Following the release of their self-titled fifth album, DMA’s guitarist Matt Mason has spoken to NME about returning to their roots and channeling the spirit of 2016 debut ‘Hill’s End’.
‘DMA’s’ was released on August 21 and marks the third UK Top 10 album in a row for the Sydney trio, completed by vocalist Tommy O’Dell and guitarist Johnny Took. It comes in the wake of a 10th anniversary tour of ‘Hill’s End’ that saw the group celebrate the record across the UK, including two nights at London’s O2 Academy Brixton and two nights at Manchester’s O2 Victoria Warehouse.
Making ‘DMA’s’, Mason told NME, was an exercise in stripping things back to the “imperfect” and DIY-minded energy that filled their first record. “You start to pick things apart more as you mature as an artist and I don’t think that’s always a good thing,” he said. “So [it was about] putting ourselves back in the headspace where we weren’t doing that and we weren’t trying to perfect things.”
He continued: “There are a lot of vocal takes on the album that are just the demos. We would go back to re-record them and it would just completely kill the vibe. So we just tried not to overanalyse everything, even though I am a bit too neurotic to allow myself to properly do that. There’s a beauty in being young and not even noticing things that could be technically incorrect and just going with the feeling of it, so we tried our best to do that.”
Mason – speaking to us at Manchester venue The Yard during the band’s UK out-store tour – also explained how one of the record’s lead singles, ‘Heatin Park’, was named as a joking hybrid between the city’s Heaton Park and Linkin Park, after the track’s co-writers Jimmy Somewhere and Milo Orchis noted a similarity to the nu-metal group.
“They live in the first house that Dr Dre lived in LA and they make beats for Norwegian rappers and they love nu-metal. They were like, ‘Yeah man, it sounds like Linkin Park’ which is never something I thought we’d get told, so I gave it a weird working title of ‘Heatin Park’ as a mix between Linkin Park and Heaton Park,” he told NME. “We supported Liam Gallagher at Heaton Park, and we played with Courteeners. We sat down and said ‘We need to rename that because it’s ridiculous’. But then things grow on you…”
Check out the rest of our interview with Mason below, where the guitarist reflects on his relationship to the band’s British comparisons, the lessons learned from self-producing ‘DMA’s’ for the first time, and his unlikely avian tour hobbies.
NME: Hi Matt, how has it been taking ‘DMA’s’ out on the road for the first time on these out-store tour dates?
Matt Mason: “It’s been pretty cool! When you release albums, you receive comments and you hear things, but you don’t really know [what the reception’s gonna be] so it’s been pretty amazing to be able to come over here. It’s like our second home in a way, it’s sort of a spiritual home in the UK.”
Do you have things that you always like to do when you come to the UK?
“I like bird watching. I woke up this morning at 1am because I was so jet-lagged, so then as soon as the sun comes up I’ll walk and have a little look around. I saw one of those eagle-looking kite birds today so that’s nice to get off the bucket list.”
When people release a self-titled album a few records in, it suggests that they’ve found a core essence of themselves – did that happen with ‘DMA’s’?
“That’s pretty much it. The last couple of albums we tried out a few different things sonically, and so we wanted to make a record for our ‘day one’ fans. We used our first album as a bit of inspiration. We toured it earlier this year so we were listening to it and getting back into that headspace. It’s a coming home, full circle moment – and we also self-produced it so I feel like there’s a bit more of us in it than other albums. Also, coming up with an album name is really hard as well so we were like, ‘Fuck it’.”
DMA’s, 2026. Credit: Roman Jody
Did you do things to get yourself back into that ‘Hill’s End’ zone?
“I don’t want to be back in that zone! My early twenties, I don’t want to do that again… One and done, I reckon. We’re all married with kids now, so we’re quite different people and being on the road’s very different. So that tour was interesting, but it was fun.”
You worked with Madonna’s producer Stuart Price on the last two records. Did you take anything from that into self-producing this new album?
“I loved working with Stuart. He was super inspiring. He would just hang out and he was really cool about letting us pick his brain about whatever. I think he was Madonna’s MD when he was 23-years-old which is just insane. He’s one of those amazing musical savants. So after working with people like that, when you get to your fifth album, it’s like maybe you can just do it yourself because you’ve learned things from people along the way? And by the time you get 10 years in, as we have, you also get a bit stubborn and picky and you know what you want, so it’s better just to do things yourself sometimes.”
You’ve got a track called ‘Heatin Park’ on the record – did you make it to Heaton Park for any of the Oasis shows last year?
“We were super lucky that we were playing with Catfish And The Bottlemen in London when Oasis were in London on the same night, so when we finished, we went and saw them. It was amazing. It was crazy. Such a good vibe. It was almost like a spiritual thing, you know? It was just an unforgettable moment. I saw someone say that reunion did more for the British public zeitgeist than anything else in years; it brought everyone together and that’s the thing about music.”
There’s also a track, ‘El Alamein’, named after a town in Egypt where a lot of WWII battles were fought. What’s the significance of that?
“There’s a place called King’s Cross in Sydney where I lived for a bit and it has a big fountain called the El Alamein fountain. I’m not a big history buff or anything like that, but I had the idea that the first verse could be about this guy in the battle of El Alamein, and then as the song goes on it’s about a guy walking past the fountain and going through his own battles – different generations and different experiences and the world changing around the fountain. Also, we have these birds in Australia that we call bin chickens, we use them for our logo and merch and they love the fountain. It’s just full of bin chickens.”
Bin chickens are terrifying. They look like pterodactyls, they’re massive.
“I saw this Irish guy one time who’d obviously just landed and gone to sit in the park, and one crept up on him and he just screamed. They’re bigger than chickens, and they’re just cruising around the city. Like, imagine if you were in central London and there was a rooster just rocking around stealing everybody’s sandwiches? It would be crazy. But that’s Australia!”
Have you seen this new trend of people calling bands who sound a bit like Oasis ‘indie poo’ on social media? What are your thoughts?
“I’ve not seen that, but I don’t really listen to indie music to be honest. I know that I kind of am in that world, but I don’t really listen to enough of it to know what’s going on at the moment. I listen to a lot of film compositions and black metal and hardcore. I don’t listen to the type of music that I make. I only really started to listen to British music when I met the other guys in the band.”
Was it frustrating having people say that you had a very British sound when you first came out in that case?
“Yeah! There was a while where we were being compared to artists that I hadn’t even heard of. I grew up listening to a lot of country music and I think that there are a lot of similarities between country and Britpop – chords and tempos and melodies and some of the guitar tones. I would write country songs and then Tommy would sing them and, because his dad’s a Scouser and he grew up listening to British music, I think that’s what happened there with our early stuff.”
Do you really think country and Britpop are similar?
“I could talk about it for a long time! I swear that if you take a country song and sing it in a British accent or vice versa it totally works if you just swap the voice out. Try it. It’s a little bit insane but there’s more similarities than you think!”
DMA’s self-titled album is out now. Following a string of Australian festival and headline dates throughout the rest of 2026, DMA’s will return to the UK at the start of 2027 for a full tour in support of the record, kicking off at Brighton’s Chalk on January 29 and winding up at The Academy in Dublin on February 20. Visit here for tickets and more informaiton.
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