Matt Malone is a singer/songwriter born in the goldfields region of country Victoria. He has formed his musical vision out of the blues, country, folk and gospel traditions of the American, British and Australian past.

Malone’s commanding baritone and masterfully crafted songs have been compared to the archetypal Johnny Cash, African-American gospel preachers such as Blind Willie Johnson, poetic folk troubadours including Leonard Cohen and tenebrous lyrical princes Nick Cave and Mark Lanegan.

The forthcoming new album For The Term Of My Natural Life (VRS Records, July 21st) is without a doubt Malone’s most personal, autobiographical and accomplished work to date. 

The title-track and first single is the opening track to the album. Like many great novels, the song acts as an opening chapter. Amid an uplifting yet sombre, acoustic strum and Morricone-inflected, distorted guitar notes, Malone surveys the lay of the land where he now finds himself after a long period of experiencing the trials and tribulations of grief, despair, attempted suicide and severe drug/alcohol dependency.

Ultimately the song signposts Malone’s redemption, and through the darkness a sense of resolute optimism emerges, for this life and beyond.

As Malone explains, “the song title and concept was inspired by the classic Australian novel by Marcus Clarke that tells the story of a young man unjustly convicted of a crime that he didn’t commit and his subsequent incarceration in the Tasmanian penal colonies where his experience of injustice is brutally meted out”. Malone read the book during the first Covid-19 lockdown and deeply related to the character and his story of unjust judgment and imprisonment:

“When you received a life sentence in the 19th century, the judge would declare – ‘you will be imprisoned for the term of your natural life.’ I think that relates not only to a prison sentence but to life overall – we are here for the term of our ‘natural’ lives. As the perennial saying goes – life is suffering, the hope in it for me, is it also implies a life beyond this world, a supernatural or eternal life.”

The video clip, filmed by John Flores and edited by Malone & Flores, was shot in key locations around Malone’s hometown of Ballarat including a derelict slaughterhouse, abandoned train station, swampy marshland and stunning waterfall landscape. He wanders through these beautiful black and white vistas like a shadowy figure of Western lore espousing Old Testament prophecy.