I caught up with Belfast duo Dea Matrona at The Great Escape in Brighton to talk about their upcoming second album, Hate That I Care, busking, social media, staying grounded, and the slow-burn journey that has taken them from street performances to major stages.
Natasha: How was playing The Great Escape, and how was being in Brighton?
Orláith: It was great. We love The Great Escape, and we love Brighton as well. It’s one of our favourite places to come through when we’re on tour. We absolutely loved the gig, and it was good to see other bands too. We’re going to try and catch some bands today.
Natasha: When you’re playing to new audiences, how do you find interacting with people who might not know you yet? Does it click instantly, or do you feel like you have to bring them into your world?
Orláith: People are my favourite part of this – getting to meet people. We always go out after a show and talk to people at merch, and we get excited about that. It’s fun having different audiences.
Mollie: Especially with support shows, because people don’t really know what to expect from you. You sometimes have to work a little bit harder to win that crowd over, but it’s a nice challenge.
Orláith: Festival crowds can be harder to win over, I think. With headline gigs, it’s your own crowd and they’re singing your songs. But it’s really fun.
Natasha: How would you describe your music to new fans?
Orláith: I’d describe our music as dark, sexy… what’s another word? The album is very emotionally intense. It’s personal compared to the last one.
Natasha: The album is coming out in a couple of weeks, right?
Orláith: It is, yeah.
Natasha: Have you been playing much of it at recent shows, or will it feel quite new once it’s out?
Orláith: We’ve been playing a lot of the songs from the album before they came out, to test how they would go down, and they’ve been going down really well. We’re doing an album tour later in the year too, so it’ll be fun to play more songs from the album.
Mollie: Even with some of the unreleased songs, because we’ve been playing them for maybe six months or so, I’ve seen people singing along. It must be on YouTube or something, but that’s always really nice to see – people liking the songs before they’re even released.
Natasha: Do you ever change the way you produce a song based on audience reaction, or is it already finished by the time you show it to people?
Orláith: We honestly don’t. We keep it to ourselves, and it’s either going to go or it’s not. We don’t really write songs for live. We’ve been asked that before – do you write songs thinking of the live experience? We don’t. Then it becomes a challenge to try and get the song into a live space, because you have all these layers and things you never really thought about.
Natasha: Is the recording mostly the two of you?
Orláith: Yeah, it’s mostly us, and then we get a session drummer. We just double up on what we need to do for the song.
Natasha: Do you find songs are already in your head before you start making them, or do you have to try things out before they become clear?
Orláith: The process is different every time we write together. Sometimes it could be both of us sitting in a room with a guitar, or both of us on a drum machine, or one of us has a little verse idea and we want to flesh it out. I really like that, because it means no song is the same. It doesn’t come from the same place. It’s a new experience every time.
Natasha: So there’s no formula?
Orláith: Yeah, there’s no formula.
Natasha: Have you ever tried writing with other people, or are you quite protective of it being the two of you?
Orláith: I’ve never written with anyone else. We’ve been writing together since we were about 16 or 17. We always remember our first song. It was before an exam – we were in the same school – and we were really stressed, so we just started writing a song. We’ve always kind of done that. When one of us is going through something, or when we both are, we talk about it a lot, and a lot of our songs end up being very personal and about what we’re feeling.
Natasha: Do you find it hard to go from that to sharing it with people, when it’s so personal?
Orláith: Yeah, it would be harder. I always say it could be really awkward writing with someone else. People ask us how close we are, because we will share with each other anyway. So it’s like a therapy session to write a song.
Natasha: And then you’re sharing your therapy with strangers.
Orláith: Yeah, exactly.
Natasha: Do you prefer playing a big festival stage, or a small dark room?
Orláith: A small, dark room – especially compared to a really open festival. It feels more personal. I love watching bands in a small, dark room as well. I don’t like festival gigs as much.
Mollie: They can be very distant, especially with the screens and everything. At the back, you can only really hear the bass delayed by two seconds. So yeah, intimate spaces.
Natasha: That’s what’s nice about The Great Escape. It’s a festival, but it’s still small rooms.
Mollie: Yeah.
Natasha: You grew up in Belfast, right?
Mollie: A little outside of Belfast, but nobody knows what that is.
Natasha: Do you feel like that scene and culture influenced your music?
Orláith: Definitely. Even the city – we started off busking there. After school, we would always go into the city centre together. There was such a big busking scene. We remember there were so many buskers, and we’d be watching. The Belfast busking scene was really cool. It was also one of the only cities where there weren’t all these crazy rules.
Mollie: Laws, restrictions.
Orláith: We were basically able to just set up and go, whereas when we tried to busk in other cities later on, it was so hard. It was a really cool scene for that. There were also a lot of really cool bands and a lot of cool post-punk colour.
Mollie: There’s always been a really good appreciation of music and art in general. You grow up being encouraged to play an instrument in primary school and everything. It’s really nice to come from a place that appreciates live music.
Natasha: With busking, people are constantly walking past. They might love it, but they might also not want to listen. Does that teach you how to interact with an audience?
Orláith: Yes, that’s exactly what it taught us. It was quite a hard one, because people aren’t going shopping because they want to listen to a gig. You have to do your best to win them over, and also not annoy them. It was a really good lesson in how to work with a crowd – a really unassuming crowd as well. But we loved it. That was the best thing we did, I think.
Mollie: Even just as an exercise in putting yourself out there. I feel like that’s the most important part of being an artist – to actually put yourself out there – but it’s also the hardest.
When we would go busking, every day we’d see 10 or 15 people we knew from class. There would be teachers, definitely. It helped us get over that fear.
