'Hampton's Champion

Welcome back to Finetuned! This week is all about a super fun artist that was a part of a really sweet group, Matt Champion. This homie creates such an easy to vibe to sound with a creative approach. Time to jam, homies!

Matthew Garrett Champion (born February 14, 1995) is an American rapper, singer, and songwriter from The Woodlands, Texas. He began his music journey in high school, where he met fellow future Brockhampton members like Kevin Abstract, Ameer Vann, and Joba -initially joining the internet collective AliveSinceForever in 2014 before it evolved into Brockhampton.

Champion contributed to all eight studio albums released by Brockhampton, a genre-defying collective often dubbed a “boy band” for its multi-member structure and diverse styles. With roots in alt-hip-hop, R&B, and pop, the group became known for its emotional candor, bold visuals, and independent creative production before going on indefinite hiatus in January 2022. Honestly I’d say if you are a fan of Brockhampton (like me frfr), you’ll at the very least going to love something about Matt’s solo music.

Champion’s solo work, and especially his debut solo album Mika’s Laundry, doesn’t anchor itself to one genre. Instead, it drifts through soulful alt-R&B, experimental funk, glitchy synth-pop, industrial hip-hop, and dreamy drum-and-bass. The record weaves together “nostalgia-inducing funk and soul,” as heard in "Slug," lush melodic textures in "Aphid," and ethereal drum-and-bass serenades in "Slow Motion" featuring Jennie of BLACKPINK.

More specifically, Mika’s Laundry evokes a vivid, conceptual world; a dystopian, slow-moving futuristic landscape centered around an imagined club named “Mika’s Laundry Chorus”. The opener “Green” uses these layered and processed vocals that feel like laser beams cutting through a mundane daydream, melding ambient dreaminess with R&B warmth twisted in uncanny directions. The album’s production textures are rich and experimental. “Slug” opens as standard funk sound before exploding into digital mist, an expression of glitchy, atmospheric transformation Chorus.fm. Tracks like “Gbiv” exhibit industrial hip-hop fused with trap rhythms; its beat switch around the two-minute mark transitions into delicate strings and piano that bleed seamlessly into the following track, “Purify”.

Lyrically, Mika’s Laundry explores the emotional landscapes of love and self-reflection with a fine balance of intimacy and existential questioning. Songs like “Purify” paint tender moments that can occur for us dweebs in life. Like in “sleepy-eyed” mornings, the “jingle of [their] keys” implying trust and familiarity, while “Project” voices struggles with codependency even as it acknowledges reliance. The track “Steel” even poses a vivid, vulnerable query: “Do you like that fill up space in my mind, is it empty?”, a line loaded with youthful uncertainty and desire.

Thanks for reading here, Finetuners! I do hope you all have enjoyed this week’s Finetuned. I’d appreciate any insights, admiration, or otherwise. You can email me here: [email protected].

Please do share Finetuned with your friends & fam & whoever else! I believe great music should be shared, cherished, and understood from all sorts of perspectives.

See you all in the next one! 🙌

(Sources: Wikipedia, Brockhampton Fandom, The Fader, Reddit, Chorus.fm, Rice Thresher, The Needle Drop, No Country For New Nashville, Wikipedia – Mika’s Laundry)