Released: 18/03/22
The third album from Atlanta-based Mattiel (AKA Mattiel Brown and Jonah Swilley), Georgia Gothic, was shaped in the quiet seclusion of a woodland cabin in the north of the Atlanta duo’s mother-state. Where 2017’s self-titled debut and its 2019 follow-up Satis Factory were written with what Swilley refers to as a “hands-off” approach, the making of Georgia Gothic was, for the first time, a truly collaborative undertaking. “This was the first time we made a point to just be together and work out ideas in the same room. That was the initial intention... it was about learning what each other wanted to accomplish on a sonic level, and then just trying different things out,” Swilley says. “Everything happened backwards. Normally, you’d have friends that make a band... with us, we started making music from the jump, and then became homies.”
Cultivated by time spent together on the road touring the first two albums, it is this newfound sense of intimacy between Mattiel’s members that enabled the writing of ‘Georgia Gothic’ not as two separate musicians, but rather as one creative entity. The album remained within the four walls of Brown and Swilley’s private world for much of its evolution - with recording taking place in a simple studio set up by the pair in the borrowed room of a dialysis centre, Swilley in the producer’s seat - until, nearing completion, it was transferred into the trusted hands of the Grammy award-winning John Congleton (whose extensive list of credits includes artists as diverse as Angel Olsen, Earl Sweatshirt, Erykah Badu and Sleater Kinney) for mixing.