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The profile · researched 31 October 2026
Matt Lorenz Built a Band Out of Salvage, Then Wrote an Album to His Dead Sister
The Suitcase Junket is one man, a dumpster guitar and a rack of handmade percussion. His seventh album, To Go On, arrived on 2 October 2026 and is the most direct thing he has made: eleven songs written to his sister Kate, who died suddenly in July 2022.
Rural Vermont, a sister who taught him to sing, and a guitar out of a skip
Matt Lorenz grew up in rural Vermont and was homeschooled alongside his older sister Kate, who was the one who got him singing in the first place. He went on to study music and adaptive instrument design at Hampshire College in Massachusetts — a detail that explains more about the act than any genre tag does, since the instruments he cannot buy he tends to build.
Before The Suitcase Junket existed he busked around Europe and then formed the band Rusty Belle with Kate. The solo project began with a guitar pulled out of a dumpster, and the salvage principle stuck: what five players would normally cover, Lorenz covers alone, on gear assembled from scrap and repair.
He is now based in western Massachusetts, and the Pioneer Valley remains the centre of the operation — the records are cut nearby, the release shows happen in Northampton, and he has described long woodland walks and New England's seasonal cycle as the thing that generates songs, something that "washes out a lot of the worry and stress of our technological existence." He is booked by Concerted Efforts out of Boston.
The rig, and the voice
On stage the kit is a cluster of contraptions: a suitcase used as a bass drum, a hi-hat he calls a box of bones, a saw blade, plus whatever else has been pressed into service. Lorenz works the lot with his feet while playing guitar and singing, and he also throat-sings, which is where most of the writing about him ends up fixating. Rochester City Newspaper once described the voice as a cross between Hound Dog Taylor and a Tuvan throat singer who had swallowed a bird. NPR's World Cafe called him a master of musical imagination; WBUR in Boston settled on astonishing.
Lorenz has been clear that the spectacle is not the point and that the songs sit at the centre of the work. In an interview published on 7 August 2026 he said he loves "creating a sense of mystery in music," and described finding his quieter register as a slower discovery, having started out drawn to the physical sensation of shouting and belting. The same interview is where the homemade rig shows its other face: when footdrums have broken mid-show, the resulting gaps became dramatic musical breaks that he then kept in later sets.
The influences he names are not the ones the blues framing would suggest — Yusef Lateef, Brian Eno, Pauline Oliveros, Alanis Morissette, Ma Rainey and The Shaggs.
Six records of escalation, then a deliberate step back
The catalogue runs from early self-released work — Dying Star among it — through Pile Driver and Mean Dog, Trampoline on the Massachusetts label Signature Sounds. Mean Dog, Trampoline came out on 5 April 2019, twelve tracks including "High Beams", "Heart of a Dog" and "Son of Steven", engineered by Justin Pizzoferrato and mixed by Vance Powell.
After that came The End Is New, made with producer Steve Berlin for Renew Records/BMG — the biggest-sounding and most produced record he has released. Lorenz has said working with Berlin changed how he thinks about space and dynamics, the argument being that silence lands harder when there is a fuller arrangement around it.
Then nothing for five years. By January 2026 he was playing new, unrecorded material live — a show at the Spire Center in Plymouth, Massachusetts on Saturday 24 January was billed as a preview of an album still being made. When it finally arrived it went the other way from The End Is New: back to Pizzoferrato, back to the sound of one person working alone.
To Go On
To Go On was released on 2 October 2026 via Bad Chef Records/Symphonic, eleven tracks running around forty minutes, recorded with Justin Pizzoferrato at Sonelab in Easthampton, Massachusetts. It is his seventh album.
The record exists because of a death. Lorenz had been writing upbeat songs after the birth of his son and while expecting a second child, but in July 2022 his sister Kate — a singer-songwriter who sang on his albums and often performed alongside him — died suddenly, aged 42. He shelved the cheerful material and wrote this instead, as what he calls an internal dialogue with her. His line about it has been repeated across the rollout: "Kate's more on my mind than she ever would have been if she were alive, so there's something sweet in that sadness. When I'm singing and performing, I feel closer to her."
