuff.

“And probably then, I think when I was about twenty-three – just when I was finishing up at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology – I got a computer because I had to write a thesis, and I got some illegal crack of Ableton, and then that’s kind of when writing music on a computer started coming into me developing my writing skills and finding out how to use all this digital software and stuff.”

After his time in Galway, Matthew moved to London. “I moved here, initially, to pursue doing a Master’s in Arts,” he explains. “That was the first time that I realised, ‘Oh, fuck, I do not have money to do this.’ I got accepted to do a Master’s over here, and I moved over, and I think I applied for funding and didn’t get it, and I was like, ‘Wow! I don’t have twenty grand for a Master’s!’ [Laughs]

“So, I shelved that and just moved, stayed here, and kept working, and started this kind of indie band thing with Tom [Hancock], who’s the guitarist in Tayne. It just didn’t really seem like anyone apart from me wanted to try and make it go anywhere. Everyone was a little bit reluctant to crack the whip, so to speak.

“So, I kind of moved over here with my laptop and guitar, and I had already kind of made these, I guess, bedroom demos of Tayne. I was kind of working on them, just on my own, and, in the meantime, me and Tom were doing this thing. We had done it for, maybe, two years, and it didn’t go anywhere. I think, maybe, we played one, singular gig, and I was just like, ‘Oh, I’m out. I’m done. I’m going to see if I can do this thing.’

“And I think I showed it to Tom, and he was like, ‘Oh, man, that’s way too poppy!’, and I was like, ‘No, look, don’t worry. I’m still figuring it out,’ and he was like, ‘Alright, yeah. You figure it out and let me know when you’ve figured it out,’ and, so, that’s what I did.

“I think we started the band in 2018, and I think I was very eager to just exist, for us to just be a band. And I think within that first year, man, we played over a hundred shows. We played a lot of shows for a bunch of nobodies, you know? And not just England; every three months, we did stupid tours.

“We were going to Ireland to play to nobody, going to Europe to play to nobody, going super far up north in England to play to nobody, and we even went to America and done seven or eight shows to nobody; strung out on the west coast and some on the east coast. And it was mad, but I think I just wanted to have something and feel like I was doing something, and, at that time, I had no ties and was in a position to just say ‘Yes’ to everything and see what happens, and just kind of make it work, and D.I.Y. everything, and shoestring budgets, eating spaghetti, and saying ‘Thank you,’ and sleeping on everyone’s couches, and that’s what we did.”

For Tayne, Matthew learnt to play the bass as Tom wanted to play the guitar. The band developed a very unique sound through experimentation with electronica and rock, which they describe as “Industrial pop noise.” A huge influence for Tayne was the Lady Gaga album Artpop, which demonstrated to Matthew how weird and expressive mainstream pop could be in the modern day.

Matthew admits that, through first-hand experience, their solitary sound has made them a difficult fit for promoters to put them on bills, but this is not a concern for him, as he would rather make music with sonic and lyrical sincerity even if it resonated to nobody but himself. This sound is demonstrated on their debut album, LOVE, which was released today.

“The record is called LOVE. It should really be called CONFLICT, because, admittedly, it’s all about conflict, or at least exploring love as conflict,” Matthew says of the record. “I think a lot of that came from just my own, personal experiences of grieving love and understanding that and going through those motions.

 “I think I was at a point in my life where I viewed love as this consistent conflict in my life because, even with compromise, there was a conflict of interest for someone or two people. I think I came out of a really awesome, long-term relationship that ended on a very mutual thing – there was no badness, there was no malice, no one did anything; we just grew apart – and I think that made me feel even more broken, in terms of, ‘Oh, love isn’t something…or being in a relationship isn’t something that I’m good at,’ and just trying to cross-examine the holes in that.

“I think that’s really where it started to emerge, where I was like, ‘OK, I’ve really got to understand this or contextualise it,’ and, through that process, I had this conversation with my dad about it. The background of my dad, which is relevant to the album, my dad had five kids with my mom, married, heterosexual relationship, and then, in the mid-‘90s, he realised he was living a lie, and he was a gay man and he felt suppressed and felt like he wanted to be who he was.

“So, that’s why my mom and dad separated and kind of went their own ways. So, a lot of what I was talking about resonated with him, and we had these mutual conversations and ideas about this conflict in love. And I had that lightbulb moment of, ‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ, my whole life, existent is because of conflict in love, and I exist because of this conflict.’

“And I just thought that was something really fuckin’ honest, and that was something really genuine, and that was something that I wanted to make art about. So, that’s kind of led into a big part of the visual side and some of the lyrical stuff, but mainly the visual side of the record.

“I was like, ‘Hey, would you be OK if we told this story in a loose, abstract kind of way with the music videos?’, and he was all up for it, so that’s what we did. We came up with these ideas for the singles we put out up to now – ‘Down,’ ‘In This Trend,’ and ‘Fear’ – we wanted to make the three videos as this one continual story in three parts, so that’s what we did.

“We came up with this story of part one being this conflict, being my dad’s sexuality, and part two being the transformation or getting through it, then the third act being the resolution or the celebration of owning who you are. So, we made these music videos based on that.”

Tayne’s debut album, LOVE, is out today. The band will play a launch show for the album at The Black Heart in London on February 5^th. You can find their music, live dates and social media accounts through their Linktree.

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… tonight to hear our discussion in full where we go into much further depth about everything we discussed in this article. 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.