Cold Gawd

Booking Agent : Alex Schmidt & Nikita Netrebko

Cold Gawd is the flag under which California-based multi-instrumentalist Matt Wainwright creates stormy, wounded shoegaze music born of open tunings and R&B melodies. Inspired by these sounds, Cold Gawd presents a refined, modernized take on the genre. Wainwright cites the thematic common ground between shoegaze and R&B as a central muse, both obsessively fixated on love, lust, and longing, in forms alternately grandiose and minor key.

Lyrically, 2022’s album “God Get Me The Fuck Out Of Here” sways between oblique and desperate, yearning and resigned – with the exception of “Comfort Thug,” a brooding, largely improvised spoken word piece inspired by the notable lack of black musicians in shoegaze.

In 2024, Cold Gawd returns to Dais Records with their second and most supreme suite of crushing downer bliss: “I’ll Drown On This Earth.” From the defiant scream that kicks off “Gorgeous,” the album rips in what singer and songwriter Matthew Wainwright describes as “go for it” mode – holding back nothing, wasting no time. Written in 2022 but recorded in March 2024, the album’s hooks, heaviness, and haze were finely honed.

The result is a storm of distortion and dream pop, love songs cloaked in swooning walls of noise. Recorded at Paradise Recorders in Anaheim, California with Colin Knight, Wainwright tracked the strings while Cameron Fonacier handled drums. Anthemic tracks like “Portland,” “All My Life, My Heart Has Yearned For A Thing I Cannot Name,” and “Malibu Beach House” sound dynamic and dialed-in. The lyrics, written a week before recording, evoke surreality, infatuation, and melancholy within a fog of memory and reverb.

As on 2022’s “God Get Me The Fuck Out Of Here” Cold Gawd’s classic but contemporary vision of shoegaze manifests intriguingly in outlier moments. Theirs is a muse as vivid as it is varied, from “Loveless” to Drake to post-hardcore to Beach House. “I’ll Drown On This Earth” evocatively captures the expanding canon of Cold Gawd, dense with riffs and raptures, escape and revelation, channeled from stacked amps and hidden powers.

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Tourdates

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