By Stella Speridon-Violet
Credit: @simran_k_01
You can spend hours getting a song to sound exactly right. Then you can spend just as long figuring out how to mess it up in all the right ways. For electronic artist Deep Thrills, the two impulses aren't at odds. They're what make the music interesting.
Born Matan Koplin-Green, Deep Thrills grew up in a house where music stretched well beyond any one genre. His father, an ER doctor who considers medicine his day job and collects musical instruments from around the world, introduced him to an expansive range of sounds, from Middle Eastern and Chinese music to South American and West African traditions. By the time Matan was 10 or 11, he was already playing guitar, bass, and drums alongside his father in various bands.
“I grew up in a musical family primarily through my dad,” he says. “My dad was a musician himself. He's an ER doctor. He says that's just his day job, but he's an ER doctor by trade, and then avid collector of musical instruments from around the world.”
The exposure came early and without much concern for musical boundaries. “I grew up like listening to all sorts of stuff. Middle Eastern music, Chinese, South American, West African.”
Still, for all that variety, Matan was a classic rock kid at heart. Zeppelin, Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles were fixtures, and his own teenage band leaned toward the straightforward pleasures of rock and roll covers. His bandmates were his friends, with his dad rounding out the lineup.
“I was in like a just straight, like rock and roll, like Red Hot Chili Peppers covers, type, band, with my friends, and then my dad,” he says. “And so, the 5 of us had, like, a hot band in high school with one old guy in it.”
Another influence had been there almost as long as the classic rock records: Beck, whose restless approach to songwriting offered a different kind of musical education. Matan remembers asking his parents to play “Loser” when he was four or five, identifying it as “the monkey song” because of its lyrics. What stayed with him was the sense that music didn't have to fit neatly into a category, or follow anyone else's rules.
“Another huge influence for me for as long as I can remember is Beck,” he says.
“I was just inspired, I think, by that mentality of like, do whatever weird, cool thing you want to do,” Matan says. “Like, that's the best thing.”
That permission to experiment eventually found its way from the speakers into his own hands. Around 13, he was on an airplane with his mother's laptop, painstakingly trying to recreate Snoop Dogg's “Gin and Juice” in GarageBand, listening closely to each sound and figuring out how to build it himself. It was an early lesson in the appeal of production: the satisfaction of taking something apart and discovering how to make it from scratch.
“I was just like sitting on the plane like listening to every sound and trying to like make it in GarageBand,” he says. “And that's what I was like, this is really cool. Making your own stuff.”
“As soon as I found GarageBand, I was pretty hooked.”
That curiosity grew into a technical skill set that now shapes Deep Thrills' music as much as his taste for the strange and unexpected. His tracks can sound meticulously constructed, with a clarity and polish that reflect the time he's spent learning to produce and mix. But that precision often sits alongside lyrics and vocals that seem determined to pull the whole thing in another direction. The songs are carefully made, yet they're not always interested in behaving.
“I spent a lot of time learning how to produce music and to mix music,” he says. “And I think maybe a little too much time.”
“I love mixing music. I love the art of production, or even just the technical skill of production.”
The problem, if it is one, is that he knows how to make a track sound good. Once that ability became second nature, the more interesting challenge was figuring out what happened when he stopped trying to make everything fit so perfectly. Or, as he put it: “How can I fuck it up, like, and not make it so good?”
For Matan, the answer isn't necessarily to abandon the craft. It's to find somewhere else for the messiness to live. Even when he's drawn to the chaos of a lyric or vocal, his instinct is to make the mix itself sound clean, a habit he recognizes can become limiting.
“I almost can't help but make it sound, like, if I had a polish or good, like, you know, it's kind of just in my bones at this point to, like, make a mix clean,” he says. “Which is its own problem, in my opinion.”
So he lets the writing push back against the production, allowing the two to coexist without smoothing away the tension between them.
“It’s nice to have a balance of like the chaos of the lyrics and the song versus the technical, like, mix,” he says.
That push and pull gives Deep Thrills a connection to the current revival of indie sleaze without making the music feel like an exercise in nostalgia. There's room for polish, but also for irreverence, rough edges, and the kind of weirdness that resists being tidied up. For an artist raised on everything from classic rock to Beck's genre-hopping experiments, that balance feels less like a calculated aesthetic than a natural extension of how he learned to hear music in the first place.
Credit: @simran_k_01
Deep Thrills is enthusiastic about the indie sleaze revival, but what excites him most isn't hearing the past recreated. It's hearing what a new generation does with it.
