With the release of his third album, 'Other People's Driving Habits', Adelaide indie artist Matt Hill adds a new layer of mystique to his solo project The Man Himself.
Released in early May, the album embraces a heavy DIY ethos in contrast to the highly refined and time-consuming process of making the previous The Man Himself record.
"I was saying to someone the other day that I expected this one will be a bit of an acquired taste, because it's a bit of an about-face from the last record," Matt says.
"The last record was 'Extra Ordinary' [2025] and the idea of that was it was a very layered record. . . it was a really rich record that took a long time to make.
"After that I wanted to do something fast and that became the ethos for doing it, was to keep it really raw and human, especially in the face of the rise of AI music and all the slop on Spotify. It's a warts-and-all record."
Matt has been developing The Man Himself for the past few years since stepping away from working with bands to create music as an independent artist.
He says the project allows him to play with the idea of pop stardom while deconstructing the myth of the musical auteur. "I called it The Man Himself because it was almost ironic in a way," he says.
"I've always thought that solo artists are never really solo, they've always got a band around them and people helping them, so it was a sort of facetious title.
"The solo artist idea is all very silly, the idea that one person can do things and that we have this auteur ideal. It's not real. Everything is made by teams and committees; it's a community thing."
With each The Man Himself album, Matt has strived to produce a distinct, self-contained work that represents various aspects of the project and his own artistry.
"What I wanted it to be was different from the last [album], because the second [album] was different to the first one. That's the thing I'm trying to do, where each record is not the same.
"It's a real defined project and I want cumulatively to have a body of work that's quite diverse, and in a way that's commercial suicide because it's all about repetition.
"It's all about doing the same predictable thing and that's how you build a brand. So, I'm not expecting to become a massive rock star on the basis of this philosophy but that's the kind of artist I like.
"The artists that change all the time, they represent different parts of their personality, and they're exploring different ideas.
"I like playing with the idea of identity, so The Man Himself has gone through a couple of incarnations and now it's becoming a bit more faceless in the sense that I don't want it to be about me as a person, it's almost like a character.
"There's not a hard message in it, but it's building up and I hope people think about it and engage with it and go 'what is this actually about?'. There's no answers, just questions."
'Other People's Driving Habits' is available on DSPs. The Man Himself plays Metropolitan Hotel (Adelaide) on 15 August.
