There’s a moment in every artist’s life when suppressed creativity finally demands to be heard. For Matthew Waldman, that moment arrived in 2024, amid the wreckage of a two-decade relationship — and it’s now taking shape as BUTCHIE, a new musical project with an unflinching debut single.
Though BUTCHIE is only now entering the music scene, Waldman brings a lifetime of creative work to the project. An artist, poet, designer, and educator who has split his time between New York City and Tokyo, Waldman adopted the name from a childhood nickname. The project represents a deliberate return to instincts he had long pushed aside, layering memory and reinvention into a sound that feels both fresh and deeply rooted.
Music surrounded Waldman from the start. His mother sang, and his father played trombone while nurturing dreams of a jazz career. Waldman’s own tastes evolved through ’70s pop, experimental music, new wave, and synth-pop. By high school, he was performing original poetry and lyrics at East Village and Lower East Side open mics, often accompanied by a first-generation Casiotone. A brief stint as a backup singer and dancer with Tina Benet and the Benetz at Boybar added another chapter to his performance history.
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Design eventually became his primary focus, but music lingered beneath the surface. During a Tokyo residency from 1986 to 1990, Waldman wrote and recorded four tracks with Soichi Terada — though those tapes have since been lost. His design career later included NOOKA, a fashion brand carried in museum shops worldwide and famously worn by Prince.
The path back to songwriting opened in 2024, when Waldman was clearing out a New York apartment as a 20-plus-year relationship came to a close. Unearthing old poems and lyrics connected him to work he had buried, and producer Peter Cattermoul of Teleman began shaping that archive into new material with him.
“Gaslight,” lifted from the forthcoming EVERPRESENCE project, emerged in September 2025 — immediately after Waldman signed paperwork ending a 24-year relationship. What began as a deeply personal response to being gaslit by someone he trusted expanded into a broader meditation on blame-shifting, social control, and political minutiae. The recurring “gaslight carousel” motif evokes movement without forward motion, while sharp lines like “Global gaslight generation” and “Nostalgia’s political masturbation” pull the song from the personal into the political. Cattermoul convinced Waldman to release it as a single after the songwriter worried it was too strange for that role. The track’s sonic palette draws from ’70s and ’80s electronic music and disco, filtered through hyperpop and electroclash sensibilities.
Director and CG designer Kota Kawamura keeps BUTCHIE at the center of the video while visual chaos unfolds around him — a direct reflection of the song’s themes of instability and arrested momentum. Filmed in real time inside an LED-lined studio, the video surrounds Waldman with spinning graphics, shifting imagery walls, and neon-drenched scenes. Deliberately ironic dance moments undercut the gravity of the subject, reinforcing BUTCHIE’s view that gaslighting rarely receives the serious attention it deserves in either personal or public life.
BUTCHIE’s immediate future is packed: a live show is being assembled, ten new tracks are being recorded for a 2027 album, and a non-album cover of Sylvester’s “Stars” is set for October 2026 release.
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Andrew Gesner
HIP Video Promo
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Why it matters: In an era where public discourse increasingly revolves around manipulation and truth, BUTCHIE’s debut arrives as a rare artistic statement that connects intimate betrayal to larger social dynamics. Waldman’s willingness to turn personal pain into pointed commentary — paired with a visually inventive video from Kota Kawamura — signals a newcomer who understands that the most potent pop can also be the most personal.
