Before dropping this first EP as Mafro, Matt Phelan had been making music in a few different guises. Highlights included working as Ella Eyre’s musical director, co-producing “Let You Go”—the 2022 collaboration between Diplo and Phelan’s partner TSHA—and remixing Sean Paul and Dua Lipa’s “No Lie” for the Baywatch movie in 2017. All the while, ideas for his own music kept percolating, a sound that he sensed could have a place in the world. “I noticed there wasn’t that much music that was exactly what I liked to listen to,” he tells Apple Music. “I came to electronic music from a musician’s perspective, I guess. I really liked the more musical stuff like Bonobo. There wasn’t loads of it, the more organic side of the electronic music world, and I really wanted to be a part of it. I thought I maybe had something to add to that.” So the London-based songwriter and producer has brought his ideas together in this EP. It’s a warm and restlessly inventive piece, one that sits 2-step rhythms alongside art-rock chord progressions, where gentle days in the park flow into eerie walks through nighttime streets. “With the electronic world, there really is no rule,” he says. “People are open to things that don’t make sense in a traditional manner. It’s meant I can buy a load of synths and drum machines and put a load of weird instruments in my songs. That just wasn’t an option before. My musical output had been supporting other artists, either as a musician or producing, working on someone else’s vision. I could do exactly what I want for the first time ever, really. It’s been massively liberating.” Here, he talks us through the experience, track by track. “Bloom” (feat. Ell Murphy) “I hit up my friend Ell Murphy. She used to have a project called Only Girl and I’d done some work with her a while back that was more of an R&B thing. Then she moved into the UK garage world. I found the vocals and knew that they had something special, but we just hadn’t nailed the production when we were working on it together. I had this idea, giving it a bit of 2-step, a bit of ’90s. Giving it the breaks and real heavy bit towards the end just to give people a bit of everything…or to indulge myself and put everything that I like into one song. I guess it has all the key elements of my sound.” “Alright” “I wrote this one on an acoustic guitar. If you listen carefully, you can hear bits of the acoustic guitar in it because I didn’t want to change its sound. We had such a good take. It was just me and [London singer-songwriter] Hollie [Carmen] jamming in a park. Her vocal sounded so nice in the demo that I didn’t want to re-record it. And that’s what you hear in the final thing. Sometimes, if you just get that killer take, it doesn’t really matter if it’s not a mega, high-end studio recording. You just go with the emotion—that’s all people need now, they’re listening as much to the song [as to the production] now.” “Revolving” “I’d had these chords stuck in my mind for ages but the chord progression was something you’d hear on a Radiohead song, not a dance or electronic song. So I couldn’t really make it fit. Then I had a period where I wasn’t sleeping that well and was walking around my area, walking my dog. I remembered that feeling—walking home from a rave in the early hours and you’re on your own. I knew those chords would work with that mysterious feeling of being on your own, walking. So I wrote everything up around that chord progression and got my friend [London singer-songwriter] Qhairo in. We’d actually written a whole other song, but I used the vocals from that in this one and it all fit perfectly.” “Hollow” “I’m really into sample-based music, Bonobo and people like that, but I’m not great with that process because I like to work in a quite manic and fast way. The idea of sitting down and going through other people’s samples for days just never really worked for me. So I thought, ‘Well, let me make the samples and then sample myself—that would give me the sound that I want, the feeling that I want.’ Then I put in a few of my own other musical elements.” “Shaken” “Again, this is a kind of track that you could sum up a lot of my music with, because you’ve got the elements of 2-step, it’s quite intimate at the start and melancholic, but then it builds up to euphoric ending point. Qhairo is such an amazing singer and his vocals are so raw and honest. I really wanted to frame them and make sure that, in the first half of the track, that was all you were really listening to. People would be fully drawn in with his vocals, and then they could go on that journey towards the end of the track where there’s more of the electronic elements and the other things start jumping in.”