Matt Corby released his hallucinatory new single “Big Smoke,” the newest single from his upcoming album Everything’s Fine (out March 24th via Communion). Next month Corby will kick off a limited run of intimate shows across the US with sold-out shows in New York, Los Angeles, Austin, and Toronto.

His first album in five years, Everything’s Fine vividly captures the personal and creative growth of Matt Corby who, like many, was tipped belly side up recently. Beyond the global touring pause, on the day he was meant to start recording his new album, Corby and his family were instead rescued by a neighbor. Their home had been engulfed by the flood waters that raged through Queensland and New South Wales, Australia, in early 2022. After nervously watching his heavily pregnant partner and young son be whisked away in a small inflatable dinghy, he got to work ferrying provisions to stranded locals and digging rotting mud out from beneath his home. With their home inundated by floodwaters, the whole family moved into Corby’s Rainbow Valley Studios during the album’s recording process. Juggling familial responsibilities with his creative pursuits was a one-of-a-kind pressure cooker circumstance that galvanized his artistic evolution.

“I’m currently rebuilding a lot of my foundational stuff,” Matt shares. “Covid changed me a lot, slowed me down. I feel like I’ve become aware of a lot of the stuff I need to work on, and I’m happy to start – and I have been. All of that chaos helped me not be neurotic with this album process and get to the point where I accepted things. Like, I couldn’t sit and stew over how something sounded and potentially make it worse if I was needed elsewhere.”

Ruminating on love, domestic life, natural disaster and more, Matt Corby reconfigured his creative instincts and returned to his longstanding creative collaborations in Alex Hendrickson, Chris Collins (Gang of Youths, Middle Kids, Skegss), and pop-writing savante Nat Dunn (Rita Ora, Charli XCX, Tkay Maidza). The result is Matt’s most innovative, sonically adventurous and resonant album yet. Feeding into his long standing R&B influences, Everything’s Fine is a rousing story told through a polychromatic embrace of the vintage funk, hip hop and playful soft rock we each grew up with, spooled into a new innovative, offbeat lens of Matt’s making.

The halfway point of Everything’s Fine, “Big Smoke” moves as a deluge. Suffused by carefully struck synths and toms, breathless vocals melt away to gliding strings, gentle keys and overdrive pedal-led guitars. Channeling a similar lonerist, in-your-head impulse as Currents or Plastic Beach, where “Problems” and “Reelin”’ focused on the moments or relationships that attempt to define our lives, “Big Smoke’ processes the self-sabotaging nature of the crutches leant on for support in the face of trying times.

An urge to consider ejecting that which holds us back from letting go, “Big Smoke” is one of the most insular tracks in Matt Corby’s most overt, direct and intimate albums yet. In his own words, he explains, “‘Big Smoke’ is a song that touches on the duality of living with your vices but being conscious of the fact they are probably not good for you.” The paisley patterned jam is a carefully produced touchstone of Everything’s Fine, indicative of Matt’s determination to focus on just five key elements throughout its making. His careful consideration of space here, compared to the layered flourishes of his J-Award winning album Rainbow Valley, is what allowed those deceivingly simplistic five elements emerge in a fastidiously curated 11-track album.

Photo Courtesy: Billy Zammit