Father Hell, Mattie Vant (VANT) returns with with new solo project & debut single

Sunderland-raised singer-songwriter Mattie Vant - the songwriter and frontman behind VANT - returns as Father Hell, and releases debut single 'Let Go'.

Written and recorded in a matter of days and tracked live to tape at Vant’s studio (The Lightly Padded Cell) alongside cellist Sophie Sayer, the song was then passed to Mike Halls (Clean Cut Kid) for an entirely analogue mix and master.

The result is loose and left intact - nylon-string guitar brushing against sweeping, uneasy strings, as Vant’s vocal moves in unsettled, fragmented lines. Lyrically, 'Let Go' moves through overstimulation and dislocation, where external noise and internal anxieties blur into one continuous loop.

There are faint echoes of The Times They Are a-Changin' in its opening refrain, a subtle nod to the period that shaped it. After a stretch of creative paralysis following his last VANT release in 2021, Vant immersed himself almost exclusively in the work of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young ("in an attempt to analyse the work of my three favourite masters," he notes) - studying their catalogues as a way to dismantle and rebuild his own approach to songwriting.

'Let Go' sits between that reset and his past output, pulling toward something more intuitive and abstract.

Speaking on the track, Vant says: "I’d struggled to write anything at all since the last VANT record I put out in 2021 mainly because my view of the world has reached unprecedented levels of delusion, I struggle to interact with the news at all these days and as a result I’ve started to lean towards more introspective subject matters. 'Let Go' is somewhat an anomaly as it is a nod to my past both in theme and tempo. I’m not entirely sure what the song is about. The meaning changes every time I listen to it. It feels like a distillation of things my subconscious has been collating in the background for years. That place of ambiguity is something I’ve been working towards – and this is the closest I’ve come so far.”

As Father Hell, Vant moves away from direct commentary and toward something more open-ended and honest - where meaning can remain unstable, and songwriting is driven by impulse.

Fresh from a full UK tour supporting Demob Happy, Father Hell will play a debut headline show in his hometown of Sunderland on 4th June.

LIVE DATES

04 June - Sunderland, Port Independent (Headline)