Pelham’s got talent: Matty Reynolds’ single reaches 1.73 million plays on Spotify

It’s no secret that there’s an increasing number of musicians becoming big online. Instead of roughing it out at underground bars on the Lower East Side, these new artists have found ways to grow a global audience through social media.

Pelham’s Matthew “Matty” Reynolds is a prime example of a growing online star. A Pelham Memorial High School class of 2020 graduate and sophomore at Providence College, Reynolds went viral earlier this year on the popular video platform TikTok. He has since garnered 212,932 monthly Spotify listeners at the time of writing—that’s more than 17 times the entire population of Pelham. He started out posting piano and guitar covers, which led him to release original songs. His newest single, the indie-pop-inspired “(another) hotel party,” is so remarkably catchy that it’s no wonder it has an eye-popping 1,729,134  million streams on Spotify after only being out for a few weeks.

Lyrically, the song is about a teenager sneaking around their parent’s rules, as Reynolds declares in the chorus, “Now I gotta tell my mom I’m sorry / I was at another hotel party.”

“Yes, my mom has listened to it,” Reynolds said. “She’s questioned it a little bit, but she knows it’s just for the music. I honestly haven’t done most of the things mentioned in the song.”

Reynolds has been writing songs his whole life, but it wasn’t until college that he became serious about performing. “The plan is to release a few more singles and then do an album,” he said. “I’m trying to make music work. It’s what I want to do.”