Matthew Milia Shares Music Video For New Single CONGRATULATIONS HONEY

Today, Matthew Milia is sharing his new single "Congratulations Honey" via the Jay Curtis Miller directed music video for the song. The single is the latest offering from Milia's debut solo album, Alone at St. Hugo, out May 3, 2019 on Sitcom Universe Records. Filmed all over the city of Detroit, the video features landmarks of Milia's childhood and adolescence. "Congratulations Honey" follows lead single "Puncture", which Brooklyn Vegan praised as "a gorgeous dose of indie folk." Milia will play an album release show at The Loving Touch in Ferndale, MI on May 3rd with special guest Anna Burch, and with further gigs planned for New York City, Chicago, and other cities this spring and summer. A full list of dates below.

"Matthew Milia captures the essence of suburban mundanity and nostalgic glory in his music video for 'Congratulations Honey,'" writes the Detroit Metro Times, "what is made clear by the visuals is that he finds time and space within the process of his own reflection to appreciate the beauty in small things."

Watch the music video for "Congratulations Honey" on YouTube

"For the video" Milia explains, "among a lot of other important places to me, we captured shots of my mother throwing a strike in the local bowling alley, my fiancee's dad eating a coney dog in his Red Wings sweatshirt at his favorite Coney Island, footage of the legendary Pontiac Silverdome a month before its ultimate demolition, and the spot where I go fishing in the summer on the Detroit River by the Ambassador Bridge."

Recorded on a Tascam 388 reel to reel tape machine in a small Ypsilanti, Michigan spare room, Alone at St. Hugo captures the sound of two friends setting out to find a harmony-laden, power pop backdrop for Milia's signature lyricism. Milia's poetic songwriting has previously won praise from the likes of Gold Flake Paint who wrote that, "Milia is straight-up one of the most underrated lyricists of recent times," and Rolling Stone who mused that "the haunting voice of Matthew Milia conjures what might happen had Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum been raised in a log cabin."

Stream "Puncture" lyric video via YouTube

Pre-order Alone at St. Hugo on Vinyl + Cassette - https://goo.gl/d1JhpP

Known for his thematic obsession on memory, domestic minutiae, suburban redundancy, and the fragility of family dynamics, Frontier Ruckus' Milia has written over 100 songs constructing an intricate personal mythology based in his lifelong home of Detroit, Michigan. His debut solo album, Alone at St. Hugo takes a bedroom-fi analog approach, resulting in something both classically lush and intimately raw at once.

Each track began with Milia on guitar and Ben Collins on drums, playing live in the room together. From there, they divided a small galaxy of overdub responsibilities between themselves evenly-mellotron, pedal steel, Hammond organ, cello, mandolin, and horns being a few of the textures wrangled in giddy, all-night sessions. Coupled with vocal layers verging on Big Star grandeur, the most poignant aspect of the musicality's sweetness is the foil it serves to Milia's vocabulary of domestic American heaviness-a world of decaying suburban landscapes and the desperate hope still residing therein.

Alone at St. Hugo at its core is a set of finely honed songs-a dense but deliberate catalog where memory is obsessed upon. A cast of waitresses, youth soccer coaches, grandparents, and young lovers occupying the ailing station wagons and birthday banquet halls in which these songs reside. Milia sings about real human beings in all of their glorious mundanity. Perhaps he is singing there alone, in St. Hugo, the Catholic grade school he attended from K-8. The way a selection of our memories will ring forever in some evacuated mental building, lights-out in endless night. But through it all, a wry sense of humor winks its way through the pathos, atop chord changes displaying a level of precision and classic craft uncommon to the habits of today's songwriters.

www.matthewmilia.com

Photo Credit: Noah Morrison

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