Gaithersburg-based singer-songwriter and guitarist Matt Wolejsza announces the release of his debut album, The Beast I’m Meant to Be, out April 18, 2025. Produced by Tim Boate in Baltimore and executive produced by Brian Feinstein in New York, the album represents years of accumulated songwriting, personal growth, and the kind of unflinching emotional honesty that only comes from an artist who has taken the long road to get here — and arrived with something real to say.
The Beast I’m Meant to Be is an album of contrasts and range. It moves from sharp cultural critique to the darkest corners of inner experience, from social commentary to intensely personal grief — all carried on a Metallica-influenced guitar-driven sound that Wolejsza has spent years developing, studying, and making his own. It is a debut that sounds like everything it cost to make it.
⇒ Read our album review here.
The album opens with its most immediate and outward-facing statement. “Stupidity Gone Viral” is a hard-hitting critique of internet and social media culture — a track that names the destructive nature of the online world with the directness and riff-driven force the subject demands. In a media landscape where that destruction has become background noise, the song cuts through it.
The title track, “The Beast I’m Meant to Be,” turns the lens entirely inward. A raw and unflinching examination of depression, lost hope, and the slow erosion of self-worth, it is the album’s emotional core — the song that gives the whole collection its name and its weight. Wolejsza does not soften the subject or wrap it in reassurance. He sits with it, and the result is something that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt themselves losing the fight against their own interior.
“One More Hug” is something different again — and perhaps the album’s most quietly devastating moment. A tribute to his cat Bonnie, it captures the specific, impossible grief of realising in real time that a beloved companion is not coming home. It is a small subject in the grandest sense, and an enormous one in every way that actually matters.
Together, the three anchor tracks demonstrate an emotional range that spans from the communal to the deeply private — and the album’s remaining songs continue that breadth, drawing from both Wolejsza’s personal experiences and his observations of the wider world.
⇒ Read our album review here.
Wolejsza came to songwriting as an adult, looking for a way to express himself — and then looking for the community and feedback that would help him do it well. That search led him to the Baltimore songwriter group led by Diana Hanson-Young, where assignments, peer feedback, and years of dedicated craft development shaped him into the artist who made this album.
It was through that community that the key collaborators for The Beast I’m Meant to Be came together. Brian Feinstein — New York-based, and a presence in Wolejsza’s musical development for years — served as executive producer, providing crucial arrangement guidance and song feedback that helped refine each track into its final form. A fellow group member’s album led Wolejsza to Tim Boate, the Baltimore-based producer who recorded, mixed, and mastered the album while adding additional sonic layers that brought Wolejsza’s original ideas fully to life.
The Metallica influence that has driven Wolejsza’s playing since youth runs through the album’s guitar work — the powerful riffs, the directness, the refusal to be quiet — while the songwriting itself ranges beyond any single genre, following the idea wherever it needs to go.
