Dallas art-pop and folktronic artist Matt of Matts explores fatherhood, religious trauma and the uneasy process of healing on his debut single, “Come Thou Fount of Unforgetting.”
Dallas-based artist Matt of Matts has released his debut single, “Come Thou Fount of Unforgetting,” a haunting reinterpretation of a childhood hymn that turns familiar religious language toward more complicated questions of love, fear and healing.
Raised as the firstborn son of an evangelical exorcist, Matt draws directly from his relationship with religion while also examining the fears that arrived with fatherhood. That connection becomes especially personal through backing vocals from his 16-year-old daughter, whose voice joins a song partly shaped by his fear of losing one of his children.
Self-produced by Matt, “Come Thou Fount of Unforgetting” combines loose acoustic guitar drones with custom synth textures and a ghostly vocal backdrop. The arrangement sits somewhere between folk music, art-pop and electronic experimentation, giving the song the shape of a hymn while gradually pulling it into stranger territory.
Matt describes the track as a love song existing in the middle of some kind of fracture, though he intentionally leaves the source of that danger unclear. Images of disaster and apocalypse hang around its edges, creating tension between devotion and dread rather than settling into one clear interpretation.
That uncertainty is central to the song. Instead of offering a clean resolution to religious trauma or the anxieties of parenthood, Matt allows affection, fear, grief and hope to occupy the same space. The result is reverent toward the musical language of his childhood without simply recreating the beliefs attached to it.
With influences that recall the intimate storytelling of Bill Callahan and Mount Eerie alongside the more unusual arrangements of Sufjan Stevens and Magnetic Fields, “Come Thou Fount of Unforgetting” serves as an appropriately personal introduction to Matt of Matts: part hymn, part love song and part uneasy conversation with the things that shaped him.