High Anxiety

In 2015 a string of inspirational encounters led Matt Bianco founder and singer Mark Reilly to combine forces with Amsterdam based jazz pioneers New Cool Collective for a collaboration that resulted in an album entitled 'The Things You Love'. Reilly subsequently released another successful Matt Bianco album in 2017 entitled 'Gravity' and toured around the world to promote it. Fast forward to early 2020, and both parties found themselves recording together again in Amsterdam, adding the South American cumbia and other new sounds to their joint fascination with Latin, jazz, soul and R&B. "Although I attended some rehearsals in Amsterdam to work on arrangements of song ideas NCC had put together, I deliberately didn't present many song ideas myself.

A couple of years after their first collaboration New Cool Collective and Mark Reilly got back together in Amsterdam.. “Although I attended some rehearsals in Amsterdam to work on arrangements of song ideas NCC had put together, I deliberately didn’t present any song ideas apart from one. For me it would be an interesting challenge as the essence of collaborations is that creatively you arrive at a piece of work you wouldn’t have thought of if you had written everything yourself” Mark Reilly (Matt Bianco) explains.