After a six year marriage with Atlantic Records, Tampa singer-songwriter Matt Hires has amicably cut ties with the label and decided to go the independent route.
"I don't have any bad blood or anything with the people at Atlantic after our split. It was just time," wrote Hires in an email to CL.
"I'm thankful for the time with the label because I was able to learn a lot and really grow as an artist ... I feel like I'm a lot more well equipped to try to do things independently." He added "It's still kind of scary, but I feel like I can actually pull it off."
To celebrate the occasion and bring awareness to his upcoming independent EP Heartache Machine (due April 8), Hires, 28, took to Noisetrade.com and released the breadth of his recorded output (a 2009 debut full-length, Take Us To The Start, and last year's EP, This World Won't Last Forever, But Tonight We Can Pretend) for free download through the end of the week.
"[Atlantic] still own the masters to my albums, and I own my own publishing. When I reached out to them about putting the music up on Noisetrade for a limited-time before I release my new music, they were cool with it," he explained. "I think my actual pitch was something like, 'It's on Spotify anyways. I could either just get fractions of pennies for streams, or I could try to gain some actual fans by putting the music on NoiseTrade.'"
Hires just wrapped up shooting a video for Heartache Machine's title track, and you can listen to the song below. Grab your free copies of Hires' previous albums at Noisetrade and pre-order his new album at Bandcamp.