Biography

Matthew Milia is a critically acclaimed songwriter, best known as the lead singer and guitarist for Frontier Ruckus. With Frontier Ruckus, Milia has tirelessly toured the United States and Europe since 2008—garnering a devoted cult following and performing at major music festivals such as Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, and End of the Road in the United Kingdom. Known for his thematic obsession on memory, domestic minutiae, suburban redundancy, and the fragility of family dynamics, Milia has written over 100 songs constructing an intricate personal mythology based in his lifelong home of Detroit, Michigan. 
 Milia's images teem with a domestic Midwestern heaviness—a world of decaying suburban landscapes and the desperate hope still residing therein. A cast of waitresses, youth soccer coaches, grandparents, and young lovers occupy the ailing station wagons and birthday banquet halls in which the songs reside. Milia sings about real human beings in all of their glorious mundanity. Perhaps he is singing there alone, in St. Hugo, the Catholic grade school he attended from K-8. The way a selection of our memories will ring forever in some evacuated mental building, lights-out in endless night. But through it all, a wry sense of humor winks its way through the pathos, atop chord changes displaying a level of precision and classic craft uncommon to the habits of today's songwriters. 
 Milia’s debut LP, Alone at St. Hugo, was followed by the critically acclaimed album Keego Harbor in 2021.