Dinosaur Pile-Up at Polaris Hall

There were six people in the ward when Matt Bigland admitted himself to the hospital for the second time. Three of them didn’t make it out alive. Life is short. It’s fragile. It can end in an instant. That’s the harsh truth with which the Dinosaur Pile-Up frontman has wrestled since losing his father suddenly at eight years of age, the stark reality that shook him into picking up a guitar and chasing his rock star dreams in the first place. Because tomorrow is never guaranteed. When ulcerative colitis left Matt in critical care in early 2021, however, he began to think again about what it’s really all about. “You think you’re halfway through life, then you realize you might be right at the end,” he smiles, today. “Being in that room was scary. I felt incredibly vulnerable. I had no control. But hearing people in the final hours of their lives forced me to think about what would happen if I were to die. What was I leaving behind? What really mattered while I was here? What bullshit did I waste my time worrying about? What had true value to me? I’ve always understood that life can be fleeting and fragile — how important it is to take every chance — but I’d never processed it quite like that…” ‘I’ve felt better…’ started as a makeshift mantra. Unwilling to sift through the layers of trauma with every friend who checked in to see how he was doing — indeed, often unable to speak through a mouth filled with centimeter-wide sores — Matt found himself defaulting to that wry, understated three-word response. After four years of repetition and rattling around his head, those words are reclaimed as the title to Dinosaur Pile-Up’s defiant fifth album: 12 songs to draw a line under a half-decade of sickness and struggle, a distillation of his agonizing uncertainty and self-analysis.