MUNA chase pop catharsis in Trump’s ‘fascist autocracy’
The pop band, beloved for their sticky songs about queer joy, dive into America’s rot on their new album.
If you want to send MUNA into a brief existential spiral, just mention how long they’ve been together as a band.
“Wait, what?!” guitarist Josette Maskin exclaims after I mention they’ve been making music together for nearly 13 years. A brief, exasperated discussion follows between Maskin and their bandmates – producer-instrumentalist Naomi McPherson and vocalist-songwriter Katie Gavin – as they determine that yes, devastatingly, they started MUNA in 2013. Maskin can’t quite believe it. “I literally was like, ‘I graduated high school in 2014.’”
Time moves in strange ways, in Maskin’s defence, and MUNA have had a busy decade. The alt-pop trio formed while in college at the University of Southern California, releasing their debut EP More Perfect in 2014 before inking a deal with RCA Records. Another EP followed before the band rolled through a strong trilogy of albums in just five years: 2017 debut About U, 2019’s Saves the World, and 2022’s MUNA.
They collected a die-hard following along the way, but their mainstream breakthrough came with the 2021 single Silk Chiffon – a heavenly slice of pop that has probably soundtracked the first kisses of countless yearning queer couples. The track featured fellow alt-pop artist Phoebe Bridgers, who signed the band to her label Saddest Factory Records after they were unceremoniously dropped by RCA (the band told NME they weren’t “making enough money”).
RCA missed a trick because the self-titled album was stuffed with hits, from the aircraft-hangar-sized choruses of Home By Now and What I Want to the delicate country folk of Kind of Girl. The band crisscrossed the globe on tour, including touching down in Australia to play the WorldPride closing concert alongside Kim Petras.
Usually, the band would dive right back into a new album but the success of their self-titled gifted them something novel: time. “We’ve always wanted to take our time,” Gavin says, walking around the block on a typically sunny afternoon in LA. “In the past when we haven’t, it’s just out of financial necessity, like ‘please give us an advance’.”
Dancing on the Wall, the band’s new album, is undeniably MUNA, packed full of sky-high pop choruses and sticky melodies (and yearning, oh there’s plenty of yearning). But instead of the glittering, shiny production that characterised their self-titled, Dancing on the Wall is decidedly rougher: there’s a metallic edge and brashness to these tracks that is worlds away from Silk Chiffon.
The band spent the last few years kitting out their own studio after years of bouncing around between basements and garages. McPherson chats excitedly about how they were able to purchase new gear and let loose. They spent a lot of time running sounds into amps and mic’ing it directly, rather than capturing the audio digitally and manipulating it. It helps to capture the feeling of the room a little more, they explain, grounding it in a particular time and space. “I could talk about these things all day,” they laugh.
The brashness is echoed in the album’s visuals: bright, over-saturated images and videos, splashed with blood-red and pitch black. It’s inspired by the band’s particular obsession with new wave, and reflective of the anxiety and “impending doom” engulfing the United States.
“We were really inspired, not only musically but in a philosophical sense … seeing the parallels between the original rise of synth-pop and new wave and the times we’re living in now,” McPherson explains. “These mechanical soundscapes and Cold War anxiety versus our interpretation of those soundscapes and that similar sense of living through an era that’s coloured by a sense of impending doom, but also making danceable music. I think we perfectly, in both a sonic and mission sense, fit into that ethos, and we’re drawing the parallels between then and now.”
MUNA’s most beloved moments have been their most personal and emotional. The use of the word yearning isn’t flippant: MUNA’s best tracks feel like they’re about to tear open their own chest, whether it’s Gavin desperately wanting to dance in the middle of a gay bar in What I Want, feel someone’s touch of Silk Chiffon, or take someone by the hand and run on I Know a Place. Often, these experiences are collective, revelling in the joy of being in queer spaces together. How then does the band try to find joy in the intimate when the world seems to be shattering around them?
“It was hard to carry over the energy of queer joy into this album, in the sense that we are living in essentially a fascist autocracy where there’s a police state terrorising our neighbours and that there are periods of relative calm and then insane chaos, and it feels disorienting to live through that,” McPherson says.
“I think we tried to reframe the purpose ... Maybe joy doesn’t need to be the only emotion experienced with the collective. I think we can have catharsis without joy, and it can be in response to the horrors that we’re able to be a channel for catharsis.”
As for whether the external “horrors” render the personal more precious, Gavin isn’t necessarily convinced. “I don’t know yet in terms of the larger trends of what we were saying with the record, but I think there definitely is a relationship there,” she says. “I think this world exhausts us and can cause us to seek numbness or external validation in things that actually isolate us.”
There are plenty of head-rushing moments on the record, from the title track to the thudding Eastside Girls and Bikini Kill-inspired Wannabeher. One of its best moments is Big Stick, an icy new wave track whose title comes from Theodore Roosevelt’s infamous theory about American foreign policy: “Speak softly and carry a big stick”.
“Yeah, it’s just a simple feel-good summer jam,” Gavin quips. “I started writing that after Mahmoud Khalil was taken to a detention centre in Louisiana. And after Kilmar Abrego Garcia… disappeared and was sent to, effectively, a concentration camp in El Salvador. It felt like a threshold had been crossed into this realm of hard power and terrorism tactics.
“I wanted to lay out this thesis about the joke of American foreign policy, which is that we have this big stick and the lie is that we will do everything we can to not use it. But it’s Chekhov’s gun … If you have the military-industrial complex, it’s going to get used. If you have enough police force in every city to have thousands of riot cops unleashed on civilians whenever you need to, then that’s what’s going to happen.
“We felt it was important to have one moment on the album where, instead of the state of the world being this pollutant that’s in the air of the record, we wanted to really distil it into something that we can all just say out loud together: ‘This is what’s happening right now’.”
MUNA’s Dancing on the Wall is out now.