What band suffers an illness, cancels a show, promises a make-up date, but never follows through? Almost all of them. But not Matt & Kim.
After having to nix a Fillmore Miami Beach gig a few months ago because singer-keyboardist Matt lost his voice while on tour, this perky Brooklyn-based pop-punk duo actually rescheduled. And the husband-and-wife team is planning to make the most of the Miami return date. In fact, according to Matt, it's gonna be a massive party for which he promises "to bring enough balloons and confetti to make a big mess."
New Times: Can you believe it? You're coming to Miami.
Matt: I know [laughs]. We're actually going [to be in town for] almost two weeks. We just happened to be coming down for Art Basel and the show got scheduled for the next weekend.
That's fitting. Especially since you both went to art school. How do you and Kim incorporate your art degrees into what you are doing with music?
We both went to art school, me and Kim. But I graduated in film, and I've had a big hand in most all the music videos we've made. Most of the ideas were ideas that I had come up with, and then Kim, she's done most of our album covers. She's done a lot of shirts and designs for numerous things. She was [in school] for illustration.
But I think, in the end, just being smarter creatively applies to all things. Like, you can tell if a photo feels good and balanced. It helps you know if a song feels good and balanced. It all applies.
There's a real balance to your new album, Lightning, as well. It's still fun, but it's not cloying. There's a fine line.
Yeah, yeah. When making music like ours, which tends to have an upbeat feeling to it and whatnot, if you listen lyrically, it's a bit darker. It's not about swing sets and lollipops. It's about a lot of things that have a darker vibe, about figuring your life out. It's a balance, in the same way with our music videos. We tend to try to make things a little bit edgier. It's not every time, but there are scenes of us beating each other bloody or stripping in Times Square. We want to create a balance with what some people find cute, and we never would want to play up cute. If some people find it that way, we're gonna accept who we are. We're not gonna change what we are. But again, we're not gonna portray that with, like, puppy dogs and kittens. We've used a lot of fake blood in music videos, and that's for a reason.
OK, you brought up the stripping-in-Times-Square video, "Lessons Learned." Were those real cops restraining you there?
Dude, it was [laughs]. We actually had a number of real cops come up. We took six takes of that video. We took three with our clothes on as we practiced it and three without. There are so many police patrolling Times Square; even with just a big-ass camera, even when we had our clothes on, we got stopped a bunch of times. But luckily we had permits, and the description of what we were gonna do was "Two tourists walk through Times Square dressed inappropriately for the weather." So we were able to keep out of any trouble.