Matilda Mann talks personal evolution and her debut album 'Roxwell' for DIY's Class Of 2025 • Interview • DIY Magazine

Matilda Mann might have a hectic 2025 ahead of her, but among plans to release her debut album and head out on her biggest UK headline tour yet, she has another task in mind. “I just want to be Cupid basically,” she grins, when the subject of her tour matchmaking scheme is brought up. “I just love love!”

For any budding singletons out there, the singer has your back. Last month, she took to her TikTok channel to explain her idea, which will see her attempt to set some of her audience up with one another when she plays her recent single ‘Meet Cute’. While she may still be figuring out some of the finer points of her blind date plan, suffice to say she’s excited about it. “I think it’s really daunting to just go up to someone, and you never know if they’re gonna say yes or if they’re already taken,” she nods. “But if you’re put in a position where it’s like, ‘Why not!’ It’s just funny!” she, quite literally, giggles: “Tee hee hee!”

For Matilda, love is a subject that’s endlessly fascinating. Granted, it may not be the most unique of inspirations, but its intertwined sense of both universality and uniqueness is something she can’t help but be drawn to. “Everyone experiences love in every way, in some form or another; whether it’s platonic, family or a loved one,” she explains. “Two people in love are two very different lives that no one’s lived before, so of course, you can’t really reach the end of it.”

In many ways, Matilda is a songwriter in the most classic of senses. Having grown up on a sonic diet of The Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Norah Jones and more (courtesy of her parents, who were equally “obsessed with the music itself, and all the backstory behind everything”), it tracks that – even before officially reaching her mid-twenties – she’s carved out a path as an eloquent storyteller, with a keen eye for detail and feeling. “I think it’s the only thing I could do,” she says of her first forays into music as a pre-teen. “I had a go at songwriting when I was 10. It was obviously terrible and I had just learned the word ‘decade’, so that’s in one of my songs about 12 times,” she laughs, “but it’s something I just always really enjoyed.

“Music is something I always naturally picked up on when I was little and something that I enjoyed every aspect of,” she continues, “the theory and choral music and playing in bands and singing and instruments and stuff. I just have a fascination for all of it.”

“I’m constantly still figuring out what my sound is and what I like, but I think that it’s ever-changing and always adapting.”

Having attended the BRIT School for sixth form, even then Matilda hadn’t quite realised her hobby could translate into a career. “I guess if you go there, you have some thought of wanting to do something within the music world. I did think I would maybe be a music supervisor or work in some sort of music, creative, something…” she trails off. “But I really actually just didn’t think that being an artist was on the table – I just wrote songs and then I was like, ‘Well, I don’t know who’s gonna sing them so I guess I will’.”

Since her years there, she’s shared three EPs (her 2020 debut ‘Because I Wanted You To Know’, its 2021 follow-up ‘Sonder’ and last year’s ‘You Look Like You Can’t Swim’), been a runner up in Glastonbury’s Emerging Talent Competition and racked up a few million streams for good measure. What’s perhaps more surprising, though, is that despite her often heart-wrenching work – take ‘The Day I Met You’, the hushed opening track of her 2023 EP which could reduce even the hardest of souls to a glassy-eyed mess — she doesn’t actually consider herself too emotionally-driven. “I think I’m not actually that emotional a person,” she shrugs. “I’m a very logical thinker and feeler, I guess; I kind of look at my emotions and examine them. I feel them but I’m also really aware of what I’m feeling and why, and I find it really easy to write out what I’m feeling in a very specific way.”

Instead, her songwriting has occasionally worked to reveal her true feelings before her mind has had a chance to catch up, like a musical game of tarot. “Sometimes I think I feel things subconsciously and I don’t even know that I feel it because maybe it’s slightly suppressed, so when I write songs, I don’t have any limits,” she notes. “I wrote ‘Worst Person Alive’ when I didn’t realise I wanted to end a relationship, and then a month later when I ended the relationship, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I totally wanted to leave this person!’,” she laughs. “I had no idea that that’s actually what I was thinking!”

It’s this somewhat diaristic approach that’s helped to shape her deeply personal debut full-length ‘Roxwell’ – due for release in early 2025. Named after the west London area where she grew up (“I don’t live there anymore, but I don’t think there’s anything else that feels more like me than home”), the album is her broadest work to date. Imbued with a scrapbook-like feel, it sees the singer move through different genres and sonic textures, with the primary thread of her own lived experience holding everything together. “A lot of the album is more sentimental,” she notes, “and about the sentimental feeling of love and places; the ups and downs. I definitely fell in and out of love a lot during writing this album and had very different kinds of loves as well, which I think is also really interesting.

“I think I’m constantly still figuring out what my sound is and what I like,” she continues of the record’s eclectic feel, “but I think that it’s ever-changing and always adapting. The thing I’ve mainly liked about doing a full album is I have more space to show a lot more sides of the kind of music I like. There’s a choral piece on it and then there’s quite a few indie songs, and some really folky ones. I really like to just move in between all of the types of songs I like.”

“I definitely fell in and out of love a lot during writing this album, and had very different kinds of loves as well.”

From the scene-setting ‘At The End of The Day’, which opens the album in a quietly reflective, intimate manner, through to the more driving indie-rock of ‘Say It Back’, via the gorgeous, ethereal ‘All That Was Said’, ‘Roxwell’ ebbs and flows through a myriad of stories from Matilda’s early twenties, but in a way that still feels intentional and considered. “It did take a very long time. [I wrote] some of the tracks when I was 20, whereas ’Dazed & Confused’ I wrote in maybe August or something,” she notes. “I didn’t want to have a song that was just thrown in there to fill the gap. All of them stand on their own to me. That was really important: that I’d be happy for any of them to be their own single and if any of them blew up or did really well, I’d be really happy and proud about that. I’ll be 25 when the album comes out, so it’s definitely about the first intense four years of my twenties, which I think is a very big part of who I am, and what I’m like now.”

While relationships and dating are an undeniably big part of many people’s lives during those formative years, crucially ‘Roxwell’ still finds ample inspiration outside of those confines. Across the record, Matilda digs into all the different corners of our lives that are touched by love, and – rather than choose to end the album via a swooning romantic gesture – instead she zooms in on the importance of female friendship with the warm, delicate ‘Girls’.

“I met my two best friends when we were three and then I wrote that when we were 23, so it was after two decades of being friends,” she explains of the tender ode and its place closing the album. “They are still my best friends and we’re so different – we just live such different lives – but we get along just so well in a sisterly way. I think female friendships are such an important thing in your life and they really make you feel like a girl again. They’re just so important to keep.”

And as for the album’s final sign off? In the ultimate show of intimacy, the song concludes with a clip of baby Matilda, bidding her listeners a very cute goodbye. “I think it’s funny that at the end of all of these emotions and everything, you remember it all came from that kid,” she laughs, “and then I say goodbye as I think you should after an emotional journey like that.”

‘Roxwell’ is out 28th February via 7476.

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