What Kind of Human Have I Become

Memory Gut

What Kind Of Human Have I Become is home for the everyday neuroses of Matthew Plunkett, who listeners might know for his involvement with two of New Zealand’s recent greatest, The Cuticles and The Trendees. If you’ve steered your ship close by the shores of The Cuticles then you’ll have some idea of what goes on throughout the twelve songs of Memory Gut: gorgeously non-pro pop and non-pop songs, marinated in hazy psychedelia, but with both feet firmly planted on the ground. It’s practical music, but surreal, too.

Plunkett started writing and recording material for What Kind Of Human Have I Become during pandemic times, in the sleepout at his home in the South Island’s Oamaru. After releasing a self-titled album on Bandcamp, compiling stray moments from the sleepout sessions with other detritus, Plunkett started collaborating with Stefan Neville (Pumice) on the project, recording in the latter’s Queen Street studio (shared with Ben Holmes of Oxsun Ox etc). A seven-inch slipped into the world on Soft Abuse mid-2024; now, the mighty Memory Gut.

What Kind Of Human Have I Become allows Plunkett to dive deep into his art and writing. There’s plenty going on in these songs – a welcome roughness and playfulness, and adroit melodicism, and a touch of both profundity and colloquialism in the lyrics and their delivery. Asked about this, Plunkett discusses a fondness for the potential in the meeting of the radical and the everyday, mining the unconscious for material, and rubbing up against the physicality and sensuality of language. “Reduction to the ridiculous, purposeful malapropisms,” he reflects on his general approach to writing, “these little tricks springloaded in the songs keep things interesting but also reflect the absurdity of the everyday.” You can hear similar ‘little springloaded tricks’ in the freewheeling music and playing on Memory Gut, the way an organ drifts across a song, the flinty chip of the guitar; it’s hard to pinpoint specific reference points (and who’d want to, really), but it shares a spirit with the literate illogic that manifested via the less self-important side of post-punk: L. Voag, The Scene Is Now, The Murphy Federation, Officer!.

The result? The joy of invention, the energy of bodies in a room, unforcedly making giddy noise. “I hope it sounds like three people who had a good time together making stuff up and working things out as they went,” Plunkett says. Well, then: mission accomplished.

-Jon Dale