Matt Hansen talks 'Orchid', viral success, and his journey from TikTok to touring

Matt Hansen is only a quarter of a century old, yet he has already amassed a passionate global following. The L.A.-based singer-songwriter is another artist who has played the TikTok game very well, boasting three million followers on the app. And offline, he has headlined tours across Europe, the U.S., and Australia, and opened for artists including Train, Lauv, and Teddy Swims. He speaks to Headliner about his May 2026 debut album, Orchid, what it’s like to ‘waterfall’ an album release over a period of years, and why his live shows have been a training camp for these new songs.

In case his ‘Tok following alone wasn’t impressive enough, Hansen has also stockpiled one billion streams worldwide, off the back of hugely popular singles Something to Remember, Yellowstone, and LET EM GO. Nor is it difficult to see why, with these songs hitting the sweet spot between pop and country, a deft combination to stop someone mid-doomscroll, and to get them to migrate from social media to the Spotify app and add these songs to their playlists. 

And, like many astute artists in this music industry so heavily influenced by these attention-economy apps, Hansen has bided his time and released single after single, and the time is finally right to release Orchid, his first full-length LP.

Hansen joins the call from his home in L.A., after some well-earned downtime after a heavy bout of touring. “I've always loved to sing, since I was nine years old,” he recalls when asked about where it all started for him. “My parents used to play a lot of Fleetwood Mac, and a lot of that amazing ‘70s and ‘80s rock, so I grew up listening to that. Eventually, I started playing in rock bands, and then moved to L.A. when I was 18 to go to music school. Things just started to fall into place. I started to realise how much I love doing this and how much I love to perform.”

Regarding his pivotal decision to start posting on a certain short-form video content app, he says: “TikTok came around, and I thought it would be smart to just post myself singing covers in a random parking garage. I feel pretty lucky to have started my career right when TikTok came around, because it just placed all the power in the hands of the musicians and the artists. You post for free, and you can get your career off the ground for $0, which is really cool.”

Hansen choosing the City of Angels as his base might be an eyebrow-raiser for some; while his music is equally as much pop as it is country, there’s certainly enough of those sounds that pull from American folk and the US South to instead warrant Nashville being his tactical base. But his love of all things melody and pop means Los Angeles is the perfect city for him.

“I've always been very drawn to Nashville,” he says. “I do a lot of writing trips there. I've grown up in California my whole life, so L.A. was my first thought; it's on the West Coast, and I'm closer to all the people that I know and love. I also enjoy the amount of pop music that's here. I'm a singer-songwriter, and I absolutely pride myself on lyrics and melody, but I think that there's a lot to learn from top 40 pop. You can hear it in the music that I make, melding those kinds of melodies with some traditional singer-songwriter, folky stuff. I absolutely love telling stories, and if I can get that story across in the most catchy melody possible, that makes me so happy.”

Hansen is one of many ‘Covid graduate’ artists — because his career has taken off in the last few years, it was strongly shaped by being stuck at home when he started working on his music and not being able to do in-person gigs. The key question is whether this generation of musicians see it as a blessing or a curse; for Hansen, it’s the former.

“I genuinely do think it was a big blessing being in L.A. during Covid. I was in college, so I was taking classes online, and then I had nothing else to do other than make music and go make these videos. I would definitely classify myself as a Covid artist who came up during that time. That was probably one of the most formative musical times in my entire life. When the pandemic first started, I went home with my parents, sat in my bedroom, and I wrote a song a day. They were all horrible! I was just self-producing and self-writing. I did so many hours of practice without putting any songs out.

“When I came back to L.A. and started putting those videos up on TikTok, I had this new idea of what I wanted to do and a lot more direction with what I wanted to say. Covid gave me a lot of perspective on what I wanted to say in my music and also how I wanted to sound, because I was able to sit alone with my thoughts and my music and just be like, ‘I like this, I don't like this.’ I slowly moulded it into what it is now. I see lockdown as an incubation period for my musical journey.” 

As the May 15th release date for Orchid rapidly approaches, Hansen has released almost all the songs from his debut album as singles, a pretty exemplary example of a ‘waterfall release strategy’ — his fans and followers on social media will know the record’s many (and there are many) catchy hooks very well, and the anticipation will be high.

“It's been three years of my life compiled into one body of work,” he says, like a sigh of relief. “I felt like I didn't have enough to make an album for a long time, just story-wise. I had the songs, but I was like, ‘This doesn't wrap up what I want to say quite yet.’ Then I wrote a couple of songs at the end of last year that really solidified it for me. I've been putting out music for five years now with no album, so now is the time. 

"The title, Orchid, came from a metaphor that we had come up with. That song is my favourite song that I've ever made. I've been through some weird relationship things, mainly one North Star, traumatic relationship that I write about a lot. And this song was really important for me, not only in the musical aspect but in my own personal life and my own emotional sanity. I needed to write that song. For a long time, I held on to that one very closely and kept it close to the chest, because it's a gut-wrenching one for me. It was such a beautiful way to talk about love and talk about letting someone go and finding the right person for you.”

And while, at least on the face of it, it sounds like a very positive album sonically, Hansen adds that his main message with this album is “that process of coming out of something very traumatic and leading your way into a new time. It's learning how to let go, but also understanding that some kind of pain is always going to be with you, and that's okay. You don't have to forget it; it's a part of your life and your story. 

"You don't have to shove it deep down and just hope that it doesn't come back up. I gravitate towards melancholy and towards those kinds of feelings. I find comfort in them. There's a lot of strength in understanding that a time was sad. You can still remember it and not be fond of it, but look back and be like, ‘You know what? I am so happy that I had that experience, because now I understand how happy I am now.’"

Many of the songs on Orchid are very uplifting; you needn’t have any fear of this album putting you into a downer. None more so than Yellowstone, a song with one of the LP’s biggest choruses, which is truly saying something. And, while it is a rousing song and being named after one of the USA’s most breathtaking national parks seems innocent enough, Hansen explains how the song touches slightly more on the morbid than you might expect.

“I was doing a writing camp in Joshua Tree, and we were talking about writing a happy song, because I really hadn’t put out anything recently that was upbeat. It was all just sad. One of the writers was talking about how he had seen on the news that if Yellowstone were to explode — because of the geysers and the pressure underneath, it's like an underground volcano — it would blow up half of the US, and the events would be catastrophic. I thought it was such a wild thing, and I've never heard anyone put that in a song. 

"At first, it started as this campy, stupid song, and then I realised it actually feels very real. It's this apocalyptic love song. If we just don't dwell on the science of how it works, it's really fun. The world is exploding, and I'm going to run right to you. It came from a joke, and then we turned that into a song and tried to make it not stupid!”

Knowing that Hansen has a big European and North American tour accompanying the release of Orchid, and that he recently performed his first arena show, Headliner closes by asking what it was like playing such a cavernous show as a singer-songwriter.

“In a large room like that, you can lose a little bit of the intimacy of a songwriter song,” he reveals. “The main thing is you limit a lot of the distractions. A lot of the production can be a lot more minimal than it would be for a straight-down-the-middle pop show. You don't give them other things to get distracted by. You still let the music and the lyrics speak. It's better for the fans not to have this gigantic spectacle of a thing to focus on when the lyrics are the main point. It's always music first for me.”