360 says faith helped him break addiction cycle ahead of Kingscliff show

AUSTRALIAN rapper Matt Colwell, better known as 360, says recovery and Christianity helped him break a long cycle of addiction as he prepares to bring his comeback tour to Kingscliff.

Colwell said his most recent album Out Of The Blue, released in 2025, was the first album he began writing after “turning a corner” in his long battle with addiction and searching for meaning through external things.

“I’ve been battling drug addiction for a long time, for probably most of my adult life and everything I was writing before Out Of The Blue was whilst I was going through that,” Colwell said.

“So, the entire album is pretty much…I started writing it right when I started turning a corner.”

Colwell said addiction left him disconnected from the vibrancy of life.

“I think when I was in the addiction all the vibrancy of life was just sucked out,” he said.

“It was like everything was black and white and there was no colour to anything.”

He said the album captures the gradual return of optimism as he became healthier while still dealing with personal turmoil, including the breakdown of a relationship.

“Six months when I started turning the corner, getting healthier, getting happier, it’s like the light started coming back in,” he said.

“Most of it feels quite, I guess optimistic and hopeful whilst still going through certain things at the same time.”

Several tracks on Out Of The Blue deal with that relationship breakdown, with Colwell drawing parallels between dependency in relationships and addiction.

“In my relationship I was almost making the relationship an idol and thinking that she was going to give me purpose and fulfillment, so when it was taken away from me, I was lost…” he said.

“I think it’s the same sort of thing that I was doing with drugs in a sense, because… the feeling that the drugs were giving me was giving me purpose and giving me peace and stuff like that.”

“But when it would wear off, it would rob those things from me, so it was similar in that regard.”

Growing up in Melbourne’s outer east, Colwell said he initially felt pressure to imitate the hardened personas of rappers he admired.

“All the rappers that I looked up to seemed like pretty street dudes…” he said.

“I thought in order to fit in in this world, I need to pretend to be something I’m not.”

He said one of the biggest turning points in his career came when he realised audiences responded more strongly to honesty than image-making.

“The biggest turnaround moment for me was realising that people just are attracted and drawn to authenticity…” he said.

“Just being who you are regardless of where you come from and being unapologetic about it is what people will respect more than anything and that’s when I started really harnessing my own sound and figuring out who I was as a person.”

Colwell said he had once romanticised the stereotypical rock star lifestyle, influenced in part by early inspirations such as Anthony Kiedis’ autobiography Scar Tissue.

“I really romanticised his lifestyle,” he said.

“Especially the being a rock star and just being a loose unit and a drug addict and all of that.”

“I thought if I was a rock star and a drug addict, it didn’t matter if I was a drug addict.”

 

He said success in music only deepened that mindset.

“When I found myself successful from music, I was willing to become a drug addict, because I thought it just goes hand-in-hand with that lifestyle, never realising what addiction was actually like,” he said.

Colwell said he now saw that period very differently.

“Now I can actually relate to everything that he went through because he just continuously relapsed all the time,” he said.

“So I found myself in the same spot and being like, why would I ever look up to something like this?”

He said finding faith had helped him escape a cycle of constantly chasing fulfilment through fame, money and status.

“Before music took off it was like, okay once I get famous, once I get money, once I have access to all these beautiful women, then I’ll be sorted…” he said.

“And then I got those things and as soon as I had them it was like awesome, it felt great for a little bit…but then it was like, “What now?”

“I thought it was gonna give me more than it did…”

He said giving his life to Christianity had fundamentally changed that perspective.

“Recently giving my life to Christ, it’s freed me from all of that because it made me realise that thing that I was looking for this entire time, that level of fulfillment that I was searching in the world for, was actually what he’s given me now,” he said.

Colwell will take to the Kingscliff stage with longtime collaborator and fellow Australian hip-hop artist PEZ, a friendship that first began on the basketball court as teenagers bonding over a shared love of hip-hop.

“We both ended up becoming super successful…thinking it was going to give us everything we ever wanted but realising it didn’t, and then drifting apart and like trying to find meaning in the world for so long and now we’ve come full circle back,” he said.

“We’re closer than we’ve ever been now.”

360 will perform at Kingscliff Beach Hotel on June 6 from 5pm, with tickets available through Oztix.