Matilda is a New York City-based eighteen-year-old artist. When she’s not dancing her way through the city listening to her millions of playlists, she’s busy creating, producing and writing music. In her spare time, Matilda enjoys hugging people, eating twice her weight in strawberries, falling in love, and making bad jokes.
Raised amidst the vibrant sounds and community of New York City, Matilda has been surrounded by music for as long as she can remember. The daughter of a drummer, she’d often attend her dad’s shows, falling asleep at the bar or backstage in the green room. It was almost inevitable that Matilda would soon start to blaze her own musical trails.
She took her one (and only) drum lesson at five years old, joining her first band at the age of six. Matilda learned to play a slew of different instruments, including piano, bass, and guitar. She prides herself on being mostly self-taught, but took several years of classical piano lessons. “I hated it, my mom made me continue taking them,” she says about the lessons. “Music is meant to be emotion-based, spontaneous, and uncalculated, and I didn’t like someone sitting me down and telling me what to play.”
That perspective would influence Matilda’s style of musical creation as she kicked off her solo career. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it offered a unique opportunity for her to step back from her band and truly be vulnerable with herself during a difficult time in her life. What emerged was a melodic reflection of her childhood and her inner emotional life to date.
She soon found herself in her home studio polishing and recording tracks with the help of producers Tyler Brown, Bennett Walker, and Josh Margolis. This summer, Matilda will release her debut EP, Union. She unveiled some of the new music at a May performance at RWQuarantunes — one of the few emerging artists ever to be invited to perform on the platform.
Matilda’s music can be found somewhere on the spectrum between Phoebe Bridgers, Fiona Apple, Patti Smith, PJ Harvey and Fleetwood Mac. She describes her nostalgic, genre-bending style as “a time capsule of not only all my feelings, but all of my musical influences.”
When asked who she makes music for, Matilda said: “I make music for anyone who needs to hear it, people who need to heal or feel like they need to be understood — basically everyone.”