“I think it's great. I mean, what could be better?” he says. “All the best music coming back.”
The nostalgia is part of the appeal, but the artists who interest him most are the ones who take those influences somewhere unexpected. He points to 100 gecs and Frost Children, whose music draws from earlier movements while pushing those sounds into something that feels distinctly contemporary.
“I was always most intrigued by stuff that felt like it was, like, different than the original movement,” he says. “I think that's the most interesting stuff is the evolution of it and actually sounding like now.”
It's a distinction that gets at what he values in music more broadly. The goal isn't to reproduce the sound of another era so much as to carry its spirit forward, allowing it to change in the process. As he sees it, that cycle has always been part of music's evolution.
“It's like any sort of 20-year revolution of like disco turning into Daft Punk or whatever,” he says. “It's not at all the same, but the attitude is the same in a way.”
That same instinct guides Deep Thrills, though the evolution he's most interested in is personal. Rather than committing to a particular sound or aesthetic, he wants the project to reflect what he's feeling in the moment, with as little distance as possible between the experience of making the music and the person listening to it.
“My purpose, like, and very specifically with this project, is like, to give the most truthful account of, like, how I'm feeling at the time about something,” he says. “Or, you know, to tell a story, to write a song in a way that's like, there's the least amount, there's the least barrier between, like, how I'm feeling and, like, what you're experiencing.”
It's an approach that leaves room for the music to change as he does. Whatever feels honest now might not feel right on the next release, and he seems to regard that uncertainty as part of the appeal rather than something to resolve.
“How I'm feeling is obviously gonna change,” he says. “And so, giving something that's truthful and honest might mean something totally different, like, with the next, like, batch of music, which is exciting.”
Honesty, however, doesn't mean the music has to be heavy. Even as he makes room for shifting emotions, he wants Deep Thrills to remain something people actively want to put on, something that can be enjoyed rather than endured.
“Overall, though, I still want it to be, I want it to be fun,” he says. “I wanted to, I want people to have fun listening to it and, like, want to listen to it, not be a drag.”
For him, the two things aren't mutually exclusive. Music can be fun without pretending that life is, and it can be emotionally revealing without asking the listener to sit with only one feeling. What matters is that there's something real underneath it all.
“You want to hear the truth from someone,” he says.
He recognizes that truth isn't always ecstatic or uncomplicated. Music has a familiar appeal that makes everything feel good, especially in a setting built around dancing, release, and the temporary freedom of a night out. But that feeling is only one part of the experience, not the whole of it.
“You want to be happy and, like, ecstatic all the time, and you want to go out, and you want to, like, you know, that's sort of like this eternal feeling that, like, is always good and it's always fun, but it's also not,” he says. “It's not anyone's experience.”
The same is true of the people making the music and the people listening to it: their lives don't stop at the dance floor, and their feelings don't stay fixed just because a particular sound or scene comes to represent a moment in time.
“If an artist goes in and out of different emotional phases, like, the audience is also doing that,” he says. “No one at a rave is like always there, right? They have like an entire life.”
It's a fitting philosophy for an artist drawn to both precision and disorder, to music's history and the possibility of breaking from it. Deep Thrills doesn't seem especially interested in deciding what his project should sound like forever. He's more interested in making something that feels true now, then allowing himself the freedom to discover what comes next.
Credit: @simran_k_01
That willingness to let things change carries into what comes next for Deep Thrills. After recently moving from Los Angeles to New York, he’s settling into a new environment and preparing to begin the third installment of a project he originally conceived as a trilogy of EPs.
“My plan, when I first started this project, was, I'm gonna put out 3 EPs, and it's gonna be, it's gonna be the trilogy,” he says.
The first two releases, How Deep Is Your and How Cheap Is Your Thrill, have established the project so far. The third EP remains unnamed, but after spending his first few months in New York moving and unpacking his studio, he’s finally ready to get back to making music.
“I'm finally, like, I'm in the zone here and can start to get that going.”
Where the project goes from here remains open, which feels appropriate for an artist whose idea of progress has less to do with settling into a signature sound than staying honest about where he is. The music can evolve, the influences can shift, and the balance between precision and chaos can take a different shape. What matters is that the work continues to reflect the person making it, wherever he happens to be and whatever he happens to feel.
For Deep Thrills, the next chapter doesn't need to sound like the last one; it just needs to sound like him.
