Inside The Credits 023: Matt Hales
How Matt Hales aka Aqualung Flowed Through & With Lianne La Havas and Olivia Dean
There is always one album I miss from any given year prior that would’ve inevitably been high on my album of the year list. That album, from 2023 which I discovered in 2024, is Olivia Dean’s Messy. The album is an alluring present dissection of murky romance. It’s equal parts Neo-Soul Pop and Alt Jazz. There are shimmering moments of brightness that are repetitively dampened by thick clouds of rain. Dean is a precise yet lingeringly poetic songwriter and needed a deft producer to craft waves around her that never quite crashed yet still swelled intensely. Matt Hales is the producer with the most listed credits on the project (8) controlling the majority of Dean’s instrumental tide.
Hales is known by many as Aqualung, his solo artist project, which emerged in 2005. I had never heard any Aqualung music before writing this piece and the initial sound on Hales’ first ep and album brought me somewhere I didn’t expect, given his Olivia Dean sonic affinity. My favorite band of all time is Muse. They have a ballad, “Unintended,” on their first album, Showbiz from 1999, which is one of my favorite love songs ever. All of the earliest Aqualung I listened to reminded me of it. I’ve always heard the Radiohead to Muse comparisons in a resounding way and have always resisted their accuracy. The interesting thing here is Aqualung exists in the sonic space where both bands' sounds do actually overlap, on the softer more meditative stuff. Yet, Aqualung never quite gets as cerebral as much of Radiohead does and in that sense, even without the intensity, Hales does lean a bit more into Muse territory.
Not only do all the best songs of early Aqualung take on the tone of “Unintended,” but the majority of them seem to be related to the same theme, being washed over by an unexpected love. There are two exceptions to this in the tracks, “Falling Out of Love,” and “Good Times Gonna Come.” Both are still keys led languishing croons in the ilk of Muse’s Matt Bellamy, but they explore a slightly more reverberating sound to contextualize the painful exit from love’s rush.
Aqualung’s next three albums foray mostly into different influences. On 2007’s Memory Man I heard a bit of Coldplay and U2, on 2008’s Words and Music I heard a little Elton John and Bon Iver, and on 2010’s Magnetic North I heard Regina Spektor, Feist, and Sara Bareilles (who actually appears on the album twice). Yet, each album’s most piercing moments were when Hales still captured the gray area between Muse and Radiohead. It never felt quite right to expand until he did it through another artist project entirely.
Balancing his most essential two band influence would prepare Hales to move fluidly into his work with the most prominent artist he’s worked consistently with besides himself, the masterful songstress Lianne La Havas. I still remember when my sister first introduced me to the first La Havas song I ever heard, “Lost & Found,” which is of course produced by Hales. On the track, he used those same eerily beautiful keys he used from his Aqualung work but leaned them slightly more R&B. He then added acoustic guitar to fit with La Havas’ grounded yet angelic vocal tone. La Havas and Hales flow in tandem on the song like a couple doing a modern dance routine. It’s so beautiful you can almost miss how tragic it is. But then, when you catch how the passion bleeds into the toxicity, it becomes one of the most gut wrenching ballads in modern music. It’s hard to find another song that exudes so much of the dark truth of losing yourself in love. Hales lets La Havas lead him like a textbook dance partner who knows their role. He rhythmically moves when required with verve, but retreats exactly when La Havas has to take control.
Hales also produced 12 of the other 16 songs on La Havas’ debut album Is Your Love Big Enough? The highlights are all masterclasses in restraint. I’ve seen La Havas sing live only once when Robert Glasper brought her out at his London show at Hackney Church. The acoustics at the venue drowned out the tone of every other singer who performed. Yet, La Havas cut through the space like a freshly sharpened knife. When you encounter a voice like that on record, the best thing you can do is support or get out of the way. Hales’ instinctually minimal approach found its perfect melodic companion.
The best song on his next Aqualung project naturally featured La Havas. This time Hales brought her into his now expanded world. Their vocal textures side by side atop more driving drums and an electronic synth atmosphere on “Eggshells,” produced a hybrid sound that makes me wish they had done a whole album as an official artist duo. While Hales knew to finesse around La Havas on her project, here he was able to flex a bit more production-wise to find congruence between their two voices. This caused La Havas to naturally lean into sharper pockets than when she was flowing in her own contemplation. Hales used more electronic sounds overall on his 2015 album 10 Futures, but his song with La Havas still pushed his sound forward more than any of the other tracks.
La Havas, on her second album Blood, seems to have taken some of her discoveries from making “Eggshells” and expanded the way she thought about the worlds she built. Funny enough though, she evolved and experimented with other producers like Paul Epworth and Stephen “Di Genius” McGregor in choice songs on Blood. With Hales, who still produced 5 of the 10 songs, she used him to lean back into flow when she needed to explore her rawest and most vulnerable self. “Green & Gold,” as a prime example of this, is a song about La Havas’ connection to her ancestry which she conceived after a trip to Jamaica. Hales surrounds her on it with sparse drums and ruminant guitar plucks providing the perfect canvas to illustrate her roots.
There was only a short Aqualung ep between this La Havas project and her next. Only one song, “All She Wore, She Was,” really connected with me from it and that was more to do with the descriptiveness of the lyricism rather than the instrumentation. La Havas felt like the source of Hales’ best work from 2015 through 2020 when she released her self-titled opus.
Lianne La Havas has a striking resemblance, due to where it exists in her catalog, to one of my other favorite albums, Kiwanuka by Michael Kiwanuka, which I discussed in my first Inside The Credits post. They are both third albums and self-titled, but also where both La Havas and Kiwanuka found the exact sequencing and throughline needed to hold their most compelling expression. Hales, who either produced or composed on 9 of the 11 tracks, built a sonic structure for La Havas made of sleek pocket drums and meditative guitar patterns. Within these smooth cadences, La Havas internally dissected her psyche while yearning for healing love. The album never wavers from these centering elements and solidified the musical plot arc of two masterminds.
Almost immediately after his achievement with La Havas, Hales released his first single alongside Olivia Dean in 2021, “Slowly.” He moved away from the La Havas glossy guitar and back to his old reliable misty keys. Dean has a distinctly different vocal style that leans less on stretch, pierce, and yearn and more on a dusty ethereality. Simply, she allows songs to unfold through her voice. Due to this, Hales had to go back to original restraint, but with a different approach. Rather than letting the vocals lead him, like with La Havas, he had to remain in simultaneous synchronicity. Without the three-album proving ground with La Havas, this task, that required even more deftness, wouldn’t have been as seamless. “Slowly,” instrumentally, sounds like watching coy fish swim within a steady stream.
Hales had one last Aqualung album, 2022’s Dead Letters, before heading back to Dean in 2023. Interestingly, much like how he reconfigured his original La Havas approach with Dean, he rearranged his early Aqualung style with this project. Hales went back to basics but with a bit more of an affinity for complex songwriting and texture. There’s still his essential malleable croon but it exists amongst more rhythmic variance especially on tracks like “Here and Now,” “Add Me Up,” and “Devotion.”
That new tempo proficiency and style maneuvering translated directly into the luring quality strewn throughout Messy. While you feel like you get a grasp of Dean and Hales’ sonic pathway you can never identify exactly where it’s going. There’s a charming quirkiness within the carefully placed musical design that seems to only have been possible with both Dean’s profundity and Hales’ flow. The opening lyrics on the title track “Messy” are strange and beautiful, “Trying to make the shapes you're dying to see/Always kept it tidy/Never really known the right shapes.” They could be heard as a bit nonsensical, yet alongside Hanes’ spacial synth and silky pattering guitar they become beguiling.
Inside The Credits 023: Matt Hales- The Playlists
Great writing. I really get the feel of the influence this producer has had on the musicians they have collaborated with.