Manchester’s Matt Woodman is a natural alchemist in turning emotional sincerity into evocative resonance. His latest single, The Comeback, is as timeless and panoramically affecting as British alt-indie gets, arriving as the lead single from his upcoming EP, Mountains Yet To Climb, and reframing recovery as something more hard-fought for than a cheap ‘bounce back’ slogan
Hitting the same emotive nerve-centres as Elbow while sending his guitars into gorgeously retro overdrive, Woodman follows the contours of 90s and 00s melodic rock in the vein of Semisonic. The Comeback projects the gravity of vulnerability through stellar songwriting, letting its choruses lift and stretch emotional pressure through your ribcage while stinging your tear ducts with bittersweet euphony. Beneath that lift, the distortion carries an artfully indie-nuanced discordance, the kind that made a whole generation of indie fans fall hard for Grandaddy.
Woodman’s catalogue already spans the electro-pop reach of The World That We Live In, BBC Radio Manchester support, festival appearances at Creation Fest and Glaston-Bury, and live slots with Luke Concannon of Nizlopi. On The Comeback, those experiences seem to settle into something more grounded: a song for anyone recovering from failed relationships, public humiliation, crushed expectations or the horrible limbo after feeling beaten.
The 1975 and Coldplay comparisons make sense in the melodic scale, but The Comeback feels rooted in Manchester’s own bruised romanticism. He has made the city proud; if he fell into the right golden ears, Matt Woodman could become one of the most acclaimed UK indie singer-songwriters of his generation.
The Comeback is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify.
Review by Amelia Vandergast
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