Matthew Stenroos (he/him) is a musical artist based in Brooklyn. He has quietly released 3 solo albums and an EP, with the 4th full-length slated for a 2025 release, and releases ambient music as Sixty Ton Angel. He is a 2017 New Amsterdam Records Composers Lab alum (as Matthew Anderson) and has collaborated with a range of artists including Chloe Rowlands (Fleet Foxes, The Westerlies), Charls Ava (M.I.A.), and Finnegan Shanahan (Contemporaneous), amongst others. 

Originally from Akron, Ohio, Stenroos was raised in an intensely religious environment complete with a home-schooled education. Sacred choral music, classical piano repertoire, and an unbridled creative urge formed the core of his musical language. Grunge crashed into his life in middle school, and by college he was seeking out rare B-side collections from modern prog losers such as Porcupine Tree and Oceansize. Somewhere in between he discovered the final two Talk Talk records, Steve Reich, Alice Coltrane and Brian Eno. After college he moved to New York City, leaving his religious roots and becoming a heathen.

The latest Sixty Ton Angel record Mantra (2025) is guided meditation music designed for riding the New York City subway system. The project was born incidentally while Stenroos was undergoing an anxiety attack on the subway, and began repeating phrases to himself: “I am on the train”; “the train is in the station”; “each rider on the train has a destination.” By doing so he inadvertently entered a hypnotic meditative state. These phrases evolved into the mindfulness cues featured on the record. He is currently “busking” the project on subway platforms by providing a sign with a QR code, from which riders can stream the record during their ride. The album was co-produced by Carson Graham.

In the post-genre world of our moment, Stenroos’s vernacular embodies an earnestly outsider voice; almost an insular alternate history. Yet his work is indelibly laced with a sense of the universal and the sacred; an almost childlike longing for oneness in an increasingly bifurcated world.