Dobro Nada by Matt Walker

Matt Walker’s everywhere these days. When he’s not playing with The Cruel Sea or touring duo gigs with Tex Perkins, he’s busy front manning for his band, Lost Ragas, who are due to release a new album soon. We’ve even been lucky enough to get another glimpse of his reunion of duo Matt Walker and Ashley Davies, which hit the charts in the early 2000s and scored an ARIA for the highly acclaimed album, ‘Soul Witness.’
During this long creative journey, Matt Walker has consistently composed his own instrumental music and continues to explore the nooks and crannies of his guitars for the hidden elusive sounds of moments.
In his latest release, Dobro Nada, we drift along to a space which resides in the solitude of memories, the present landscape, space and time, allowing the listener imagination to play out the imagery to this benevolently inviting soundtrack.
In contrast to Matt Walker's previous instrumental release, United States Of Alpho (2022) where the production aesthetic positioned the listener to experience a live recording of the performance in real time, Dobro Nada creates a more ethereal and orchestrated work. Walker's slide Dobro guitar weaves recurring themes and conversational lines between unexpected shifts of cascading synthesizers, percussion and voice.
'I felt it was time to dust off my old Dobro', Walker explains. 'I started playing it again and when I started digging around, I found I was drawn to the way it sat against new ideas I was writing on synth. While one instrument felt real and as earthy as a handful of dirt, the other held a more untethered quality that brought an external element to the music'.
Deciding to keep the original working untitled titles for the compositions and retain the order in which they were written and recorded, the album plays out as a natural reflection of its creative process.
Dobro Nada is somewhat a play on words. Dobro is the name of the wood bodied guitar with a metal resonator that features on the recordings. The word 'dobro’ is both a contraction of Dopyera, the surname of the brothers who created the instrument in 1929, and the word meaning 'good' in their Slavic language. In that same Slavic group, the Serbian word ‘nada’ means 'hope', which also happens to be Walker’s partners name, Nada Čordašić, who has captured the photography for this album.
Dobro Nada – Good Hope
While managing a busy touring schedule Walker recorded the album in late 2024 when time would allow. It was then mastered in April 2025 and is now due for release on 7 October 2025 via Stovepipe Records.

Matt is a musician based in Melbourne Australia. He's toured with people such as Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Nick Cave…as well as his own tours to different parts of the globe and recording critically acclaimed albums. Currently he divides his time between working with Tex Perkins, Lost Ragas and The Cruel Sea

mattwalker.com.au