Cage the Elephant's Matt Shultz: 'There was a huge potential of me not being here'

Making the rock band’s fifth album rescued their electrifying frontman from himself after a series of devastating personal traumas. He speaks to Roisin O’Connor about the making of Social Cues, the ‘tortured artist’ trope, and why he relates to documentaries about serial killers

(Neil Krug)

Cage the Elephant are known for their visceral live performances. At Lollapalooza in 2017, frontman Matt Shultz appeared onstage in a purple sequinned dress and fishnet tights. He stalked up and down the stage; leapt between bursts of pyro; climbed scaffolding and howled. What fans who saw the band on their last tour likely didn’t know, however, was that the man they were watching was on the verge of a breakdown.

“I was being besieged, if that’s the right word,” Shultz says now. “I had to recede into myself to figure out what was happening. I hate things coming across as melodrama, but there are times where I think it’s a miracle I’m alive.”

The 35-year-old, who looks like the love child of David Bowie and Mick Jagger – wiry, with a strong jawline and wide mouth – is sitting across from me, leaning forwards with his elbows propped up on the table. Occasionally, he rocks back and forth, as though he’s trying to physically propel himself towards an answer. He’s been learning the impulse-based Japanese dance form, Butoh, which he says helps him put things into words. Often, he opens a sentence with “for myself” – delivered in a light southern drawl – as though to avoid assuming that other people’s experiences match his own. It’s hard to imagine that many do. Over the space of two years, Shultz split from his wife, the French model Juliette Buchs, and suffered the loss of three close friends.

“I definitely snapped,” he says. “And I realised I was punishing myself. It was almost like a breath of desperation, to a certain extent. I felt I was tumbling over and over: I could see myself rising up in the morning and then falling forward through the floor and back up, like the hands of a clock.

“I justified it and called it research, like if I lived my damage on stage and presented it as theatre, as least it was serving some kind of purpose. But it was still very much all real. And once the touring stopped, I couldn’t stay still and be left to the silence of my own thoughts. So I just ran.”

For the better part of a year, Shultz lived in hotels between LA and New York. “It was pretty intense,” he says with a soft laugh. “Spent all my money, not that I had a bunch.” What did he spend it on? “On the things that you do when you’re running away.”

Making the band’s fifth studio album Social Cues forced him to come home, even if he didn’t realise how necessary it was at the time. “I think there’d be a huge potential of me not being here if that hadn’t happened,” he says.

Since they formed in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in 2006, Cage the Elephant have won a devoted fanbase with their brand of lyrically cynical, neo soul-influenced alternative rock. It drew early comparisons to Pixies but has since evolved (Social Cues is their best to date) into something darker, with more grit. Shultz and his older brother Brad, the band’s rhythm guitarist, had a tough childhood – what he has referred to as a “crash course in life”. Their father was a long-distance truck driver who divorced their mother while they were still kids; the two brothers were bullied at school for wearing hand-me-down clothes.

As you’d expect with any siblings who play in the same band, they have moments of tension. But it sounds as though, this time around, they managed to avoid anything like what happened during the recording of their third album, Melophobia: in the heat of an argument, Brad pushed Matt over a glass table in the studio and stormed off.

“Yeah, we don’t use the phrase: ‘That’s f***ing stupid’ anymore,” Shultz says, laughing. “We still had a couple of meltdowns during this recording process. For myself, it’s not something I want to happen, but confrontation doesn’t have to be unhealthy.”

He agrees that Social Cues producer John Hill (Portugal. The Man, Florence + the Machine) may have made them be more tactful when it came to expressing themselves. “John was very quiet, didn’t hardly say anything for the first few sessions, which kind of freaked me out,” he says. ”When you provoked an actual response, you knew you were onto something.”

Though it was made in the wake of Shultz’s divorce, Social Cues is far from a “break-up album”. His relationship is most explicitly addressed in “Ready to Let Go”, which is about a trip to Pompeii the pair took together where “the chasm that was between us was very obvious”. For the most part, on songs like the title track, he addresses universal characteristics: love, fear, hate. “We’re constantly watching each other’s micro-actions to base our own off of. There’s a strange unspoken thing that’s quite terrifying”

There’s a line on “House of Glass” where Shultz talks about building “brick by brick”. Surely, I say, people might interpret it as some kind of statement on Trump. He looks amused.

“That’s funny, this touches on what I’m talking about,” he says. “I didn’t write it from that perspective at all. Think about how highly politicised everything is – that’s where people’s minds go immediately, and that’s dangerous. It’s important to look at those things as well, but that song is about me isolating myself, and learning that, inside and outside my house, love exists.”

It’s interesting that, unlike certain male rock musicians who use the “tortured artist” trope as an excuse for harming others, Shultz turned this behaviour inwards. “For myself, it’s never this desire to shock, although the truth is shocking,” he shrugs. “I think that’s why I related to these serial killer documentaries; I found this curated presentation of outwardly appearing kind, and inside being a monster, so interesting. I considered the duality of that – how you could be innocent and kind to others, but a monster to yourself.”

“I think we’re all monsters to a certain degree,” he adds. “It doesn’t negate the beauty of human beings, it just says the darkness is there too. Why do we all relate to Jekyll and Hyde so much, you know?”

Is that him on the album cover, dressed in red latex? He grins. “We thought it paired really nicely with the album title, the fact you could wear something that was created for sexual situations, which in the space of art is acceptable to society at large. But there are other things that are important to talk about, which we’re not allowed to.

“There’s no real space where people can converse back and forth,” he says. “I personally enjoy being wrong, because I can learn. I don’t think I’m infallible. We need more of that.”

Social Cues, the new album from Cage the Elephant, is out on 19 April