Matt Maltese shares new single ‘Driving Just To Drive’
Matt Maltese has been on the rise for some time, and his viral hit, ‘As The World Caves In’, has been played over 270 million times on Spotify alone, earning the songwriter a string of famous fans that includes the likes of Doja Cat and Frank Ocean. Now, he’s back with the title track from his upcoming album, ‘Driving Just To Drive’.
Maltese has released three studio albums and two EPs since his debut 2015 single, ‘Even If It’s a Lie’. His last full-length effort, Good Morning It’s Now Tomorrow, was released in October 2021, and Maltese is now raring to release the follow-up. With his sardonic wit and heartbreaking observations that belies the synth dreaminess that wraps his melodies and choruses, Maltese is primed to go even further in 2023.
His latest offering, ‘Driving Just To Drive’, is a beautiful late-night meditation about moving on. The track begins with Maltese lamenting, “Walking back without a song, I hear the cars, I smell the exhaust”, over his funeral procession like piano chords. This is a song about not having a song, and the deep yearning in his quivering voice makes it more evocative.
With his eye on a ghostly image in the park from his past, Maltese sings: “Playing in the park when I was four, I can’t remember anymore”. The sense of brooding and foreboding is underpinned by shuffling jazz drums, and the longing to get out from under and escape is palpable. Our narrator is stuck, and existential dread seems to be pulling him down. When he sings, “When it rains it doesn’t pour, It just trickles dawn to dawn”, you hope something is going to give.
Maltese has not been one to disappoint with his choruses in the past; seemingly well-versed in the vernacular of classic does-what-it-says-on-the- tin songwriting, he knows how to build to that moment. The clouds part, and Maltese realises how he’s going to get out of this mire, “And maybe I’ll go driving just to drive,” he sings. Every now and then in life, you just have to do something to lift the ennui ‑ get out of the house like it’s on fire, I was told.
As the chorus continues, we get an idea of what has put Maltese in this state: “Maybe it meant nothing/When I threw another coin in the fountain at the mall,” he sings. The penny is starting to drop; this sounds like a loss now. The next verse reveals all. Maltese plaintively sings: “I used to drop the windows down/In case you ever returned home” — Maltese’s cat is missing, it would seem. Loss is painful and debilitating in any form, and ‘Driving Just to Drive’ is as good a song as any on the subject.
Driving Just To Drive is out on April 28th through Nettwerk.
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