Winnetka Bowling League's Matthew Koma Talks Demi Lovato Collab and Playing His Music for His and Hilary Duff's Kids

With Grammy-winning hits like Zedd's "Clarity" under his belt, you'd think Winnetka Bowling League's Matthew Koma's kids would consider Dad pretty cool. However, the truth is, not quite.

"Not at all," Koma, 34, tells PEOPLE. "The only time I've ever been cool is for about four seconds, when I told my son that our song 'Barcelona' was in Fortnite. I had six seconds of being really cool, and then anytime I tried to bring it up again, it was like, 'Yeah, yeah, I know.'"

Luckily for Koma, he has plenty of other fans who do think he's cool, including Demi Lovato, who hopped on the Winnetka Bowling League track "fiimy (f— it, i miss you)" after Koma shared the first verse on TikTok.

That track, along with four others, rounds out the band's fourth EP pulp, which comes out Friday.

"I had no expectation [posting that song], but maybe a couple hours later, I got a message from them," Koma says of teaming up with Lovato. "They were just like, 'Can we finish this together? Or can I at least have the song to listen to?' I was like, 'I'd f—ing love to finish this together. And if you'd be down, would you want to sing on it?' Luckily, they were super into it, which is really cool."

Though most of the EP leans on the sun-kissed synths Koma made his name writing and producing, some, like the title track, take a punkier route, while others, like "fiimy," lean in to heartbreak.

"Yes, now I'm a happily married guy with kids, and life is great," he says. "But I still gravitate toward sad songs."

Koma married actress and singer Hilary Duff in 2019 and is dad to Luca (Duff's 9-year-old son from a previous marriage) and daughters Banks, 3, and Mae, 11 months.

Though he grew up on Long Island listening to singer-songwriters like Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen, he also was exposed at a young age to more hardcore sounds, thanks to his older brother, who would drag him to shows at 8 years old.

That sound versatility is something that comes through in Koma's music — and something he's passed along to his kids.

"My daughter Banks loves listening to everything from Dua Lipa to like, I'll play her the new Felice Brothers record, and she's into that, so it's cool," he says. "That's how my and my wife's taste is, too — we're into pop music, and we're into more obscure music and smaller bands. So it's rad for them to get a front seat to that."

He says his toddler also loves listening to Duff's 2015 album Breathe In. Breathe Out., which happens to be where her parents met, as Koma co-wrote and produced several songs on the record.

"We listen to so much of Hil's music, which is rad and funny, because a lot of the songs are off the record that her and I worked on and then wound up meeting on," he says. "So it's very full-circle."

Though Koma has been making music professionally for over a decade, Winnetka Bowling League — in which he plays with his drummer brother Kris Mazzarisi and Sam Beresford — was born just before COVID, at a time when the musician faced a crossroads over the direction of his career.

"The fact that I was writing songs that were working in that [electronic and EDM] world and kept furthering my path in that genre… was cool, and really exciting, but also very disorienting," he says. "It's like growing up wanting to be a basketball player, and then you're in the NFL, and you're like, 'OK, it's still sports, but a different sport.'"

So after several tours and electronic hits, Koma switched gears and started a band, which he named after Winnetka Bowl in Los Angeles after a friend asked if he wanted to join his bowling league.

While it took nearly a year for Koma to create even one song for his new group, the time gave him some wiggle room to figure out where exactly he wanted to take his new project.

"I just wanted to have this little zone where I can make s— that I think is cool and that I enjoy doing. That was the only expectation," he says. "It was easier to just start fresh and start from ground zero and build it."

With a headlining tour alongside "abcdefu" singer GAYLE now in their rearview, Koma says he's eagerly awaiting additional shows, and is excited to tour once more following pulp's release.

"Typically it would be like, I can't wait to come home and sleep in my bed and hang with the fam and eat all the comfort food," he says. "But I think because it's been so long, and because it was such a short tour I'm just like, 'Wow, okay. The taste buds are whet. Let's do it again.'"