stream Heinali and Matt Finney's first album in 6 years, 'How We Lived'
Heinali and Matt Finney is the collaborative project of Ukrainian multi-instrumentalist Oleg “Heinali” Shpudeiko and Alabama spoken word poet Matt Finney. They met online in 2010 and started collaborating immediately, having put out a few releases that very year. The duo scrapped the followup to 2011’s Ain’t No Night and then stopped working together for years, but now they’re finally back with a new album, How We Lived. It comes out this Friday (8/11) via The Flenser (pre-order), and we’re premiering a stream of it in this post.
Ahead of the release, Jon Rosenthal interviewed Finney for Invisible Oranges. Here’s an excerpt:
Given the tumultuous end of Heinali & Matt Finney phase one, what ultimately brought you and Oleg back together?
Mostly just missing working with Heinali, really. Oleg’s become such a close friend of mine and he knows more about me than my family does. Not really speaking to him for years, giving up writing completely… I forgot how big a part of my life our project was. It’s the one thing I’m most proud of and I was dying to get back to that. I hated that I left him hanging. Scrapping our last album and all of the drama with that… I wanted to come back and make the best thing we possibly could. Kinda to show up the person that left us high and dry by not putting it out but also to kinda make everything else we’ve done look terrible by comparison. I’m just glad Oleg wanted to join me again.
I do recall the difficult situation which led to the end of Oleg’s and your work together, but I guess it never really occurred to me just how deeply it hurt you. Scrapping a whole album (the now-lost On Mercy’s Shore) comes off as reckless and emotional, especially with the amount of work which goes into it. Why abandon it entirely? Does On Mercy’s Shore exist in any vaulted form?
It felt mostly like being betrayed by a friend. That’s what hurt the most. We worked our asses off on it and to have the person that was gonna put it out just toss it away like garbage… I don’t think I’ve been that mad about anything in my life. He was someone I trusted and admired. It was the final straw on top of a lot of things during those 5-6 years. We talked about finishing it but the spark was gone completely for me. I wasn’t proud of it anymore. All I could think about was this guy leaving us out in the cold. I still get livid thinking about it. I’m not sure if Oleg has the demos that we did for it. The computer that I had everything on died a while back. I tried combing through my email archives but I think it’s lost to the world.
Regarding the new album, Rosenthal said: “A far cry from the “doomgaze” of Ain’t No Night, Heinali and Matt Finney have effectively shifted their focus from the “doom” half of their self-imposed tag, instead both gazing at their feet in despondency.” Read the rest of the interview HERE.
Stream the album below:
