Dea Matrona – Red Button Review

Strength in harmony is the key to Dea Matrona’s latest track, Red Button. With much of its quality gathered through its consistent drum beat, the catchy flickers throughout this new track are the essential, repetitive quality singles of this variety need. It is not enough for the rock tones to strike through, they do so extremely well, but more is needed for the depth. Red Button provides that with storms, sin and strong lyrics to pair with a consistent, quality piece daring someone, just about anyone, to hit the red button and return Dea Matrona to some other state. Their harsher tones are a welcome change of pace, and Dea Matrona begins a charge for heavier-set rock with real meaning behind it.

That is their in, then. Red Button is a quality rock track that bleeds the Led Zeppelin crowd into the harsher tones of the heavier side of the genre. Red Button manages to pull the best qualities of both sides and push them through on a track that lasts less than three minutes. To conceptualise that tone, this Northern Irish rock piece finds a clear identity with this song. Clear, crisp and solid work brings a fundamental quality that Dea Matrona must now carry with them throughout the rest of their work. Red Button sets the bar, and it is up to Mollie McGinn and Orláith Forsythe to maintain that. Dark tones, cemented qualities both lyrically and instrumentally, this is how a genre is revitalised.

Fundamental tones are not cast aside but reflected on and improved. Dea Matrona has waded into the vast terrors of the rock genre and cemented themselves as something unique. That is sincerely rare. Quality like Red Button is what makes it so exciting to engage with these long-forgotten forms. Simplicity done well, great hooks and a stylish flair determine Red Button and the band behind it as surreal in their quality and unique in their image. Swift and broad takings give some interesting moments for Dea Matrona to muse on, to focus their instrumentals more than anything. Their vocal impressions are more impressive than the lyrics on display – solid rises and falls that give the presence of vocalist riffing on the quality past while cementing that new wave of the genre.

That is the key to Dea Matrona, a duo that is pushing through with a familiar sound reworked enough to feel, and clearly engage, with something unique. Notes of Cream and Led Zeppelin, but worked with a lighter flourish, a less-dominant wall of sound that dominated the era and a focus more on the tempo than anything else. Consistent those moments may be, it is the vocal presence from Forsythe and the undercurrent of instrumental quality from McGinn that marks Red Button as an essential modern rock offering. There is no way around it, Red Button needs pushing again and again. A quality single that not just cements a strong style for Dea Matrona to pursue but a fundamental nod to the tracks and influences that formed their playing style. Red Button is a crucial, important modern rock track that can hang with the best of them.