The Tallest Man On Earth

Leksand, a band called Montezumas, and a stage name that was always a joke

Kristian Matsson was born on 30 April 1983 in Leksand, in the Dalarna region of central Sweden. Before the solo work began in 2006 he sang for an indie band called Montezumas, and the name he chose for himself afterwards runs against the facts: Matsson is 5ft 7in. Taken together with a voice pitched somewhere between a rasp and a yelp, the joke set the terms for everything that followed — a small man, a large claim, and nothing on stage to hide behind.

The early material was built almost entirely from American parts. Open guitar tunings, banjo, a high cracked delivery that drew comparisons to Bob Dylan in nearly every review written about him. Matsson has named Nick Drake, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie among his influences while refusing the lineage others kept assigning him: "I don't consider my work to be a part of any tradition. This is how I play." For most of two decades that was the gap he worked in — a Swede from a folk-music county writing songs that sounded as though they came from Appalachia.

Seven albums of narrowing distance

Shallow Grave arrived in 2008 and did the work a debut needs to do: Pitchfork placed it 47th on its list of the fifty best albums of that year. The Wild Hunt followed in 2010 and remains the record against which the rest of his catalogue gets measured, including by critics writing about him in 2026. There's No Leaving Now came in 2012.

Dark Bird Is Home (2015) came out of the end of his marriage to the musician Amanda Bergman and is the point at which the songs stopped being character studies. I Love You. It's a Fever Dream. followed in 2019. Too Late for Edelweiss, a covers record, appeared in 2022.

Henry St., released in 2023, was the first album Matsson made in a full band setting, and it split opinion sharply — Pitchfork's notice was among the harshest he has received, a judgement SPIN revisited in its coverage of the new record. The releases have moved across labels over the years, with Dead Oceans handling much of the earlier catalogue and ANTI- issuing the recent work.

A father, a reel-to-reel machine, and the polskas

Matsson's father died in 2024, after living with Alzheimer's disease for several years. By then Matsson had moved back to Dalarna, and the two things together redirected the writing. Instead of reaching again for the American songbook he went into the traditional music of the region he was raised in — polskas, old field recordings, the tunes that had been ambient in his childhood and that he had spent a career not using.

Just Beyond Endless Mountain is the result: eleven songs, mostly recorded at his home studio, with Matsson handling the bulk of the recording and mixing himself. Some tracks were run through ageing reel-to-reel machines to introduce deliberate imperfection, pushing the finished thing closer to the texture of the archive recordings he had been studying. Sofia HK sings, Björn Sima plays drums, Martin Hederos contributes fiddle and piano, and CJ Camerieri wrote the horn arrangements. Fiddle lines run long. The guitar is still fingerpicked but it is no longer carrying the whole argument.

Matsson has been plain about where it started. "The album started out in such a dark place," he has said of the sessions, describing the aim afterwards as making "something I really mean" rather than something that simply worked.

October 2026: the record lands

The sequence of the last six months is tight. In May 2026 Matsson released "Colors", his first new music in nearly three years — cut in his home studio with violin, guitar and voice, co-written with Hederos, and paired with a video shot during a European tour. Tickets for the North American run went on sale on 29 May through Ticketmaster and AXS. The album was announced in August alongside "Deliver Me from Trying". Just Beyond Endless Mountain came out on 9 October 2026 on ANTI-, his eighth studio album.

The reception has been warm rather than unanimous. Writing for SPIN in October, David Harris called it Matsson's strongest work in years and read the Swedish turn as a move away from detachment. No Ripcord's David Coleman gave it 7/10 on 16 October, concluding that "Matsson does what he does with minimal fuss, and he does it well" while declining to place it above The Wild Hunt. The opening track is "The Wildest of His Dreams"; "Scully, It's Me" and the title track sit alongside it, and "Överboda" is a duet with Sofia HK that reviewers have singled out.

He had already been playing through the summer — St Luke's Church in Cork on 27 August, the Walled Garden in Bangor on 28 August, St Canice's Cathedral in Kilkenny on 29 August, then Galejan at Skansen in Stockholm on 12 September. The churches and the open-air garden were not incidental bookings for a record made out of field recordings.

The show: a rack of guitars and a room holding still

The current tour opened on 15 October 2026 at the Haw River Ballroom in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, and reached the Orange Peel in Asheville the following night, where the set ran to seventeen songs plus a two-song encore. It began with "It Will Follow the Rain" and closed the main set with "Like the Wheel"; the encore was "The Wild Hunt" and then "King of Spain", the song that has ended his shows for well over a decade.

Everything about the routing suggests the format is the point. Webster Hall in New York on 20 October, Royale in Boston on 21 October, Massey Hall in Toronto on 23 October, two nights at the Ark in Ann Arbor on 24 and 25 October, the Majestic in Madison on 27 October, a barn at Codfish Hollow in Maquoketa, Iowa on 28 October, Thalia Hall in Chicago on 29 October and the Palace Theatre in St Paul on 30 October. November takes in Boulder Theater on the 1st, the Commonwealth Room in South Salt Lake on the 2nd, Treefort Music Hall in Boise on the 4th, the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver on the 6th, Revolution Hall in Portland on the 8th, the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco on the 10th, two nights at the Lodge Room in Los Angeles on the 11th and 12th, Observatory North Park in San Diego on the 14th and the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix on the 15th.

A European and British leg follows in February 2027: Groningen on the 5th, the Passionskirche in Berlin on the 6th, TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht on the 9th, two nights at EartH in London on the 12th and 13th, La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris on the 15th, Muffathalle in Munich on the 18th, Arena Wien in Vienna on the 19th, Magazzini Generali in Milan on the 20th, and two nights at Kulturkirken Jakob in Oslo on the 23rd and 24th. Seated halls, two churches and a pair of double-nights in the same room — a routing built for a man playing alone.