Al Matcott’s debut album, Summer’s Coming, was a full-throated howl against global warming and the forces behind it. Featuring caterwauling guitars, driving rhythms, and incisive lyricism, it earned him a Double J feature album.

Now the Naarm/Melbourne artist is stoked to announce that his follow-up album, Fake The Days Away, will be released on Cheersquad Records & Tapes on October 17.

Fake The Days Away often explores how the electronic hallucinations of the internet have pushed reality and nature aside and are now, foot-to-the-floor, driving us into a death spiral of lies, paranoia, hate, and—above all—utter, dogshit stupidity.

The album touches on themes of loneliness and isolation, toxic masculinity, Ben Roberts-Smith, liars and fake people, and the importance of friendship. Strikingly, the album is counterbalanced by some of Matcott’s most personal writing. There’s even a love song.

Sonically, it dials down the distortion of Summer’s Coming, with a lush, varied, and more naturalistic sonic palette. What remains is his penchant for earworm melodies, the rich timbre of his vocals, and his engrossing narratives. Folk and country meet garage and psychedelic rock as Matcott turns his earworm melodies and memorable one-liners to the hyperreal wasteland of our digital lives.

Matcott recently released the first single ‘Wouldn’t Expect To See You Here’, receiving widespread national support across community radio. It’s a song that tumbles forth like a lost outtake from The Stooges’ Funhouse before morphing into a sound that seamlessly blends into a sound akin to both The Replacements and The Strokes. The surprises don’t end there! It’s a song of two halves, with the fuzz-drenched riffs and shout-along choruses giving way to mournful and melancholy pedal steel and piano.

Now Matcott gives us the second taste of the new album, the opening track ‘All Night’. It’s a compelling statement of indie rock, overflowing with vocal, guitar, and bass melodies all surging along with invigorating momentum as Matcott writes about the feeling of limerence (“a state of involuntary infatuation with another person, characterised by obsessive thoughts and a longing for reciprocation of feelings”).

As Matcott explains, “‘All Night’ was inspired by the poetry of Alejandra Pizarnick. The song explores the stark contrast between how obsessive and all-consuming night can be, in contrast with the barren desert of the morning after.”

Elsewhere, Matcott sings about billionaires investing their ill-begotten wealth into fantasies about cheating death and immortality while the world burns around them on ‘Saint Haven’, artificial intelligence and constant surveillance on ‘One By One’, and the manosphere, pickup artists and angry dudes, viewed from different angles, on the darkly comic and subtly psychedelic ‘Rebel Without A Clue’, and the baroque and brooding ‘I Decide’.

One of the album highlights, ‘There Is Much Wrong I Have Done’, is delivered initially over a sparse drum and guitar backing as he details failings and misgivings in the face of love and devotion, the song adds swelling synths, pedal steel, and piano, adding emotional gravitas to Matcott’s heart-laid-bare songwriting.

‘When The War Is Over’ takes a strong and principled swing at the much-publicised Ben Roberts-Smith, Australia’s most highly decorated war soldier who was found, in a civil defamation trial, to have committed murder and other war crimes while deployed to Afghanistan.

“There’s so much about this shit that annoyed me,” says Matcott. “The main thing with the movie 300. His troops even called him Leonidas. So it’s likely he was re-enacting that “This is Sparta!” scene from that movie, on a defenceless farmer. Just so utterly sickening.”

With the blurred and dreamy psychedelia of ‘Song For A Ghost’, the album ends where it began, lonely and obsessing, late at night. Staring into a phone.