When it came time for fifth full-length 'Many Times,' Matt Hegarty needed to try something different. The Aldershot songwriter, better known as Matthew and The Atlas, was keen to follow up 2023's 'This Place We Live' quickly, jumping straight back into the studio at the end of that same year. Tapping up Bear's Den member and producer Kev Jones for the challenge, they approached 'Many Times' with a production style antithetical to its title: each song was to be recorded in as few takes as possible, stripped-back and direct-to-tape, with no overdubs.

This process, the pair explain, was intended to capture Matt's songwriting in its purest form. Recorded over just two days at the iconic Rockfield Studios in Monmouth, Wales, "the idea was just to capture a moment in time that is very, very honest and open," Jones says. Inspired in part by Nick Drake's 'Pink Moon' (which was itself captured over just two nights).

"We said to ourselves that I shouldn't rehearse too much," says Matt. "It's a balancing act – you have to write the songs, and know the melody and the lyrics, and how you're going to perform it. But only up to a point – you're still trying to capture something a bit truer to its original form; something you haven't over-rehearsed or refined down."   read more