Picture life before COVID-19, at a packed indie rock show inside Downtown’s Bunkhouse Saloon. Now make your way to the tightest space—dead center, right in front of the stage—and say hello to Matthew Shaw.

He and twin brother, Jeremy, have been fixtures on the local music scene for years, supporting local and traveling bands with their enthusiastic attendance. “We had an older brother who introduced us to music—Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Guided By Voices … right away I just got into it,” Shaw, 30, explains. “And I always loved the experience of seeing music live. It was incredible to me that you could plug in a guitar, play it loud and fill up a room and have hundreds of people there who love what you’re doing.”

Shaw picked up his own guitar in middle school and hasn’t put it down since. In recent years, he has served as guitarist and vocalist for the Vegas band Orange Eats Creeps, and now, he’s debuting his first solo project, Dream Martyr. First album Remember the Haunted Palms just dropped on Bandcamp and Spotify, and Shaw has plans to bring the recordings to life whenever the pandemic finally abates.

“I was working a lot of weird shifts and making good money, and that’s when I started to visualize Dream Martyr,” says Shaw, who worked as a bartender pre-coronavirus, pouring gin and tonics and vodka sodas for drunken tourists. When the city entered lockdown, Shaw immersed himself in music.

“I like solitude,” Shaw says. “I was able to write and work on songs and listen to records and get inspired by stuff.”

Also factoring into the vibe was the end of Shaw’s relationship with his girlfriend. Remember the Haunted Palms is a collection of love songs, written in what he calls “a sad, lonely but calm state.”

“The entire thing was basically done in one very long day during quarantine,” he says. “One long drunk and high day.”

Inspired by songwriting heroes like Guided By Voices’ Robert Pollard, Shaw says he looks for influences in everything, even the seemingly mundane and monotonous. “People try really hard to write cool stuff and things that are meaningful, [but I] think of [music] as a time capsule for that moment,” he says. “Ultimately, I wanted a record that was a rejection of the current pop stuff that we see. I wanted something darker and stranger, like a weird nighttime kind of record.”

Remember the Haunted Palms is definitely that. Lo-fi and dark, moody and atmospheric, it’s the kind of album best listened to in a slightly inebriated state, after the sun has set and with headphones on.

As a quarantine record and a snapshot of a specific moment in Shaw’s life, Dream Martyr’s debut is both quiet and intimate. “If someone like me can just write music and try to find a way to get it recorded, I think that anybody can,” Shaw says. “Creativity is everywhere; you just have to look for it.”

MATTHEW SHAW Dreammartyr.bandcamp.com