The album opens with "Oh Death", sung unaccompanied and distorted through the resonance of his guitar. "Don't Worry" is a fingerstyle ballad with string parts that addresses Kate directly. "More Time" is a lament about how quickly a life goes; "Born Wolves" and "Silver Linings" are the loud ones, with the guitar solos. "Blindside Memory" was cut with the Young@Heart Chorus. The singles came out in sequence: "One More Mile" on 14 July 2026, "Put Your Phone Down" in August, and "Blindside Memory" around his AmericanaFest showcase in Nashville in September. Lorenz also made the album's cyanotype artwork himself, and reused it in the videos and as set pieces at the release shows.
Where he stands, autumn 2026
The reviews have been strong and unusually specific about why. Glide Magazine ran Christopher Raley's review on 30 September 2026 under the heading that the album walks grief's long road, noting that the blues element of the earlier records is largely gone, that violin and flute appear in places, and that the thing moves through regret, anger and raw agony "without putting on a brave face". Seven Days published Chris Farnsworth's review on 28 October 2026, which lands in a different spot: ghostly percussion and reverb-soaked guitar, but also anthemic and country-leaning passages, a record that finds sunlight rather than staying in the dark, and an approach he called idiosyncratic and utterly human. The Boston Herald's verdict — sparse, sublime, deeply sad and shockingly beautiful — has been quoted throughout the campaign, alongside coverage from The Bluegrass Situation, which premiered "Afterparty" on 2 October 2026, and Twangville.
The release was worked properly. He played WCBE's Live From Studio A in Columbus on 1 October, then two nights at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge on 15 and 16 October, the record release show at the Iron Horse in Northampton on Saturday 17 October, and Mercury Lounge in New York on 18 October.
From November he reverted to touring alone. The autumn run took in Showdown Saloon in Portland, Oregon on 5 November, Ballard Homestead in Seattle on 7 November and Trout Lake Hall in Washington on 8 November, before an eastern leg through Myrtle in East Providence, Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, Jammin' Java in Vienna, Virginia on 18 November, The Attic at the State Theatre in State College, Pennsylvania on 19 November, the Purple Fiddle in Thomas, West Virginia on 20 November and Harmonie Hall in Philadelphia on 21 November. A California stretch follows in December — The Crepe Place in Santa Cruz on the 4th, the Folsom Hotel Saloon on the 5th, Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley on the 6th and Gold Diggers in Los Angeles on the 10th — with The Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on 22 January 2027 and Stone Mountain Arts Center in Brownfield, Maine the night after. Seventeen dates were on the books as of late October. Between legs, by his own account, he is at home with his family, foraging mushrooms and writing.
The show, now
A Suitcase Junket show in late 2026 is one man surrounded by salvage: Lorenz sits behind a suitcase used as a bass drum, a hi-hat built from a box of bones and a saw blade, working them with his feet while playing the dumpster guitar and singing, and throat-singing over the top of it. The set draws heavily on To Go On — "Oh Death" sung unaccompanied and distorted through the guitar's resonance, "Don't Worry" fingerpicked and addressed to his sister, "Silver Linings" and "Born Wolves" for the louder stretches — pulled back towards earlier material from Mean Dog, Trampoline and The End Is New. His own cyanotype prints from the album artwork were used as set pieces at the release shows. The October release run was the exception to the format: at the Iron Horse in Northampton on 17 October, Caitlin Canty, Kris Delmhorst and Louisa Stancioff joined him as guest bandmates, with Stancioff opening; the Cambridge and New York nights that week were also billed with guests. From the November leg onward he is back to touring solo, mostly in small rooms and listening venues — the 19 November date at The Attic at the State Theatre in State College was an 8pm show at $42.80 general admission, which is the scale of the whole run. Equipment failure is part of the format rather than a disaster: Lorenz has said that when footdrums have broken mid-set, the holes became musical breaks he then kept. Reviewers of the record describe muted, ghostly percussion and reverb-heavy guitar that translate directly to the room, and the recurring note from audiences in New England is the energy and playfulness he gets out of a rig that looks like it should not work at all.
Researched from sevendaysvt.com · glidemagazine.com · broadwayworld.com · thesuitcasejunket.com · concertedefforts.com · broadwayworld.com · recorder.com · myampmusic.co
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