Matt Champion is evolving in ways nobody could’ve predicted. Cutting his teeth as a rapper in the sprawling collective Brockhampton, he’s now matured into an artist of honesty and experience. With a glitchy, soulful sound, blurring the lines between rapping and singing while stacking and shaping his vocals into supernatural forms.
His debut solo album, Mika’s Laundry, paints a dustbowl vision of the future that crystallizes his radical shift. Two weeks of sessions in 2020 with Dijon and Henry led to the warbly “Aphid” and a bunch of dead ends. A two-hour drive out to Mountain Center, CA, is where his next undertaking really blossomed.
In the remote desert, he, Henry, and a small cadre of collaborators experimented with a cyborg soul style inspired by the video game-like world Matt was building.