It’s been five years since Mat’s debut EP ‘To Being Free’ captured the hearts of music lovers with its intellectual compositions and well-crafted melodies. A million streams later, with high profile support slots for artists including Axel Flovent, Seafret, Hyde & Beast and To Kill A King, Hunsley returns with ‘A Worrier’s Dream’, an EP collection of six tracks showing a fine maturity in Hunsley’s song writing skills.  Already gaining large critical attention, Damian Robinson spoke to Mat about the EP.

Warriors feels like such an interesting EP with a clear concept running throughout it – was that always the intent?

I’d say that this is the kind of record I’ve wanted to make from the start.  The content is very autobiographical in the sense that I’m talking about mental health and some of the difficult conversations that we might have with ourselves and others.  I’m not sure I started out writing the EP that way though, I’d say I was probably two or three songs into the creation of the EP before I started to notice a theme developing around mental health.  Once I saw that theme I definitely tried to work the rest of the songs towards that direction.  Some artists seem to be able to pick a concept and go after it, I’d love to be able to do that, but I’m not there at this moment. 

The production of Warriors Dream is really interesting – there’s layers of electronica and effects surrounding the songs – which felt like a new direction for you.  Could you tell us a little about that?

I started writing very much acoustically and become a better writer and player over time.  I think with these songs I wanted to challenge myself further.  I listen to a huge variety of music and wanted to produce music like some of my idols – people like Nathaniel Rateliff- and bring in some of other elements to the record.  Essentially I want to learn to be a better writer by learning through new processes – and sometimes that comes through happy accidents.

The launch show will be interested given the different sounds in your music – do you know what that looks like yet?

Yeah we’re starting to look at that at the moment.  Luckily a lot of the electronic parts can be played lived so that helps, but we’ll be using a 5 piece band to work through the songs at Bobik’s and at the minute it’s coming across well and it’s been fun to try to recreate the EP.

‘A Worrier’s Dream’ EP will be out on 28th January 2022. Mat will be headlining Bobik’s (Newcastle upon Tyne) on 30th January to celebrate the release.