Matt Corby has come a long way since he released his 2011 breakthrough single Brother at the age of 21.
Now a father of two, with four studio albums and three ARIA awards under his belt, his priorities have changed.
What matters to him when he's making music has changed.
How he makes music has changed.
"I'm pretty quiet, I don't really share that much about myself. I never have," he tells Weekender.
"I don't think people want to know about musicians. It's better that they're mysterious. The more you know about their life, the less weight, or symbolism, the poetry has."
It also means the listener can interpret what the musician is singing in their own way?
"Exactly."
He's happy, though, to talk about his new album Tragic Magic.
The album is where Corby is at now: confident in his abilities and unafraid to push the limits, creatively and instrumentally.
It builds on the quiet, bruised beauty of 2023's Everything's Fine, exploring grief and joy, intimacy and release, and tracing moments of fatherhood, friendship, loss and isolation.
Yet Tragic Magic, which debuted at No.1 on the ARIA and Australian album charts, doesn't dwell on grief. Many of the songs were inspired by the most unlikely of sounds, like a magpie's melody and the sound of a winning poker machine.
Recorded with long-time co-writers and co-producers Chris Collins (Royel Otis, Middle Kids, Old Mervs) and Dann Hume (Genesis Owusu, Tones and I), Tragic Magic also features co-writes with Nat Dunn (Marshmello & Anne-Marie, Blackpink, Duke Dumont), Shungudzo Kuyimba (The Chainsmokers, Teddy Swims, Jesse Ware, Little Mix) and Meg Mac.
Corby co-produced every track and performed the majority of instruments across the record.
"We finished the record over a year ago. It's been a bit of a journey just to get to this point, and I'm excited for people to hear it for the first time," he says.
"I feel really good about it. Normally if I listen to music from a year ago I'm like 'What was I thinking?' but this time around I'm still happy with the record.
"I listened to it for the first time in ages the other day and I had a good affiliation with the way the music was feeling and sounding."
Corby is his own harshest critic, which is something he views as a positive rather than a negative.
"I think having an aversion to your own work over time is the result of having high expectations of yourself, which is a good thing, because it means you're always trying to be better," he says.
"These days I'm a lot less concerned about how my music is going to be perceived by others, and more concerned in the studio about how it feels on the day.
"For a long time I was making music through a lens, like, 'Is this going to work for people?' But it can be really crippling when you're making decisions through that lens.
"I'm still drawing lines in places when I'm making music, but it's a lot more free-flowing now than it probably was a few years ago."
Does that mean making music is more enjoyable these days?
"I think so, yeah. I love being in my studio and have spent so much time there over the past five or six years," he replies.
"I'm constantly recording, producing records for people, making beats.
"I've learnt so much that it doesn't feel difficult. It almost feels like you're gambling, like, 'I'm betting on this emotion today, or this synth sound, and let's see if that can produce something interesting or not'.
"I don't really have a plan when I go into the studio. There's no genre or sense of 'This is what I do'. I have no idea what I do, and I like approaching it like that.
"It's how I've kept it really interesting for myself. I never feel like I'm out of ideas. If anything, I get a little bit sad when I have to stop. I'm on a roll, finding out things I never knew about myself or my musicality."
New single Maker follows earlier Tragic Magic single releases War to Love, Know It All, Big Ideas, Burn It Down and Long and Short.
"It was funny how Big Ideas came about," Corby says.
"Dann, my buddy who I made my first two records with, he's an incredible writer and producer. We spent three days together and the three songs that we wrote on those days wound up on the record: War to Love, Big Ideas and Locked In.
"It didn't really feel like we were writing music, we were just catching up the whole time, and every now and then we were like 'OK, let's roll with this'. And Big Ideas was one of those funny songs that just appeared at the end of the day when we didn't feel like we were making music at all.
"I really like that song. I didn't quite 'hear' it when we first wrote it but I showed it to a few friends and all of them were like 'That's a cool angle for you, it's got this psychy-groovy thing going on'. As soon as they said that I heard it in a different way."
Corby opened for US singer Teddy Swims on his I've Tried Everything But Therapy Tour tour of Australia and New Zealand in October 2025.
The pair are now good friends.
"Teddy is ridiculously good. I met him a few years ago when Meg Mac and I were putting out a song together, and she was his support. He was doing an underplay in Australia at the time, which for him was something like 4000 tickets a night," Corby says, laughing.
"I had to fly to Sydney to sing with Meg and his manager burst into the dressing room and was like 'Teddy really wants to meet you. He's a huge fan, he's been listening to your music for years'.
"So I went and said hi, I watched his show, and then he's like 'We've got the night off, you've got the day off tomorrow, let's go have a drink'. We stayed out until about 3am and just had such a nice time talking music, having a good laugh.
"When he came to Australia again he asked if I'd like to do the run and I jumped at it, obviously."
Corby says he's learnt a lot from Teddy.
"He's like the opposite of me; he'll say yes to everything and he'll do every little bit of press. Anything I'm asked to do goes through this vetting process in my mind ... I'm like a cranky old man [laughs].
"We still talk all the time, we send each other photos. I feel like I've got a good friend for life in Teddy, he's such a good egg.
"On a couple of nights we were touring he was telling me about the songs that he was listening to at a very pivotal point of his life, and they were mine. He was almost thanking me, which I thought was hilarious, but it made me feel really good about the music that I make."
Corby is looking forward to taking songs from Tragic Magic and his back catalogue on the road, saying it's not something he ever takes for granted.
"There's so much material now - four albums and five EPs worth of stuff - and the music's changed so much in the last 17 years that it's quite challenging putting a set together and figuring out how it's going to flow," he says.
"I'm just lucky I still get to play shows. Music is a hard business and the older I get, the more grateful I am to be able to get up in front of a group of people who want to hear me play."
