Remembering Cola Boyy, the disabled disco innovator

Quit To Play Chess – the second album by Matthew Urango, aka Cola Boyy – is one of this year’s best dance records. Packed with bulbous, funky and funny anthems, it’s a defining document from one of indie-pop’s underground stars. It’s also his final record: Matthew passed away in 2024, at the age of 34.

The Californian musician began releasing music under the alias Cola Boyy in 2018, quickly attracting attention thanks to his idiosyncratic style, charming performances and off-kilter production methods. He collaborated with The Avalanches and Air’s Nicolas Godin, and forged strong friendships with MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden and the Argentinian indie musician Tall Juan.

When Matthew was making Quit To Play Chess, he felt he was just getting started. ​“Matt was really pumped on this, but he was recording other things – he couldn’t stop,” says his twin brother, Marcus Urango. ​“This album is so freaking good, but to him, it’s like, alright, cool. This is done. What’s next? He was hungry.”

Matthew was from Oxnard, a Latino-majority farming town in California that has politics and music in its bones: famed activist Cesar Chavez grew up there, as did contemporary music icons like Madlib and Anderson .Paak. The Urangos were a big, multiracial family, (“We’re Black, Mexican, Spanish, Native American, Portuguese, all these things,” says Marcus.) Matthew was born with spina bifida, kyphosis and scoliosis, and he used a prosthetic leg. ​“There was so much love and people around, and everyone was supportive of him being disabled,” says Marcus. ​“We had a family that cared and showed him a lot, even when he faced a lot of strife, with other people not understanding him. Certain parts of society definitely let people like him slip through the cracks.”

Matthew had an uncle who was intent on making him a musician, giving him toy DJ decks and guitars and, at one point, a miniature drum kit, ​“knowing that part of it was to piss off my dad a little bit and be like ​‘Here’s some more music for your house – hope you’re happy with it,” says Marcus. Those early misadventures in toy music sparked something in Matthew, who by high school was teaching himself to play guitar in a way that suited him, given that ordinary methods of playing didn’t accommodate his disability.

Like so many SoCal teenagers before him, Matthew’s first journey into playing music was through punk, a scene that prioritised intuition and sentiment over technical prowess. ​“He really lucked out with the fact that he fell into punk, which in a lot of ways, at its best, was about acceptance and being there for everybody,” says Marcus. ​“There definitely was still that element in the punk scene that was a little discriminatory or treated him poorly, but there were a lot more people that supported him. I think if he had gone down a different path, it might have been harder for him, but he was in the perfect environment for himself to grow.”

Through punk – and, especially, through learning about anarcho-punk scenes in places like Burma and Ghana – Matthew started developing a political consciousness, eventually becoming an organiser in his twenties with two local groups that prioritised anarchist thinking and PoC liberation.

According to Marcus, Matthew never really gave up punk, even writing punk songs with friends as he was working onQuit To Play Chess. But after playing in powerviolence bands like El Mariachi in his early twenties, he started posting disco-inspired songs as Cola Boyy online, impressing César Wogue at the French label Record Makers, which was co-founded by Air. ​“I stumbled across his SoundCloud thinking that he might be a musician from the ​’70s whose family was posting old music. It sounded like nothing I had heard of at that time – it felt very timeless,” says César.

César passed the music to Record Makers’ co-founder Teissier du Cros, who was able to see one of Cola Boyy’s early performances in Los Angeles. ​“It was basically at an abandoned house, and he was playing in what used to be the living room, onstage with a computer dancing, and his friends were yelling, and there was no alcohol served,” Teissier recalls. ​“He had such a great presence, and he was a very kind guy – he knew of the label, he had spotted a video we had released years before that.” Signing Cola Boyy, says Teissier, was easy, because ​“he told me he’d sent his music to many American labels [and] barely had one response – nobody cared, you know?”

Matthew’s debut Cola Boyy EP, 2018’s Black Boogie Neon, was conceptualised as a soundtrack for a fictional club for disabled people, and its lush combination of high-toned disco and synth-pop was a tonic for anyone who craved serious music that still sounded fun. Around the time of the EP’s release, MGMT’s VanWyngarden discovered Cola Boyy through a SoundCloud trawl. ​“It really took hold of me in a way where it just felt like there was energy behind it – almost like it was a whole scene and movement that was going on,” he says. ​“From the first listen, you can just hear the sense of love and community in the music, and that’s rare when I listen to newer music, sadly.”

MGMT invited Cola Boyy to support them on tour in 2018, and Matthew and VanWyngarden immediately hit it off, eventually becoming close friends. ​“He came backstage and almost immediately, he was riffing with the whole band,” VanWyngarden says. ​“It was kind of an instant friendship, we just started goofing off and it didn’t stop for the whole tour.” It was Cola Boyy’s biggest tour to date, although you wouldn’t have known from watching. ​“Opening for a bigger artist is an intimidating experience, and I was really impressed that he just went balls out and was super confident. He did his thing and people loved it. I was really impressed with his confidence and his swagger.”

That sense of fun is what drew the Avalanches’ Tony Di Blasi and Robbie Chater to Cola Boyy. ​“We were always just fucking around. Even if we were talking about more serious issues, he’d always be making us laugh as well,” says Robbie. The Avalanches first worked with Cola Boyy on We Go On, a sublime highlight from their 2020 album We Will Always Love You. They maintained a strong friendship with him, eventually contributing production to Don’t Forget Your Neighborhood, the winsome piano-house track that opens Cola Boyy’s 2021 debut album Prosthetic Boombox. ​“The first time we met him, it was like we’d just known him our whole lives,” says Di Blasi. ​“That sounds corny, but we just met and I think before we even recorded anything or did any music, we sat there and just spoke for about two hours, and it was like old friends reuniting, like he was one of my best friends.”

Prosthetic Boombox, which also featured collaborations with VanWyngarden, the Avalanches and Nicolas Godin, was met with widespread acclaim. Matthew sung about his disabilities on Kid Born in Space (“I hear them making fun of my voice/​But I keep on moving forward”) and his love of his community on Don’t Forget Your Neighborhood (“Fight for your town, don’t you let go”).

In Matthew’s mind, these songs spread awareness about causes that were near to his heart. In the minds of some of the organisers Matthew hung out with in Oxnard, he was breaking arbitrary, unspoken laws of their groups. ​“Some people definitely were intending his music and his reach to be used strictly for their benefit, and there were people who didn’t like the idea of the attention he was getting,” says Marcus. ​“It was like, ​‘Oh, you said this in an interview, and you said it wrong – now you’re gonna have to do all this work to make up for it, and write about why you were wrong. It was literally cutting into time when he could have been making music.”

César Wogue shared the same concerns. ​“For some time, we weren’t hearing from him so much, because he was working and he was completely burned out,” he says. ​“He was giving a lot to that part of his life.” Eventually, Matthew began to distance himself from those activist groups, realising that they were detrimental to his mental health and career. He named Quit To Play Chess in reference to French iconoclast Marcel Duchamp, who famously stepped away from his popular art in order to focus on chess, which he considered more pure than art. “[The album title] was his way of saying ​‘I quit the politics to prioritise music’,” says Marc Teissier du Cros. ​“He really wanted something big to happen in his career.“

Quit To Play Chess is a bittersweet record, but it’s as great a final document as anyone could ask for: an album perfect for wiling away summer hours with friends and loved ones. ​“This album, he was just focused on making good music and being himself,” says Marcus. ​“It was about having fun. Not every line has to be political. They can just sound good, and still speak to his soul.”