Dinosaur Pile-Up had grown into one of the most beloved alt-rock bands in the UK before Covid slammed on the brakes to their major 2020 tour plans. Aside from a couple of festival appearances and one London show in 2022, Dinosaur Pile-Up were pretty much silent over the next four and a half years – until December 2024, when frontman Matt Bigland explained in a series of videos the horrific health battles he had been fighting on and off since 2019.
Matt displayed a level of vulnerability that is rarely seen, and fans have responded with unwavering support and explosive excitement for their upcoming UK and US tours, and fifth album, I’ve Felt Better, which will be released on 22 August 2025 via Mascot Records.
When asked how he felt about sharing his story again and again with lots of eager interviewers, Matt said: “I feel grateful that I get the opportunity to be asked to talk to people about it. It definitely could be the other way around, where nobody wants to talk to me about it, and I’d be like ‘that sucks’.
“I didn’t really feel like the front guy of Dinosaur Pile-Up or a guy that has fans and can control a crowd.”
“Talking about what happened, in a way, reminds me of my resilience, which is nice. It’s good to remind myself what I was able to push through and remind myself that I am capable of that. Because a lot of the time when I was in hospital and when I was out of hospital, but still, you know, probably should have been in hospital, I was incredibly weak, physically, and also mentally just sort of shattered. So I didn’t really feel like the front guy of Dinosaur Pile-Up or a guy that has fans and can control a crowd and go on tour for fucking nine months or whatever.
“And, obviously, I’m stoked about the record coming out, so it feels good.” In the videos Matt shared on social media, you can see the brutal details of what he has been through, so I was delighted to see how upbeat he looks.
Moreover, having listened to the album multiple times already, I know he has very good reason to look this excited: I’ve Felt Better is an absolute beast of a record packed with emotion, “straight-up rippers” and stomping pop-punk splattered rock tunes. It opens a window into the past five years of pain, frustration, and love, but maintains a universal relatability that will make it a companion to countless heartbreaks and the soundtrack to many beautiful days.
“People were asking questions… people started to ask us if we’d broken up. And it felt weird to just return with a record and not mention this massive event that’s just happened and the reason why we were away,” Matt said. “So I felt like I had to be real about it.
“And also for my own peace of mind, I had to be real with the fan base about what had happened because I wasn’t in a particularly good place to be like, yay, I’m back, and everything’s absolutely fine. If I ever do have to bounce out of something, it won’t be this weird thing of like, ‘why is Matt always canceling shit?’ Because I never wanna cancel anything, but there is a reality of that now.”
Matt was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease at the end of 2019 when Dinosaur Pile-Up had returned home from extensive touring in support of their fourth album, Celebrity Mansions. This album had been make-or-break for the band, as Matt, bassist Jim Cratchley, and drummer Mike Sheils agreed to call it quits if it wasn’t a success. They were all flat broke, had lost their previous label, and Matt was already quite sick before the release of the album, but was relying on steroids to get through the tours.
Then Covid hit, the world stopped, and Matt’s self-isolation was extremely strict, due to the immunosuppressant steroids he was on. One of the only “sunflowers in the rain” for Matt was his relationship with Karen Dió, whom he called almost every day. He describes it as: “the realest thing that I’d ever experienced. I felt like I’d met my best friend whom I’d known for my entire life.” Matt visited Karen in Brazil in December 2020, but had to cut his trip short when his symptoms flared up, as he couldn’t risk being stuck out there without treatment.
He suffered severe weight loss, internal bleeding, and agonising mouth ulcerations, which worsened when he got back to the UK; Matt was so ill he could barely eat or talk. This led to his first-ever hospital admission, where he was re-diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis instead of Crohn’s, but was prematurely discharged due to a lack of beds. “I was sent home with permission to self-administer morphine,” Matt said. “It felt dangerous. I could have killed myself with that syringe.”
Matt returned home but lost more weight and blood, and the skin all over his body began to badly ulcerate. He said: “The pain was so overwhelming that it was difficult to answer when people asked, ‘how are you?’ so I defaulted to, ‘I’ve felt better’, to avoid explaining the layers of daily trauma.” After holding out for as long as he could, he went to the hospital emergency room and was immediately wired up and endured endless tests, including having part of his tongue removed while he was still awake.
“Lying in that hospital bed, my priorities shifted. I realised that the most important thing in my life was spending time with the people I loved,” Matt said. The panicking doctors, aggressive treatments, and then deaths of three out of the six other patients in his ward had a profound impact on Matt, and he underwent what he describes as an “ego-death”. He saved a photo of a wedding ring on his phone, and the thought of marrying “K” became his motivation.
