Cold Gawd is the flag under which California-based multi-instrumentalist Matt Wainwright creates stormy, wounded shoegaze music born of open tunings and R&B melodies. His second collection, God Get Me The Fuck Out Of Here, took shape in the winter of 2020 while working long solo shifts at a coffee shop in Chicago. Fueled by dreams of returning to his hometown of Rancho Cucamonga and reconnecting with old friends from past hardcore bands, Wainright holed up with his coveted pink Jazzmaster, an array of FX pedals, and a laptop, and wrote the entire album in a month. In March of 2021 he made the move, heading back west to the Inland Empire, where he booked sessions with Gabe Largaespada at Open Ocean to track and mix.

Despite recording every instrument himself, the results have the lived-in feel of a practiced live band (which Cold Gawd now are, fleshed into a sixpiece). Cascading walls of guitar churn, surge, and ripple, framed by sunken rhythms and Wainright’s distant, defeated voice, veiled in violet haze. He cites the thematic common ground between shoegaze and R&B as a central muse, both obsessively fixated on love, lust, and longing, in forms alternately grandiose and minor key. Lyrically the album sways between oblique and desperate, yearning and resigned – with the exception of “Comfort Thug,” a brooding, largely improvised spoken word piece inspired by the notable lack of black musicians in shoegaze.

Cold Gawd is here to change that. God Get Me The Fuck Out Of Here channels malaise and melancholy into gauzy, galvanized anthems of escape, change, and introspection. The crushing closing cut, “Passing Through the Opposite of What It Approaches,” heaves and hovers like looming storm clouds, beneath which Wainright sings (and bandmate Arturo Ramirez screams) as close to a mission statement as the album offers: “leave what you know / and get grown / everyday / remember /why you left.”