So here’s what happened—or, more precisely, here’s what happened according to 18 Wheeler, who, for the record, is not a trucking conglomerate but an artist (musician, video-maker, bedroom-soundscaper, et cetera), better known by friends and family and governments as Matteo Debole. After releasing Game, a 2024 EP that managed to be both miniature and maximalist last February, 18 Wheeler hadn’t put anything out again. Until now, that is, here, with what we can only hope is the first of more.

“tell me again” began, as these things often do, not with a Grand Vision or any kind of plan, but with a two-bar guitar idea. On the day prior, Debole’s girlfriend’s cat had died (this detail, seemingly minor, holds more emotional gravity than is maybe immediately obvious and may be the seed of the song’s whole tonal dissonance: melancholy wrapped in lo-fi fuzz). He wrote two lines about the cat (“tell me again about Maggie / I could listen to you for a whole day straight”), and then—this is his word—extruded the rest. As in forced. As in compressed. As in the way something reluctant is pulled through something narrow and unwilling, like dough or toothpaste or feeling. The lyrics came out that way.

The whole thing was tracked in his bedroom, on Ableton Live, using drum samples that sounded like drums but also not-quite—uncanny, eerie in their approximated humanity, and amp simulators that mimicked tube amp warmth without actually generating heat. His bandmate Sebastian Jones (this one not a pseudonym, just his real name) later added bass and organ—actual bass and organ, presumably physical, vibrating strings and keys—and then took the whole thing back to his studio, where it was mixed and mastered into its final, shareable state.

As for the video—and this is where things get, if not exactly meta, then at least slightly disjunctive in the way that artistic intention and content often diverge—Debole wanted it to be “quick and haphazard” (his words again), unserious in affect and full of B-roll. This was partly a gesture of contrast, a way to offset or maybe deflate the sincerity of the track itself. He had recently read about a guy named Dael—a goatherd, a beekeeper, a sort of rogue agrarian figure embroiled in a bureaucratic war with the City of Los Angeles over his right to keep goats for goatscaping (yes, that’s a real thing: goats as lawnmowers, basically, but with hooves and agency). Dael’s life struck Debole as pure LA—not Los Angeles in the starched-Hollywood sense, but LA in the way the city actually lives: sunburnt, stubborn, deeply weird, fighting itself.

So the video plan was simple: spend an afternoon with Dael and the goats—Frosty, Pepe, Benito, Beatrice, and an as-yet-unnamed kid (a goat, not a child, perhaps a metaphor)—while they cleared brush at a hillside house somewhere in the sprawl. Debole and his co-director Don Juan Santaolalla (no, not that Don Juan) shot the whole thing on a pair of deliberately anachronistic camcorders: miniDV and Hi8, relics of the ’90s and early-aughts, grainy and washed-out and oddly perfect. The result? A low-res pastoral documentary as counterpoint to an electronic bedroom elegy.

What it became is harder to say. But it started like that.

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“tell me again” by 18 Wheeler, written and produced by Matteo Debole 

Additional instrumentation by Sebastian Jones

Mixed by Sebastian Jones at Wasatch Studios LA

Mastered by David Jones

Shot and edited by Don Juan Santaolalla

Thanks to Dael Wilcox and his goats Frosty, Benito, Pepe, Beatrice, and baby

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