A last-resort recommendation from the doctors saw Matt on a steroid treatment 600 times stronger than his previous highest dose, and healed even scars he had had since he was a child. But the side effects were harsh and immediate, including rapid weight gain, destruction of his bone density and liver, and an insatiable appetite coupled with low energy. Matt still tried to write music whenever he could muster the strength, and Dinosaur Pile-Up even played Reading and Leeds Festival in the summer of 2021. When Matt’s symptoms began to return, a friend recommended a traditional Chinese herbal medicine, which was expensive and tasted awful, but worked.
In March 2022, Dinosaur Pile-Up played their much-delayed and many times rescheduled show at the O2 Forum Kentish Town, a night Matt said will stay with him forever. A month later, Matt and Karen got married, and their romance is something that runs through the heart of Dinosaur Pile-Up’s fifth album.
The recording for I’ve Felt Better began soon after their marriage, a process dictated by when Matt was physically well enough to be in the studio. As soon as the album release date was decided, the tours started coming in, and Matt had to gauge if he was well enough to do them. “I still don’t really know if I am well enough to do it,” Matt said, “but I’m doing it. So we’ll see.
“I’m just stoked to have another record out in the world… The most important thing about music for me, and the most exciting thing about music, is making the music, writing the songs, and then showing them to the world.”
Matt said that his personality or how he operates creatively hasn’t changed due to his health crises and experiences over the past five years. “I’m still me,” he said, “but I have a very different perspective now having gone through that experience. And maybe that comes out in ways like how I articulate myself in a song, my perspective when I’m writing lyrics, or how I think about doing this full stop.
“It’s so fucking difficult to stay in the game and do this because it’s a struggle. But my perspective on how I do that and my gratitude has gone through the roof because I could be doing something that’s not this – or I could not be here at all. So, yeah, I don’t think I’ve changed or how I work has changed, but I definitely have a wealth of experience now that I didn’t have before, and perspective.”
I asked Matt if he thought pain and suffering led to greater art and music. “Extremes like that push you,” Matt said. “If you wanna make something, it pushes you to make sure it happens. I feel like one of the perspectives that I gained from this whole thing was a level of apathy about stuff and being able to articulate that when you truly are at the bottom, or you are truly like, fuck it, and have zero left. When you’ve been knocked down to your absolute base and you really are like, I don’t fucking care. I just wanna say this.”
“I really love life and I love living.”
Matt said that he has always been quite tough on himself, and no matter how bad his pain or isolation was, he would tell himself that he just had to get on with it. “And there were times where it was just bananas,” Matt said, “how living in constant pain, sort of 24/7, real pain, I understand now people going mental or people killing themselves to get out of that. Not that I ever wanted to kill myself. I never did.
“I really love life and I love living. But I can relate. I can understand why someone would do that because it’s, fuck, it’s a lot. It’s wild how horrible that is. So, in times like that, I would just have to sort of level myself and be like, there’s no way out of this apart from killing yourself. But I definitely wasn’t gonna do that. So the only way to get through it is just to get on with it and keep on going through that.”
Although the plan had been for their first show back to be the first night of the I’ve Felt Better tour, which will be at XOYO in Birmingham on 5 September 2025, Dinosaur Pile-Up simply had to play one of The Leadmill, Sheffield’s, closing down shows. But they only had about a week and a half’s warning, which meant only two rehearsals. Having not played anything in two and a half years, and having only performed about five shows in total over a five-year period, Matt said he was bricking it. “I was having an anxiety attack for about a week and a half, because I was just so not ready.
“But what was wild about that show is that from about the second song, the crowd was barking in between songs. I could not believe it. Like, can you imagine if we didn’t play Big Dogs? What a letdown.” Big Dogs was the third single released off of I’ve Felt Better and has already helped establish a new Dinosaur Pile-Up tradition. Matt said he loved the barking and hopes it becomes a thing.
He said in his youth, he just used to use drinking to help deal with pre-show anxiety, but eventually learned that it didn’t work. He was still anxious. “So now, as an adult with a brain, I don’t really drink at all,” Matt said. “The key is to have fun before you have a show. Like playing ping pong or beer pong or whatever. Playing games is killer.
“But I was so anxious for this one because I physically didn’t feel like that dude. Like I’ve lost so much weight. The steroids that I was on have just absolutely wrecked my voice and loads of different stuff. So I was really anxious because I never wanna be shit and I never wanna let anyone down. That’s something I kind of struggle with, because I shouldn’t really put that on myself, but I do. So I was really panicking.
“Which was wild, because in the end, it was literally one of the best shows we’ve ever been part of. And I say that, I don’t say one of the best shows we’ve played because, really, the energy was coming from the crowd.”
The future is roaring for Dinosaur Pile-Up: be sure to catch them on their upcoming UK and North American tours, starting in September.
Check out the full interview on YouTube:
