“It's never not funny” - an interview with Matmos

Plus Actress, Drew Ashby, TDF, GB, Vanishing Twin and more

“Alarm calls at Work, Work, Work” @annajanemcintyre

Every time a new Matmos album is released, I think what unbelievable fun it must be to actually be in Matmos.

Consider it: the loving couple of M. C. (Martin) Schmidt and Drew Daniel have explored concepts in electronic music from making an album out of washing machine sounds to composing song with distinct metallic clangs, including cemetery gates and aluminium cans. (This was their most recent record: 2025’s Metallic Life Review.)

Every album is different; every album is brilliant and every album pushes the envelope in its own particular way. Music is literally all around for Matmos and the possibilities are endless. But they are never po-faced or overtly chin-stroking, conscious of how fantastically ridiculous it is to make an album with their Whirlpool Ultimate Care II and then have to lug the self same machine around Europe on tour.

Johann Wald and I interviewed Schmidt and Daniel at Primavera Sound 2026, the day after they had played the festival, and the duo proved as joyous and funny in real life as they are on record, resulting in one of the most out-and-out fun interviews I think I have ever done.

You can watch the interview here. But, for fans of writing, I present to you here the edited highlights, full of Björk, fire, the Pavarotti of plastic pillboxes, Hit Em, gay energy and disgruntled Italian audiences. I hope you enjoy it.

Johann Wald

It is the Saturday of Primavera Sound 2026 and last night people were very fortunate to catch Matmos performing at the Levi’s Warehouse. Welcome Drew and Martin. Did you specifically ask the festival if you could stay an extra day to check out stuff?

Drew Daniel

Yeah, I knew I wanted to see some more things. Lechuga Zafiro - Lechuga Zafiro is a friend. We’ve exchanged a lot of emails and he did a remix of Matmos and so I’m stoked that he’s playing with Verraco. I’ve never seen My Bloody Valentine. I’ve loved them since Isn’t Anything, way back in the day, so I’m really chuffed for that. I brought some earplugs too, because I hear it gets pretty loud.

Johann Wald

You’ve been to Barcelona plenty of times. I remember taking a picture of you with a friend at Sónar.

Drew Daniel

We have played Sónar many times, many times.

Martin Schmidt

I was claiming that we played the first one….

Drew Daniel

…but then he got busted and it wasn’t true. We also went to it as punters one year. We weren’t playing; we just wanted to go the year that it was Stockhausen and Coil and Autechre. But we also have played as Matmos and then in Björk’s band as well and then I played as The Soft Pink Truth a few times.

Johann Wald

Oh yeah with Björk!

Drew Daniel

I played Primavera also as The Soft Pink Truth two years ago.

Martin Schmidt

Yes, that was Björk, and everything was on fire. And the Fire Commissioner of Barcelona was here, like, “No fire.” And Björk was like, “Yes fire.”

Drew Daniel

People were being kind of harsh because the Björk show was delayed and it was because the dress was in a taxi that was stuck behind a lot of traffic. So there was a lot of drama backstage that year; I definitely remember that.

Ben Cardew

Every time I hear about a new Matmos album, I think what fun it must be to be in Matmos.

Drew Daniel

Well, you don’t see the tears and couple fights that are behind it.

Martin Schmidt

The brutal, vicious, gay energy.

Drew Daniel

Yeah, the gay energy gets a little scorchy sometimes. I think the issue with being a couple band is that you know each other really well and you can’t conceal anything. So if someone’s playing you a pattern and they’re super excited about it and you’re just like, “No, this is not it.”

But it is fun, I’m not gonna lie. Our life is crazy. It’s really weird and feels like some odd bonanza or some unearned windfall. And I am super grateful; I don’t mean to sound all mushy about it, but it’s fun as hell. Except when it’s like, will the washing machine clear German customs, or -

Martin Schmidt

Or will the washing machine blow the fifth power converter in a row?

Drew Daniel

Yeah, we had that thing set up at Berghain. Our audience is there and we still have no way of knowing if the show itself is even going to happen because we’d blown up so many power converters, because the washing machine sucked so much power. We finally got this magic converter that helped everything to work. So yeah, it is fun and it’s a mess sometimes too.

Johann Wald

Because you had a question about that - of, you know, which is one utensil or one piece of apparatus that you just tried and it’s like, “Let’s not do this again.” I imagine the washing machine might be something that you’re not even…

Martin Schmidt

I loved every minute of the washing machine schtick.

Drew Daniel

I think just the most labour-intensive thing we did where we were like, “Ah, this is a bust,” is we dragged a piano through the desert with video cameras and microphones inside it, and we were like -

Martin Schmidt

Screwed wheels to the bottom of the piano and dragged it behind a truck. And I had this imagining that it was going to make this beautiful, sort of thrumming, humming sound and it was basically an amplified wooden cart... and then it fell over.

Drew Daniel

There was a TV commercial for dog food that had something called a Chuck Wagon and basically our recording of this piano being dragged through the desert sounded like the dog food commercial. So that was a dead end. So sometimes you experiment and you just roll a snake eyes, you know? That’s life.

Ben Cardew

I’ve often wondered about this. Do you have the idea first, or are you just pottering around and you think, “Well, that might make a kind of idea.”

Drew Daniel

Sometimes objects flow into our lives from other people. So we have a sculptor friend that said, “Hey, I think you would like this,” and he gave us this weird blue thing and it sat on our shelf for 20 years.

Martin Schmidt

It looks like... you know, they don’t really make pills like this anymore, like a capsule. Remember capsule-style pills with the little balls in them? Yeah, imagine that, but like, much... I’m holding my... because for those of you who don’t have eyes on the radio, I’m holding my hands out about a foot and a half apart and they’re spread to about that deep.

Drew Daniel

This keeps getting dirtier! Yeah, okay, so how to describe? We had this object, and then -

Martin Schmidt

It was plastic and blue.

Drew Daniel

Two decades later, we’re like, “Let’s make a plastic album,” and we suddenly realise, oh, this thing makes an incredibly great noise, and it became the star of the album. It was like the Pavarotti of plastic pillboxes.

Martin Schmidt

It had been dormant, taking up stupid space in our house for 15 years.

Drew Daniel

And the problem with this is that it legitimates being a hoarder, because you have this feeling of like, everything is potentially valuable. You just don’t know if the right project will come and then it activates it.

Ben Cardew

I reckon, in a way, the idea that you can make music from anything is brilliant and at the same time, it’s slightly intimidating. Because you must have days where you’re like, “I just want a cup of tea,” and then you think, “Yeah, but that milk bottle - we could stick out a 12-inch.”

Martin Schmidt

It’s never not funny. It just never stops being yeah… because it’s stupid. That’s what makes it endless. It’s like, yeah, that’s so dumb.

Drew Daniel

We were in Lisbon and the metal railing going down the staircase into the club was absolutely gorgeous. We just encounter things about everyday life and it’s all there. But yeah, sometimes I get obsessed and Martin has to pull me back from the ledge. I got really into agate coasters, you know, like a drink coaster. This was a cross-cut of this…

Martin Schmidt

This was so dumb…

Drew Daniel

And I was like, “Oh, these agate coasters are so poetic, they’re so beautiful.” He’s just like, “These are not interesting, Drew. These are just agate coasters.”

Martin Schmidt

They made a nice sort of crystalline ‘ding ding ding’…

Drew Daniel

We did a whole concert in Paris based on these agate coasters and Martin was like, “You’re getting lost in the sauce. Come back to Earth.”

Ben Cardew

Martin, you were just outside the studio and you said five people came and said how much they like you did.

Martin Schmidt

It was very nice. Literally, the people in front of me in line in the coffee thing turned around and went, “Oh my god! Oh my god!” And I turned red. It was very sweet.

Ben Cardew

Because people know Matmos, right? Especially at a festival like this.

Drew Daniel

Weirdos know Matmos.

Ben Cardew

So that’s what I want to ask. When was the last time you played to an audience that had no clue who you were and were just like…?

Martin Schmidt

Last summer. We played in Italy, in Milan, as the band at the afterparty from a green energy convention. This is just another line item on our schedule. We thought it was a Matmos show and I get there and I just realise no one knows who the f*ck we are or gives a shit. But I am such a ham that I look forward to those situations. I’m like, “At the end of this thing, you will love us.” And goddamn it if they didn’t.

Drew Daniel

It doesn’t always work. We once got booked for a beach party in Italy, in this town, Bari, and there’s all these grandmas in folding chairs out on the beach because it’s free music. We’re doing this piece where we shave someone’s head and just amplify the buzzer because it sounds really good when you shave your head. It’s a great sound. And they start yelling this phrase at us and we’re asking our Italian promoter later, “What were they saying?” And they were going, “Dov’è la musica? Where’s the music?”

So it doesn’t always work out but you can’t start by condescending. That’s what’s great about being in a context like Primavera is that there’s people here that are here for pop music but you don’t know who’s going to wander in and maybe see something that for them is the first time they’ve seen something like that, you know? And you shouldn’t assume in advance that you’re too smart or too arty or too deep for them. You have to just bring it.

Johann Wald

Aren’t you amazed or impressed by how soundscaping and industrial textures have become part of pop music and young Gen Z are making pop-oriented music that has edge? That they’re drawing on Aphex Twin, they’re drawing on Matmos, they’re drawing on Warp Records, and they’re doing it in a kind of inhabited internet space where they’re going for pop.

Drew Daniel

It reminds me of when you’re having a salad and there’s some bacon bits in there. It’s kind of like that when you listen to Lana Del Rey or certain Kanye productions or whatever, where there’s a lot of different layers of music that are being drawn upon. But now the crunchy parts are crunchy in a new way and it’s like the bacon bits of the salad have penetrated into a world that you didn’t expect them to ever show up. I think it’s awesome.

Martin Schmidt

That’s an amazing metaphor.

Johann Wald

Last night you got to perform in the Warehouse, which is reserved for more edgier stuff that requires intimacy, whereas Blixa and Einstürzende Neubauten were playing in the auditorium; it was a great evening for industrial music. Einstürzende, were they ever a reference for you?

Drew Daniel

Huge for me. I remember having the Strategies Against Architecture album and the thing that really blew me away - in addition, of course, to Blixa’s voice and the sound world - was the liner notes that said this song was made entirely from the rubber suction cup supports on the bottom of mic stands. When I read that liner note of Neubauten, I was like, “Oh my god!” It just blew my mind. So yeah, I have a lot of respect for their way of working.

Ben Cardew

Who’s got a bigger sample library? You or Matthew Herbert?

Martin Schmidt

Matthew Herbert.

Drew Daniel

Matthew Herbert. He was there first

Martin Schmidt

And his is organised.

Ben Cardew

And yours is just…?

Martin Schmidt

Yes. The answer to that question is yes. Just a bunch of crap. You know, when you look at some people’s desktops and it’s just like ‘blablablala’, every single one of our computers is like that.

Drew Daniel

It’s a rat’s nest, it’s true. All my computers are named after different Shakespeare characters, so that’s how I keep track of what era of the band are we worrying about. Is it Dogberry or Juliet or Timon?

Johann Wald

All this wonderful recorded output that you have - do you have plans to make your own Matmos museum?

Drew Daniel

Yeah, we live in it and it may collapse on us at any moment.

Johann Wald

A Matmos museum is something, if you made all the installations and everything…

Drew Daniel

I think we try to now let the albums themselves become an act of reflection on the history and survival in the past. The last one being called Metallic Life Review, making a record called Plastic Anniversary. There’s now a retrospective thing and I think it’s part of survival.

You know, as a gay dude who’s about to turn 55, a lot of my peers didn’t make it; they died of AIDS. So a sense of survival not being promised or not being something you can necessarily assume will happen. I don’t mean to get all mawkish or whatever but there is something about memory and the falsehood of memory but also the pleasure of memory. And I think that’s becoming more important to the music I make because of being an old creep.

Ben Cardew

I’d forgotten about this until I was researching the interview: Hit Em.

Drew Daniel

Hit Em was a really weird thing and it made me connect with a bunch of music communities that I wasn’t that aware of, like the Discord server scene where people share a sample pack and then have beat-making challenges.

Martin Schmidt

This is a huge thing for younger generations. I started teaching at a music school recently. I had no idea. That’s the world that computer musicians live in.

Drew Daniel

Hit Em was really rejuvenating in that sense and very estranged.

Martin Schmidt

Can we explain what the...?

Drew Daniel

I had a dream that I met a girl at a rave who told me that there was this new style of music called Hit Em and that it was 212 beats per minute of very crunchy sounds in a 5/4 time signature. And I just woke up and tweeted it because I thought, “That’s a ridiculous dream,” and I went back to sleep. And then I woke up a few more hours later and people had started making this music. And then hundreds of people were sharing it and we put out some... there were some compilations of Hit Em music.

It [the tweet] got 3 million views and there’s real-deal producers like EPROM were starting to play Hit Em tracks at Lost Lands, giant dubstep raves in the United States. So it got this traction in all these worlds that I never really thought I would see and I thought that was really fun. And I feel like it’s very impersonal in the sense that it’s from my unconscious but it wasn’t me. It was like a girl I met in a dream told me about a genre and then the internet decided, “Well, let’s make it real. Why not?”

Ben Cardew

Why did people go so mad for it?

Drew Daniel

It’s so specific. It’s just absurd. It’s an annoying thing to do. I tried to make Hit Em and it’s a hard needle to thread. 212 BPM - okay, you’re talking Gabber. But 5/4... you know, that’s the Mission Impossible theme.

Johann Wald

There is that club element to your music. Do you guys still go out to clubs to see how it’s evolving, how people are celebrating dance music?

Martin Schmidt

Here’s how clubs were described to us in Baltimore. “You guys can’t go. You’ll get cut.”

Drew Daniel

If I’m honest, it’s mostly a dance club of the mind at this point. I feel like I can get down in gay bars and I can get down... like, I go to a Shakespeare convention every year that has a Shakespeare Malone Society dance. And it’s a bunch of academics in tweed jackets in their 50s and 60s dancing to Shakira and the Black Eyed Peas. And it’s like wedding DJ mode and I love that.

Johann Wald

I was also interested in the physical spaces where your music and your sound can exist, right? Obviously, there’s the art circles or festivals like Primavera but I’m wondering if you’re ever interested in where where else can we take this?

Drew Daniel

I mean, we have DJed a prom for homeless teenagers once, so that was a tough audience. I’m not sure that we wowed them or won them over but I’m glad that we got tested by like, “Can you do the job?” I mean, who wants Matmos? I’m not really sure. I don’t want to assume in advance.

Martin Schmidt

It’s not like we choose where we play. They choose. There are weird places where they don’t want us. Like, apparently, the country of France.

Drew Daniel

They used to love us but I don’t know. We lost France.

Some listening

Actress - Overchord

Moody piano ballad Actress is not the Actress I expected in 2026 - but by god is it the Actress I needed. Overchord starts with languid piano chords, a vocal comes in, delicate and longing, and drapes itself all over the melodic bed, there is a slightly dissonant string rush and a leisurely four four bass drum line arrives to shepherd matters home in a suitably circumspect manner. Overchord is an unusually beautiful track, so much so, in fact, that it doesn’t feel the need to over-agitate or draw the listener in, confident in its own glory.

Drew Ashby - After Hours

After Hours, from New York’s Drew Ashby, is soulful, jazz-y house at its finest, a nebulous late-night drift of unexpected chord changes, echo, double bass, ultra-deep kick drum thump and hi hat shuffle that reminds me of peak Motorbass. And I REALLY like to be reminded of peak Motorbass.

TDF - Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

The Stone Roses meets Mura Masa? Yes please! That is how Tokyo artist TDF bills Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, the first single to be taken from his debut album Truth I Found Last Nite. And, remarkably, that is what Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? actually delivers, in a song that marries the melancholy / messianic melodic smarts of Manchester’s finest to sharp - but never intrusive - electronic production, as if The Stone Roses had actually bothered to evolve post The Second Coming, rather than crashing and burning in an elaborately messy fashion. The swagger of this song is absolutely delightful.

GB - The Next Day

Gustav Berntsen, AKA GB, has almost certainly listened to a few Durutti Column records. But that’s OK because so have we all and injecting their liquid guitar style with tricky time signatures, Copenhagen songwriting class, the smell of freshly cut summer grass and faint lines of cello is resolutely a smart move. The Next Day feels simple and gently stimulating, kind of like the perfect summer holiday.

Vanishing Twin - Bring Me The Axe

It has only recently occurred to me that Vanishing Twin are home not just to Susumu Mukai - AKA Zongamin, a producer whose records fascinated me in the early 2000s - but also to Valentina Magaletti, who is one of London’s best drummers.

Of course, now I can only marvel at the group’s drums and Bring Me The Axe, from the brilliant new album Archives, is a masterful example of this, an overdriven and really quite nasty drum machine pattern joining consciously off-hand percussion to create an unusual rolling groove, over which Cathy Lucas supplies her best, chillingly pagan vocal.

Things I’ve done

Tricky - Different When It’s Silent

I reviewed the (largely great) new Tricky album - his 15th! - for Pitchfork. “…after the darkly desperate Fall to Pieces, Tricky’s punchy, punky album is further evidence of a career renaissance rooted in emotional power and musical exorcism.”

The playlists

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest