When writing songs, “95% of the time” Murray Matravers starts with the title. It’s a tactic he picked up from Gary Barlow: a producer once told him the Take That man tends to arrive at sessions touting a load of prospective song titles “cut out on little pieces of paper, and he’d put them on the table and you could just choose one. I was like: that’s fucking brilliant. Ever since I’ve always had loads of titles in my Notes app. It actually changed the way I wrote music,” he says with genuine enthusiasm. “Shout out to Gary Barlow!”
Names are clearly very important to the 29-year-old – but in recent years they have also caused him untold stress. By 2023, Matravers’ band Easy Life was thriving, having scored two No 2 albums on the trot by fusing upbeat, synthy bedroom pop with wry emo-rap. But that same year, his career came to a screeching halt when easyGroup – owners of the easyJet brand name with a long history of taking legal action against businesses with the word “easy” in their branding – decided to sue the Leicester band for trademark infringement.
Their first reaction was to laugh at such extreme litigiousness. “We thought it was hilarious,” recalls Matravers. They spent the next few weeks “umming and ahhing about fighting” the legal action, buoyed by the support they received from the public: “We thought, we’re gonna start a GoFundMe and fight the system – that was the energy people were giving us.” But ultimately the risk felt too gargantuan. Easy Life wasn’t a limited company, so “if we did lose, any assets that we have would be liable for repossession – and the court case would have been into the millions”. Then there were the years of their lives they would need to sacrifice. “Our court date would have been in July 2025, so we would only now be going to court.”
Instead of spending years in legal limbo, the group swiftly rebranded to Hard Life (although the financial impact was still huge; they didn’t gig for 18 months, and the complex task of scrubbing references to their former moniker from online artwork and streaming services was a full-time job in itself for a while). Last June, they released a ludicrously catchy comeback single called Tears, which paired Matravers’ Midlands-accented sprechgesang with a chipmunk-soul sample and lyrics that prodded at the controversy by calling out easyGroup’s founder. Unsurprisingly, this attracted further legal pushback, with the company’s lawyers calling it “disparaging and defamatory”. It has subsequently been bleeped out of the song.
Matravers doesn’t regret it … well, maybe just a teensy bit. The musician is deeply committed to candour: in conversation, he is garrulous and funny, but makes no attempt to hide how beleaguered he clearly still feels; when it comes to his lyrics, he says anything is fair game (“other than a few deeply buried secrets of mine that will never come out”). The lawsuit “was my life for such a long time, of course I’m going to write about it. Fair enough, I could have been smarter and not name-dropped the owner of the company on the first song back after they had sued. But I was fucking angry as well.”
Tears opens the band’s forthcoming third album, Onion, which features one other reference to the company (“I’m sure they’re gonna listen to the album on the day that it drops and I’m sure I’ll hear from [their lawyers],” he says wearily). Yet the rest of this infectiously upbeat record betrays little trace of the strife that preceded it. That may be because it was largely written after Matravers decided to make a fresh start in Japan. Today he is Zooming from the island of Kyushu (“Studio Ghibli vibes”), where he is staying with the grandparents of a friend he met in Tokyo. Following a break-up and craving some respite from expensive London (“so many of my friends are leaving: we don’t party or eat out as much as we used to because we can’t afford to”), he “ran away” to the city last year, and now spends more time in Japan than the UK.
Tokyo was where Matravers met the Australian-Japanese producer Taka Perry, his main collaborator on Onion. The pair quickly became inseparable – “He’s actually next door on a futon, asleep” – and began making music together. (Hard Life is in many senses a solo project; Matravers’ touring bandmates have never written with him and “there’s only a few [recorded] songs they’ve actually played on”.) They worked at a studio called Onion; Matravers liked the fact the name chimed with the already-released Tears – onions make you cry – and ideas started percolating. But he still didn’t envisage these sessions becoming the new Hard Life album: “I never thought that I would go back to England with the album, present it to Island Records, this big major label, and they’d be like: yeah, let’s put that out. And yeah, put a big fucking picture of an onion on the front if you want.”
As per Matravers’ song-title fixation, the Onion references kept coming. Philosophical break-up ballad Ogre nods to the famous Shrek line (“Ogres are like onions, they have layers”); they also had a song called Rings, which was cut from the final tracklist. At the moment, the musician loves going on Reddit “because all the fans are coming up with these theories about onions”.
That said, Matravers is not fastidious about the allium allusions: tracks such as the surprisingly moving Tele9raph Hill have nothing to do with them. An ode to the south-east London neighbourhood with panoramic views, it sees Matravers visualise his own future from the vantage point while grappling with his mental health history – an evergreen subject for the artist. He was “incredibly anxious as a younger man” – triggers included flying, buses and trains – but things have improved recently. “I’m not teetering on the edge of a panic attack right now, which is a nice feeling.”
Nowadays, Matravers is surrounded by “lots of delicate, fragile men like myself, so we all can cry as much as we want”, but in retrospect he thinks he began writing songs at 15 to “make sense of the world because I didn’t know who to talk to”. Growing up on an organic cattle farm near Loughborough, he spent much of his time making music with his older brother. Unlike most of his friends, he didn’t go to university, which he links to the fact “my parents existed outside of mainstream society. My dad had come over from South Africa and never fully assimilated to being here and lived on this farm. They never leave the farm; they’re self-sufficient.” Actually, he may be giving himself a bit too much credit. “To be honest, I couldn’t be bothered to go to uni – it was that sort of energy.”
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He could, however, be bothered to form bands and had moderate success with one group in his mid-teens (he finds their name “incredibly embarrassing now” and asks me not to repeat it in print). Soon after, he formed Easy Life, plugging away with no luck for years and supporting himself by working on a market. Then, in 2017, he released Pockets, a song about failing to make it in the music industry. Ironically, it got him noticed: the band’s lineup was overhauled and they were signed to Island. At 21, Matravers was “receiving more money than I ever thought I would make”.
Despite achieving longed-for commercial success, band life was not always healthy. In early interviews, the group claimed to eschew rock star hedonism for tea, lasagne and novels in bed. Now, Matravers says he was “fairly wild” and that the money led him “down a certain path. I’m beating around the bush here – you can read between the lines”. On new song Proximityeffect, he mentions being “black-out drunk on stage” – something he says was happening a lot. The intra-band dynamics were also deteriorating. After the threatened lawsuit, they seriously considered packing it in entirely. “It wasn’t like: oh no, this perfect thing has been destroyed. Being in a band is like being in a dysfunctional family.”
That family lost a member last year when bassist Sam Hewitt – a school friend of Matravers and the only remaining member of the original lineup – decided to quit. The lawsuit “gave us all a chance to take a long look at ourselves and ask: is this what I want to do? For Sam, maybe the answer to that was no.” Proximityeffect is mainly about the pair’s fractured friendship, as Matravers hops between antsy confrontation (“What’s up with the unfollow?”) and misty-eyed childhood nostalgia. Has he played the song to Hewitt? “No, I’ve not spoken to Sam for a very long time, sadly. Life sucks without him, he was my best friend.”
But Matravers is also not the person he once was. On Tears, he considers how distant he feels from his roots: old pals tell him his accent’s changed; he drinks oat milk now (“I’m from a farm!”). There is a wistfulness, but also a sense of excitement. A lawsuit, a lost friend and brand new beginning: in recent years, Matravers’ life has actually been quite hard, but also thrillingly unpredictable. “I’m so far away from where I started. I would never have guessed a year ago that I’d be here now,” he muses from his bucolic Japanese getaway. “I can’t imagine what next year is going to look like, either.”
Onion is released on 18 July.
