Matt Pryor & The Salton Sea

Kansas City, Missouri native, Matt Pryor, is a household name for anyone who was attuned to the second and third waves of emo. His genre-defining band, The Get Up Kids, were among a small and legendary group that has shaped the musical landscape for years. However, after growing tired of the boundaries it so needlessly applied, the internationally recognized frontrunners eventually transcended the genre with their later albums and found themselves at home with a more indie sound.

Most recently, on his latest album under his given name, Matt Pryor has presented the world with The Salton Sea, and it is abundantly clear that this is the continuation of a decades-long love affair with music and being outright obsessed with songwriting. Steadfast fans of Pryor’s prolific career will also find themselves treated to a style that is more reminiscent of the works of Paul Westerberg and Red House Painters, that is of course laden with Pryor’s signature style, whose DNA is deeply rooted in artists like Elvis Costello and The Afghan Whigs.

It should be noted that the chosen title for the album is not one that was picked arbitrarily, and while not a concept album, the period of time when the songs were written were some of the darkest days of Pryor’s life. After spending six months in a downward spiral in what he sarcastically refers to as the penultimate moments of his “drinking career”, Pryor finally hit rock bottom. A casual habit that became a full on addiction had officially come to a head, and in the blurry moments when 2022 became 2023, Pryor found himself with a choice that so many people before him have been forced to reckon with:

Keep going on this path and face certain tragedy—or— Clean up, get sober, and stay on the right side of the dirt.

Thankfully, Pryor decided on the latter, and the beautiful composite left on the shoreline for all of us to enjoy is the album now known as The Salton Sea. For those unfamiliar, The Salton Sea is what’s known as a “terminal” lake—meaning that new water never flows into it, and its salinity increases incrementally due to evaporation and pollution… The once high-spirited desert oasis was a tourist attraction for celebrities and the upper crust in the 1950s and 60s, and it is now a bona fide wasteland. It’s not difficult to imagine that while in the throes of addiction, Pryor saw himself as this once lush and vibrant body of water that years ago was referred to as a “California desert oasis”—but it is now an uninhabitable veritable shadow of its former self.

Pryor’s latest songs have a timeless quality that makes you instantly nostalgic for strangers’ memories that unfold as narrative stories, and as a listener, you’re left wondering what these moments are all about—how will they unfold? This is undoubtedly due to the fact that along with sobriety, Pryor has found solace in writing for the sake of writing , a practice that he keeps up with daily—usually before dawn. If there’s a silver lining to all of this, one can glean that nothing bad will come from finding more creative outlets to calm the devil that sits on your shoulder, especially when that person has been writing the soundtrack of so many people's lives for the last thirty years.