EGN NEWS DESK
In the spring of 2020 because the pandemic lower a terrifying path throughout the globe, touring bands packed up and went house, uncertain how they’d survive. At the identical time, Matt Shultz, the frontman of Cage the Elephant — the uncommon arena-scale rock act to emerge inside the previous 20 years — was going through a special disaster in his personal head.
After releasing 5 hard-edged but hook-filled albums with Cage the Elephant since 2008, Shultz, a frontman identified for stripping all the way down to underwear and fishnet tights and strolling the size of venues atop his viewers’s outstretched palms, was not himself.
Suffering an excessive response to treatment he was prescribed to deal with A.D.H.D., he fell into psychosis. Consumed by paranoia and satisfied he was being hounded by malicious actors who would typically break into his house, the singer started carting round his belongings — images, journals, books and extra — in cumbersome suitcases.
His brother, Brad Shultz, who performs guitar within the band, recalled their mom describing Matt’s ever-present haul as “a bodily illustration of his emotional baggage.”
Matt’s struggles got here to a dramatic and really public head in January 2023, when he was arrested on weapons prices on the Bowery Hotel in Manhattan after police discovered two loaded handguns in his room. He has since regained his grip on actuality via intensive therapy — and averted jail time because of a plea deal — however his season in hell is immortalized on “Neon Pill,” the band’s sixth studio album, which it is going to help with a North American tour of arenas and amphitheaters beginning this week.
“I misplaced management of the wheel,” Matt, 40, sings on the deceptively breezy-sounding title observe in his hoarse croon. “Double-crossed by a neon tablet.”
“When I wrote the music, I used to be satisfied that somebody was tampering my treatment and making an attempt to poison me,” he mentioned in early June, sitting within the yard of a Japanese cafe in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, carrying Celine sun shades, an L.A. Dodgers cap and a patterned knit short-sleeve shirt. “My brother mentioned essentially the most heartbreaking factor was to listen to that,” he added, referring to the lyric about therapy that turns poisonous. “He’s like, ‘He’s so near the reality, however can’t fairly grasp it.’”
Cage the Elephant’s knack for accessing genuine emotion has helped win the Bowling Green, Ky., band a loyal following, a pair of platinum albums and two Grammys throughout a time when rock’s mainstream market share has dwindled.
“There’s quite a lot of coronary heart in what they do,” mentioned Beck, who toured with Cage the Elephant in 2019, collaborated on the observe “Night Running” and guested with the band onstage at a Los Angeles present in May. He praised the group’s present for balancing accessibility with deeper resonance. “There’s one thing undeniably actual about what’s taking place,” he added, “and folks really feel it.”
That transparency pulses via “Neon Pill,” whether or not Matt is exposing the darkish facet of the party on “Good Time” or praising the fidelity of a companion who stays shut “even when it’s painful” on “Rainbow,” an ode to his spouse, Eva, whom he divorced on the peak of his paranoia however later remarried. (“I assumed that she was in peril from whoever was after me,” he defined.)
Matt believed he was the sufferer of relentless on-line hackers, then grew to become satisfied that he had run afoul of an precise legal syndicate. “It was simply an countless stream of epiphanies,” he mentioned, that “had no foundation in actuality.”
His reminiscence of the arrest is vivid. He heard a knock on his door, seemed out the peephole and noticed “no less than 20 law enforcement officials with weapons drawn.” He recalled being scared, however pondering he ought to “positively simply give up and simply let it occur.”
In an announcement posted to social media in February, he instructed followers that the arrest, which led to an instantaneous hospitalization, “undoubtedly saved my life.”
These days, Matt’s humility is palpable. Projecting not a hint of the peacocking vitality he’s identified for onstage — the place his sweaty, cathartic performances have drawn comparisons to Iggy Pop (one other collaborator) — he spoke softly and sincerely, recounting the depths of his ordeal with a mix of self-deprecation and heartfelt contrition. He admitted that, even earlier than his psychological well being disaster, his funding in his position as a rock frontman had begun to overwhelm him.
“I grew to become increasingly satisfied I used to be this persona,” he mentioned. “And to go from an individual who creates a fictional character to carry out for leisure functions, after which to imagine that character, it’s a leap — and it’s harmful.”
Brad, 42, noticed his brother’s extroverted tendencies taking form from an early age. Inspired by their father, a faithful newbie musician, the 2 would try their very own performances round the home. One time a younger Matt picked up their father’s sizzling soldering iron, pondering it was a microphone. He “scalded and blistered his whole hand,” Brad remembered. “But, you realize, it didn’t scare him away from a mic.”
The brothers moved on to varied adolescent bands and fashioned Cage the Elephant in 2006 together with the bassist Daniel Tichenor and the drummer Jared Champion (the band additionally consists of the guitarist Nick Bockrath and the keyboardist Matthan Minster; the guitarist Lincoln Parish left in 2013). Across their early albums, they honed their sound from a garage-y stomp to one thing extra polished and pop-friendly.
As their attain has grown, so has their artistic ambition. John Hill, a seasoned producer who labored on each “Neon Pill” and its Grammy-winning 2019 predecessor, “Social Cues,” praised the band’s openness to new strategies of writing, resembling collaging collectively parts of varied songs to create a extra compelling complete.
“They’re not tremendous inflexible about, ‘Well, it has to simply sound like us all enjoying within the room collectively,’” he mentioned, “which I feel has enabled them to discover some totally different sonics and concepts exterior of simply being a rock ’n’ roll band.”
Brad confirmed Cage the Elephant’s want to interrupt free from classes and anticipated methods of working, borne out within the sleeker sound of its latest data. “We’ve been categorized as a rock band, or an alternate band, or no matter, however I actually just like the genre-less type of mind-set,” he mentioned. “I really feel like that’s type of the best way ahead.”
The band’s regular rise has been rooted in its songwriting, in addition to Matt’s highly effective capability to attach. Beck recalled a time when, following one of many singer’s signature crowd walks, Matt ended up sitting and speaking with some children within the viewers. “He would simply be on the market utterly obliterating any type of fourth wall,” Beck mentioned.
Strolling out to a Greenpoint pier, the place he watched the ferries come and go on a sun-dappled East River, Matt giddily recalled the time Cage the Elephant opened for the Rolling Stones in Paris in 2017. Before one present, whereas clad in his revealing stage apparel, he’d been summoned to fulfill Mick Jagger. “I walked into his room mainly simply carrying a thong,” he mentioned, cracking up on the reminiscence.
But the band’s latest live shows have felt much more particular for the singer. During the handful of exhibits Cage the Elephant has carried out since he has been capable of lastly lay down his literal and figurative baggage, he mentioned, “I felt this overwhelming sense of getting skilled one thing that helped me to see exterior of what may be an phantasm in and of itself: fame and success, and issues like that.”
“It’s good to have skilled one thing that was so shattering,” he continued, “that perhaps that phantasm isn’t as highly effective.”
