“The world is such a beautiful thing!”: Matt Maltese, songwriter for pop music… and Shakespeare | music

TThree years ago, Matt Maltese was in an informal co-writing session with some friends. A song came out of it called Magnolias, which is an abstract piano song about imagining his funeral. “I didn’t think anything of it,” he says. “Two years later, we heard some strange whispers that Rosalia somehow heard.” It was true: six months ago, the Spanish pop star’s demo of the song was sent to the Maltese. He tried not to get too excited, even when a grainy photo of the tracklist for Rosalía’s album surfaced online a few weeks ago. “In the WhatsApp group we were like: ‘I think this is Magnolia!’

Magnolias ended up as the final track on Rosalía’s new operatic masterpiece, Lux: one of the most talked about albums of the year, currently in the top 5 in the UK. The Maltese first heard the finished song on the day the album was released, when he returned to London from a US tour. “I took a long walk due to jet lag and listened to the entire album to put it in context. It’s extraordinary.” In “Magnolia,” Rosalía changed some of the words, he says, “and she dramatized it incredibly. It’s wonderful. It’s a gift from someone, somewhere, that it just fell into her lap.” That’s all anyone wanted to talk to him about since then. “I’ve got a lot of followers on Instagram,” he smiles.

The 30-year-old British Canadian has quietly become a successful and influential figure. Across six solo albums since 2018, the Maltese indie pop ballad combines a modern kind of masculine sensibility with the sarcastic humor of his hero, Leonard Cohen. With the help of a viral TikTok moment, he has six million monthly listeners on Spotify and more than a billion streams combined; His latest album Hers, a rich distillation of longing and desire, was his first album ever.

It’s earned him A-list fans like Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, Frank Ocean, Laufey, and BTS’s V, and made him an in-demand songwriter. Malti has written by and with artists such as Celeste, Joey Crooks, Jimmy T, Tom Misch – and even the poet himself. Last year, Malti wrote the music for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Twelfth Night in Stratford-upon-Avon. Next month, we will arrive at the Barbican Hotel in London, where we will meet on its terrace overlooking the lake on an unusually warm afternoon. “We co-wrote with Shakespeare,” he smiles. “Maybe that’s for the best, right?”

Malti grew up in Reading to Canadian parents, and moved to London as a teenager, where he fell into the “Great Society” of the thriving south London scene centered on the Brixton Windmill pub. But among alternative post-punk bands like Goat Girl, Shame and Sorry, he was very much the odd one out. “I was like, ‘I’m the saddest here.’ They’re like, ‘Fuck the world,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, but the world’s a beautiful thing.'”

In 2015 he signed to Atlantic Records on the back of promising Soundcloud demos. “They told me I was the voice of a generation.” But that didn’t save him when 2018’s debut album Bad Contestant didn’t live up to Atlantic’s expectations. He was a misfit for the mainstream ratings system, he says: “As an arrogant 19-year-old, I said no to a lot of things.” He was once asked to cover John Lennon’s Happy Christmas (The War Is Over) for the BBC’s Christmas Trailer. “And I insisted that I would only do it if I could record it in a minor key.” He starts laughing. “It was terrible.” It was never used, and was later dropped. “But I needed that hit. I wasn’t treating it enough as a job.”

He looked at the remainder of his advance of £50,000. “I worked for eight months before I had to quit music and get a job.” So he hibernated in his bedroom, agonizing over Atlantic rejection and “some messy personal relationship stuff,” and worked on songs. “That period was good for me because it made me feel better about myself. It made me write songs from the heart more.” His 2019 independently released second album Crystal began a “positive spiral”.

His career really took off in 2021 when his 2017 song As the World Caves In, an apocalyptic song depicting Donald Trump and Theresa May spending their last night on Earth together, exploded on TikTok. Charlie xcx and Shawn Mendes posted about this; On one of the “silly days” the song was the second most streamed song worldwide by a British artist behind Dua Lipa. And after the Atlantic, it was a vindication of sorts. “They make all the money from it,” he smiles ruefully: around £20,000 a week at the song’s peak.

But it brought him a whole new fanbase. “It was about divorced parents and students.” Now, he has screaming fans ranging in age from 18 to 23 years old. “Especially in America,” he says, where he just headed up the 5,900-capacity Greek Theater in Los Angeles. “But it’s very funny that I define myself as a person on TikTok. I think that has distorted a lot of people’s impressions.”

The true Maltese passion is the craft of songwriting. “I didn’t come out of the womb with a microphone.” Hence his embrace of the sideline of shared writing. Sometimes within the group – Magnolia was written at that session with Danny Cascio, Sophie May, and Daniel Wilson – but more often closely with the artist himself.

He has a particularly close relationship with jazz and pop singer Celeste. “She’s great at breaking the norm.” Once, uninspired by the expensive studio environment, she took him to a harsh rehearsal setting. “It was very cold in January, and it was a big dark room with no heating. We wrote there for a week.” They ended up with three songs off Celeste’s brilliant new album Woman of Faces – due to be in the top 10 this week – and the indie single Everyday.

Joey Crooks is another artist close to Maltese: after 2021’s Skin, he co-wrote Crooks’ 2025 single Math. When he heard the finished song, he was amazed that British rap legend Kano had added a guest verse. “I’m a white boy from Reading; getting credit with Kano is just crazy.” Even after Rosalía, Maltese are still getting used to his growing imprint on pop music. “I don’t necessarily feel like I’m very culturally relevant. I’m just someone who’s obsessed with songwriters from the ’70s. I feel very lucky that people care.”