Follow by Mathame is out now. The track features Swedish vocalist BONN. He previously provided vocals for Axwell and Ingrosso on More Than You Know alongside Avicii on Freak. Audiences heard the new Mathame record during live sets across cities like Miami and Amsterdam over the past year. The duo held the official release to observe audience reactions before digital distribution. The publication schedule follows earlier tracks Endless, Lose Yourself, and Yogen. Below, Amedeo and Matteo discuss the development process alongside their evolving visual direction.
You played Follow in your sets for a whole year while keeping the official release strictly under wraps. How did crowds across different cities react to the track and what informed your strategy to hold onto this specific record for so long?
Live testing is the honest way to write dance music. We wanted to know if Follow could do the one thing it was designed to do, bond a room front to back without ever being announced. So we played it. Miami, Tulum, Amsterdam, Mexico City, London, Ibiza. Every night we watched what happened when the drop landed. The reaction was consistent in a way that surprised even us, people singing a melody they had never heard before, filming a track they could not name. That is when you know. Holding it back was never about strategy in the marketing sense. It was about protecting the moment. Some records deserve to grow up in front of a crowd before they exist online.
BONN brings a specific commercial history from his work with acts like Martin Garrix and Avicii. What happened during the initial studio sessions with him and how did you integrate his distinct pop sensibilities into your darker melodic techno framework?
BONN walks into a room and the first thing you notice is the discipline. Every syllable is placed. That is a school we did not grow up in, and it forced us to sharpen our own. The first sessions were about listening. We showed him the world we live in, dystopian melodies, wide low ends, cinematic space, and he answered with lines that felt human in the middle of all that machinery. We never asked him to be darker and he never asked us to be brighter. We met in the place where a great vocal makes the sub bass hit twice as hard.
The rollout this year already includes Endless and Lose Yourself alongside Yogen. What is the sonic relationship between these previous singles and Follow regarding your current creative direction?
They are chapters of the same story. Endless opened the year with something more introspective, Lose Yourself pushed the club side, Follow is the emotional peak of the arc. If you play them back to back you can hear the same DNA, melodies that carry weight, drums that leave space, vocals that mean something. We are not chasing singles that stand alone anymore. Every release is a scene inside a longer film.
Your visual aesthetics lean heavily into cinematic and dystopian themes during live performances. How do you plan to evolve these visual narratives for future tours without relying on predictable industry trends?
The rule we set for ourselves is simple, our visuals have to look like us, not like the moment. Right now everyone is running toward the same aesthetic, AI faces, glitch textures, chrome. We are moving in the opposite direction. The next chapters of NEO and NEOLOGY go deeper into narrative, less spectacle, more film. We want people to feel like they walked into a story that started before them and will continue after. That is the only way to stay ahead, build a universe that has its own rules.
Living near Mount Etna shaped your earliest productions with a specific geographical isolation. How did moving away from this environment alter your studio routines and affect the emotional tone of your recent output?
The Etna years gave us silence. Real silence, the kind you find only when you live on a mountain that occasionally reminds you it is alive. Every track we wrote back then had space because we had space. Moving into a city changed the tempo of everything. We wake up inside noise, and that noise now enters the music, but the discipline stays. We built a studio that behaves like the mountain, closed, protected, quiet inside. The tone of what we do now is a little more urban, a little more restless, but the melancholy underneath is exactly the same. You can leave the mountain, the mountain does not leave you.
Electronic music audiences consume new subgenres at an unprecedented pace today. Which specific production elements do you actively avoid right now and how do you plan to sustain your unique sound long term?
We avoid anything that dates a record the moment it comes out. The very short vocal chop that every big track has this year, the compressed leads that sound identical from label to label, the drops built purely for social media. If you can hear the year on a track, you can also hear its expiration date. Our filter is simple, would we still be proud of this in five years? If the answer is not obvious, we cut it. Longevity in this world comes from restraint, not from adding more.
Lorenzo de' Nobili
Lorenzo de’ Nobili is a sound designer and composer driven by a deep passion for urban culture and its evolving aesthetics. His work explores the intersection of music, fashion and sport, blending contemporary sounds with strong visual identities. Alongside his research in urban culture, he collaborates with contemporary dance artists, creating immersive sonic experiences that connect movement, space and emotion.
@sereno________________________Share this article
