When MATT GILMOUR returned to Austin, Texas from an exhausting chemo treatment stint back home in England, he felt exhausted and lonely. To buoy his spirits, his buddy would pick him up and take him to an informal jam they called “Music Mondays.” These were fateful moments where a spirit of community pervaded that transformed Matt and led to his forming a band.
“That time brought me back to life, saved me from depression, and made feel able to deal with things,” Matt shares. “Before that, I was a spoiled rich kid.”
Today, Matt is on the precipice of releasing some of the music he’s wanted to make his whole life, an interstellar mélange of psychedelic rock with touches of prog, blues, indie, folk, and funk. Through embracing the power of community, Matt’s life and music has soared. You can hear this spirit in the music with its harmony vocal overlay, and in the melting pot of influences frothing over.
HENNESSEY is the music project of artist Leah Hennessey. Recently named one of Cultured magazine’s “30 Under 35” young artists, Leah Hennessey is a writer/performer/actor whose work circles around roleplay and decadence.
Hennessey’s self-titled debut EP on Velvet Elk Records strove to capture the “glitchy disquiet” of 2020, while dreaming of a brighter, dancier, more intelligent future. She is currently working on her full length record, and playing her songs in their rawest most stripped down form.
“Leah Hennessey’s work is the most rigorous dreamscape you’ll ever enter— world-bending and building that combines the precise absurdity of a 19th-century dandy with the eager sincerity of adolescent fantasy.”– Cultured Magazine *
“Living among the retro-obsessed scene of Avenue A in the East Village, Hennessey comes as more of a rebirth than a rehash of New York band’s before them” – V Magazine