Matt Maltese is renowned for writing about all things love and heartbreak with an undertone of wit in order to remain light-hearted, and his new album, Krystal, continues this trend. The album concerns itself with Maltese’s own experience of a breakup, and opens with the earlier released single ‘Rom-Com Gone Wrong’, an opener distinctive of Maltese. It begins with a playful piano melody in which his fingers skip lightly along the keys, however this is combined with haunting chords to create an upbeat and yet almost foreboding effect, audibly mixing the joy and pain of love that the album will explore. Alongside this, Maltese couples his witty tone and dry humour with his heart-wrenching lyrics and serious subject matter of lost loves; he sings flatly ‘I’m crying when I’m smashed / haha, welcome to grieving’.  

The chorus … resonates with any listener who has ever experienced unrequited love for an idolised crush

The next two songs on the album, ‘Tall Buildings’ and ‘Tokyo’, seem to provide the light relief of the record. Both are short, sweet love songs, spirited and flirtatious, and the former contains an evident reference to the Beatles in the line ‘I’m just gonna say it once / all we need is’. This hints at the song’s message: that love should be simple and easy, and this contrasts the complex emotions and heartbreak of other songs on the album, such as the following song, ‘Jupiter’. Maltese himself describes this song as ‘a song about pining, filled with desperation and delusion. A kind of melodramatic love song for astronauts.’ The line ‘I’d even be an ulcer in your mouth / just to be close to you’ is a direct example of the pining he talks about, and despite this, the song is painfully identifiable. The chorus ‘I need you like a fire needs a log / Jupiter couldn’t keep me from you’ resonates with any listener who has ever experienced unrequited love for an idolised crush, and the electronic riffs and high-pitched vocals give the song it’s spacey feel. 

It describes being so in love that you don’t think you could love anyone else again

‘Intolewd’ functions as light relief after the intensity of ‘Jupiter’ and summarises the album in its entirety with the line ‘I was doing fine then I met you’, but the following title track has a definite melancholic feel. It describes being so in love that you don’t think you could love anyone else again, and Maltese sings ‘she will pass by at a point in your life’, describing the universality of these feelings. The song builds to a repetition of three refrains: ‘I forget if I ever loved anyone else’, ‘I’m a mess and I’ll never love anyone else’, and ‘I’m obsessed and I’ll never love anyone else’, the crescendo and the doubling of voices adding more force to these lines. 

The saddest song of the album, ‘Curl Up an Die’, opens with an explicit reference to Van Gogh – ‘there was a time when I’d cut off my ear for you’ – as Van Gogh famously cut off his ear and delivered it to a woman in a brothel he used to visit. Maltese tragically sings ‘I was just the dirt on your shoes / and I liked being that […] I was just the me to your you / and I liked being that’, and the pain in these lyrics shines through Maltese’s vocals with heart-wrenching clarity. 

The heart-breaking end-note of the album comes in the penultimate song, ‘Human Remains’, the pained sounding ‘la’s’ combined with the admission ‘I’ve gone insane’ describing the breaking point of Maltese’s grief. To the listener’s relief, however, the album doesn’t end here. The final song, ‘When You Wash Your Hair’ is a simple love song of beautiful innocence situated within a domestic setting, and this closes the album with an air of hope – something truly needed by the listener’s heavy heart at this stage. In this record, Maltese blends the joys of love and the intensity of heartbreak with his own playful wit in order to create delightful ode to adoration and suffering without being entirely bleak, and he does so seamlessly.  

Krystal is available now via sevenfoursevensix