Cold Gawd's Matt Wainwright has two goals: first, to make shoegaze music Black again; and then, to change people's lives. "It's good to start small, start in shoegaze, change the genre. Then after that: alright, what's next?" he says, his voice satiny and serene. "I know my world's bigger than just changing the music game which I'm going to do, no problem."
As leader of the Southern California shoegaze outfit Cold Gawd, Wainwright intends to "smash down walls" and inspire people of color to take up space in today's scene. "I might not slap the message on shirts but even just our existence in the genre — that's message enough," he says.
The band's new sophomore album, God Get Me the Fuck Out of Here (their first for Dais Records), is a love letter to the genre as well as an update of it; combining R&B melodies with crepuscular shoegaze textures. It's already found a fan in Deftones, who invited the band to play their Dia De Los Deftones 2022 fest. "Being a person of color and getting out there and playing guitar music — I'm proving that we can do it too."
Wainwright was born on Christmas Eve, 1995 — a year after the disbanding of A.R. Kane, the Black U.K. shoegaze band whose pioneering work helped pave the way for genre leaders My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. He was raised in Rancho Cucamonga, a pleasant community situated in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, and describes his suburban upbringing as "pretty easy, pretty cush." But life wasn't without its challenges, including his parents' divorce when he was 15.
On Sundays, he'd go to church; one of the only Black kids there. He sang onstage, drawing quick Michael Jackson comparisons from the white churchgoers. "Maybe it's just being an attractive Black guy, but you always get compared to attractive Black people," he says. During the week, he'd attend his mostly white high school where he became known for being the only Black kid into alternative music. "This was in the mid-2000s, before liking everything was cool."
With the sounds of Slipknot, Metallica and Green Day soundtracking his school days, he dressed like a walking Hot Topic: band tee, dangling chain — every- thing except the JNCOs. "My parents would say, 'Um, We'll get you the Slipknot shirt, but we'll have to get your jeans from Macy's," he recalls.
From a young age, Wainwright was identified and defined by his interests; the bands he wore on his T-shirts were as vital to his internal framework as his own developing psychology. To everyone else, he wasn't merely Matt Wainwright — he was the resident Slipknot fan, Kanye fan, the mallcore maverick.
In the 2010s, he found a digital home and community on Tumblr — a deeply earnest space where fandom flourished, and likeminded peers created intense bonds over shared interests. Wainwright used the vast platform as an arena for music exploration.
"I wouldn't even do homework, I'd just be up all night scrolling and reblogging, listening to everything," he says. "I'd see a picture of a band playing, look through the tags and discover Tigers Jaw, Basement, Superheaven. I would dig and dig." Wainwright is the first to admit that without Tumblr, he wouldn't be who he is today. "It made everything feel so tangible and new."
In his own music, Wainwright tries to emulate these intense feelings of discovery; that moment when he first came upon the ethereal open deserts of shoegaze and nu-gaze — music that made it impossible to decipher where the sound stopped and heaven started. He can pinpoint the exact moment he first heard Nothing's Guilty of Everything: senior year, second period of English class, headphones hidden in his ears, phone below his desk. His world shifted. "I was going track by track thinking, What is this music? I'd never heard anything like it before."
In the pre-Nothing days, he'd been submerged in the chaotic, atonal world of the emo revival, but this was entirely new: guitar music with beauty as its governing aesthetic. "It was this new experience of entering into this world of pretty haze." He'd found his make-out music.
Wainwright loves love. "It's the most important human emotion besides feeling inspired," he says. From the age of 18 onwards, shoegaze has been Wainwright's primary love language. "I would show people Whirr's Around EP. That's baby-making music for sure."
Today, Wainwright becomes emotional when he talks about his girlfriend (which he does, often). She's his right-hand and his partner, his muse and confidant. For most of their relationship, he'd talk her ear off about how he dreamed of owning a pink Fender Jazzmaster, like the one Nothing's former guitarist Brandon Setta played. She finally got it for him two Christmases ago. "The second I got that guitar, God Get Me the Fuck Out of Here was written," he says. "She is the catalyst to everything."
Wainwright and his girlfriend had been living together in Chicago for two years when the pandemic hit. He'd go to his job at a local cafe and return home without the salvation of one of his usual escapes (no bars, no shows). Then, it'd be time to go to work again, barriers blocking off the coffee servers from the customers. Wainwright felt like he was working in a cage, siloed off from the rest of the world. "Let's go get lattes from the bubble boy," said the regulars. God get me the fuck out of here, he'd think.
So, he began working on his escape. First, creatively, by channeling his frustrations into his music and writ- ing the entire God Get Me the Fuck Out of Here album, by himself, in one month. And a year later, physically: In March 2021 the multi-instrumentalist moved back west to the Inland Empire, where he eventually tracked and mixed the record with Gabe Largaespada at Open Ocean Records.
Since Wainwright's settled back on his home turf, he's fleshed out his band to a six-piece — and his ambition for Cold Gawd continues to grow. He doesn't just want to be a somebody, he wants to be the biggest somebody out there. "I think this record is a great start to that," he says.
God Get Me the Fuck Out of Here certainly sounds like euphoric liberation. With its ample use of R&B 7th chords, which coruscate like shining stones under a wash of distortion and fuzz, the music on the album is woozy, lovely and rapturous; its most obvious antecedent being Whirr's Sway. "I want to add more beauty to the world," says Wainwright. "You see so much of the bland and mundane shoved directly front and center in your day, but there are still beautiful works of art out there … and I want Cold Gawd to be a part of that."
It's a kind of beauty that drew in Chino Moreno as soon as he heard it. Wainwright says the Deftones frontman was introduced to Cold Gawd through electronic musician Joshua Eustis a.k.a. Telefon Tel Aviv, who provided additional mastering for God Get Me the Fuck Out of Here. After attending a Cold Gawd show in L.A. and posting it to his Instagram story, Eustis told Wainwright: "Dude, you will not believe the conversations I'm having about you now."
A week later, Wainwright received an email from Live Nation asking if he wanted to play Dia De Los Deftones in November. Wainwright's been thinking about it ever since, working meticulously on a setlist, exclusive merch, stage design. "The goal is to stand out," he says. "There's so much mediocrity thrown at you in your life. As Cold Gawd, I want to be the thing that stands above mediocrity. I want to change lives."
