UK dance music enters 2024 in the healthiest place it’s been in for a long while. Those who are especially thriving are artists who blend the naked honesty of singer-songwriters with pounding beats and festival-ready hooks. The overwhelming success of Fred Again.. is testament to this, with Scottish producer Barry Can’t Swim seemingly the next star off the production line.
It was the increased exposure to this hybridised form of music-making that opened up a lane for the creation of Mafro, the project of Matt Phelan. Starting out as a session musician and songwriter for R&B stars – including a stint as Ella Eyre’s musical director – Phelan could never connect the dots between his love of dance music and his day job as a hired hand for others. It was through this subtle but definite shift in the musical landscape, as well as the emergent success of his wife, the Ninja Tune-signed DJ and producer TSHA, that he began believing such a world was possible, and writing for himself and his own project.
Over the last two years, Mafro has collaborated with Diplo and NME 100 alumni Surya Sen, soundtracked Channel 4 show I Hate You and continued a fruitful working relationship with TSHA. On his own productions (2022 debut EP ‘Bloom’, and a second effort titled ‘Higher’), he brings an organic and earthy edge to house music. If all is right in the world, recent single ‘Try’ – full of classic house piano and Qhairo’s honeyed voice – will become a 2024 festival anthem.
It’s new single ‘No Teacher’ that’s most representative of his musical journey though. Originally written by Phelan for the project of featured vocalist IYAMAH, it existed in a past life as a slower R&B track. “When I was starting my project, obviously the first place you start is to go back through all of your old things you’ve done with other people,” he explains to NME over Zoom. The finished product – a song with clear R&B DNA but given house music flourishes – bridges this gap beautifully, also tracing his lineage as a London-born person with a Trinidadian mother and an Irish father, musical cultures that can be heard in his music.
“All you are doing when you’re producing is collecting your influences,” Mafro says. “People can’t just hear your voice and be like, ‘Oh, that’s Mafro’. What they can hear, though, is the line of influences that you always keep and use throughout all your projects. That becomes your voice.”
NME: Your background is as a session musician and writer – what made you want to start your own project?
“When I was working with other artists, that’s all I thought I would, or could, be doing. It was only later that I realised I could do a project of my own where I could be fully in control. I didn’t really know that this kind of thing existed for the kind of music I liked though. I thought that it was just for other people.
“Once TSHA’s project started taking off, I started getting more into that world and realising that it was something I could do. I started writing for it in 2020 and gave myself the [artist] name, which is a childhood nickname that I can’t get away from!”
What kinds of new spaces do you think are opening up for house musicians such as yourself, to become performers as well as producers?
“I knew about a few people, like Bonobo and all of that stuff, but for the more niche music that I was into, I didn’t really know that there was a whole world of that stuff. When I was a session musician. I’ve worked in the major label world, and didn’t realise there was a whole other world out there. There are a lot of musician types coming into this space, and it might have always been like this but it feels like people are very open to that sort of thing now.”
“I’ve worked in the major label world, and didn’t realise there was a whole other world out there”
Is that an important part of the music to you, keeping an organic and human edge to dance songs?
“I want it to have an organic sound. I don’t really have that much stuff that is fully synth-based – it’s all pianos and real instruments. It’s quite personal sounding, and I want people to feel like they’re in the room with me and the singer. I love an R&B vocal too, as that’s where I’m from and the stuff that I’ll always love.”
Does this idea also link with giving your music a face and a name too after previously being in the background?
“I think so. It’s quite cool that people have bought into it. I’m a music-first kind of person, and that’s always been the main part of it. All of the other stuff is new to me – even just opening up and telling people about myself, because you assume that no one gives a shit. And maybe they don’t!
“But actually, it does seem like people do care, and they want to know why you’ve made certain decisions. I wasn’t necessarily doing this because I’m trying to be famous or have my face all over everything. I was just thinking: what’s the best way of getting my music out there? Being the face of it is the best way.”
How important has your collaboration with TSHA been to the evolution of Mafro, and do you see yourself always working together closely?
“She’s my wife, so I can’t not do that! She’s the sounding board for a lot of decisions I make on my project, and we help each other. It’s just a natural thing that will always continue. We would both like to bring more people into the fold a bit, but it’s just me and her for the most part.”
With the second EP out now and a third in the works, is there a concrete idea of what you see Mafro looking and sounding like in the future?
“I’m still in the process of figuring that out at the moment. It’s difficult because for your first project, you have no expectations for it, but then as you get further along in things, you have expectations, you want things to do well and it can start to change the way you think about things.
“Right now, I’m just really honing in on what I like, and what I’ve listened to in the last year, and going back to my old set of influences and figuring out what I want to do. I definitely want to bring the project into a more of a dance place. I like doing the songwriter-y end of things, but I want to incorporate the dance stuff as well. When I do more live shows, that’s the place I want it to get to and the balance I want to achieve.”
Mafro’s new single ‘Try’ (featuring Qhairo) is out now