Then when we started posting videos, I remember the day we made our Facebook and YouTube. We were so worried about what people from school would think of us. People would say things like, “Oh, they think they’re famous,” and we would get a lot of backlash.
Orláith: Or angry reactions on Facebook.
Mollie: It was something we had to get over. But it was so good that we had each other, because we were able to be like, “Well, this is our little group, this is our thing.” We were just these little weirdos together. I think My Own Party was sort of about that as well – that person who comes to your mind when you’re trying to self-express, when you’re trying to put yourself out there. In some ways, it’s supposed to be reassuring: people don’t really notice or care anyway, and you just have to get past it and be yourself.
Orláith: It’s like a celebration of being yourself and not fitting in. You can tell yourself it’s bad not to fit in, but I like not fitting in.
Natasha: That feels so important – it’s easier to be happy than to try to conform.
Mollie: That was definitely one of our early experiences of doing something out of the norm. People would be like, “Oh, that’s weird, you guys go busking two or three times a week.”
Natasha: How do you find social media now? Do you get involved?
Mollie: We are involved. It is still hard. I don’t think it’s good for anyone to spend so much time on their phone. That’s even what our song Wait was about on the album. It was about being in such a numbers-based industry, and modern life being shit, and the frustration with that.
Orláith: Even your tastes are kind of informed by numbers now. When you go to Spotify, you hit the song that has the most streams because it tells you that you should listen to that because it’s popular.
Mollie: We had so many meetings with industry people after a video blew up, and all anyone would say was, “These numbers, this data.” It’s hard, but at the same time, social media is one of the only outlets for musicians that is accessible.
There are loads of bands, and people will be like, “Just go on tour.” But that costs money. That’s not accessible for everyone. Whereas most people do have a phone. It is quite a level playing field, whether you come from money or you don’t.
Natasha: With social media, it’s not even always high-quality content people want. They just want to see you.
Mollie: It’s the double-edged sword of it all. It’s also really bad for your mental health. I’ve got four younger sisters, and I’ll always tell them, if they’re in a bad headspace, “Stay off your phone. Don’t go on your phone for months.” Whereas when you’re an artist nowadays, you can’t really do that, because you have to push and promote the new song. You have to grind.
Natasha: Have you ever had a song you thought would be the one to go viral, but the algorithm didn’t pick it up?
Mollie: You do get that sort of thing, but we’ve never written music for social media. We’ve always just written about our experiences. Then we try, and it’s always a surprise to us. Actually, our song So Damn Dangerous went viral, and we weren’t expecting that. For the first three years it was out, it got around 80k streams, which is still good. Then in the third year, I think it randomly got two million. There was a video of it that did really big, and it started getting slow traction. Dea Matrona has always been a real slow-burn band. It’s been a gradual thing.
Natasha: Does that feel like a good thing – to have it happen gradually, rather than being thrown in at the deep end?
Mollie: Totally. We’re in a lucky position as well, where we’ve been able to fund tours through our vinyl sales, and we have a label now and stuff. We do feel lucky that we’ve been able to move from posting on socials when we were starting off with busking and covers, to being able to tour.
Orláith: I’m happy it’s been a gradual thing. I don’t know how teenagers are thrown into anything so soon, especially with social media. It’s too much too soon.
Mollie: We started as a covers band. When we were 16 or 17 and busking, we’d have people on the street saying, “I have this wedding,” or, “I have a garden party.” I remember one day we were busking and this guy came up and said, “Do you want to play in my pub every Thursday?” From there, when we left school, we ended up in a position where we were sometimes doing five or seven gigs a week – sometimes two in a day. That was how we were making our money when we left school. We were using that to fund our original music for a bit, but it meant we weren’t always able to focus on originals. Then lockdown happened and we were like, “Oh my gosh, what do we do again?” We had to stop doing it for a bit.
Natasha: What advice have you been given that has helped you, or what advice would you give to other people trying to get into music?
Mollie: It’s so hard to know, because honestly, I do think nobody really knows anything. Even if you ask Paul McCartney to write a number one, great song – I don’t even know if he can anymore. Just because someone’s done it, it doesn’t mean they can do it again. There’s so much luck involved.
Orláith: The best advice I was ever given was by a legend: “If you think you know it all, give it up.” Experiment and keep going. You’ll never learn everything.
Mollie: That was Moya Brennan. She was so nice.
Mollie: I think you have to be yourself, and you also have to try and find joy in it.
Natasha: Is there anyone you’re currently listening to?
Mollie: A lot of Wolf Alice.
Natasha: When the new album came out, I was like, “This was so needed.”
Mollie: We’ve been listening to a lot of Sister Sledge.
Orláith: Mollie loves Sister Sledge – like a disco playlist.
Natasha: Do you have any pre-show rituals?
Mollie: Disco relaxes me because it’s just good times. I like to put on the Vengaboys. I have to dance to relax. Anytime I’m severely stressed, if I put on my earphones and dance for 10 minutes, it does better than anything else.
Natasha: So what’s next? You’ve got the tour later in the year?
Mollie: We’re actually supporting Wolf Alice, so that’s crazy, in Belfast. That is so exciting. We’ve got the album tour, and then our first arena tour with Sting, so that is really fun.
Orláith: Festivals. Isle of Wight will be a good one. Album coming out. European and UK festivals.
Mollie: We’re going to do an in-store tour and our own shows again. Just keep writing, because we still feel like we’ve got a lot we want to do.
Natasha: Does it give you energy as these things get booked? Does it keep the motivation going?
Orláith: Oh, it does. I remember getting the news about Sting, and I was like, “Okay, right. This is why we should keep going.”
Hate That I Care is released on 5 June 2026.