The members of Muna stored calling themselves “impenetrable.” They have been sorry about this, they insisted, as every lurched into the body of a video name from a yard in Los Angeles, ping-ponging inside jokes and rearranging themselves into completely different configurations.
The indie-pop trio of Katie Gavin, 29, Naomi McPherson, 29, and Josette Maskin, 28, function on a frenetic frequency and have easy accessibility to their feelings. By the top of the decision to debate their new album, out Friday, all three had teared up and begged themselves out loud to cease crying. The fixed churn of promotion was including up: “That’s why we’re chaos vibes,” McPherson mentioned, dangling a whorl of curly hair over the display.
Any album launch brings some chaos. For Muna, although, sending its third, self-titled album into the world means beginning once more. The group performed at Lollapalooza and appeared on Jimmy Fallon’s present earlier than its debut album, “About U,” got here out in 2017, then opened for Harry Styles and adopted up with a 2019 LP known as “Saves the World.” But its label, RCA, dropped the band months into the pandemic, citing price-reducing requirements.
Muna was devastated. Then it went again to work. A pal of a pal, somebody the members knew by way of what Gavin known as “the lesbian Los Angeles support group,” rented them a studio in her basement for subsequent to nothing, and the band began exhibiting up on daily basis. The songs it labored on there would develop into its most pop-oriented and propulsive but. One of them turned one thing the band had by no means had earlier than: a viral hit.
“Life’s so fun, life’s so fun,” Gavin lilts on “Silk Chiffon,” which options Phoebe Bridgers and has caromed throughout TikTok, soundtracking cookie dough tutorials, hangovers and odes to crushes. The remainder of “Muna” is stuffed with fizzy songs about twirling by way of homosexual bars and rollerblading by way of the night time that barrel over slick, sputtering synths. Buoyed by the success of “Silk Chiffon,” the band is now on the verge of breaking out of its cult following and bringing its anthems about queer pleasure to a wider viewers. But pleasure isn’t simple for Muna, both in its music or in its members’ lives.
“Obviously, everything is going really well,” McPherson, who’s nonbinary, mentioned, prodding a toothpick between their tooth. “Which is when the demon wants to punish you.”
Muna bought its begin on the University of Southern California, the place McPherson spied Gavin biking by way of campus and murmured to their pal, “That girl is cool.” The feeling was mutual; they bonded, and Gavin launched McPherson to Maskin at a celebration. Almost instantly, they began making music, workshopping guitar chords between courses. Gavin sings lead vocals, performs guitar and helps produce; Maskin (guitar) and McPherson (guitar and keys) work on manufacturing.
Nearly a decade later, one a part of their songwriting course of is identical: Muna is aware of when to cease. The band likes to place in what McPherson calls “princess work”; they tinker with songs for a couple of hours every day, and give up simply when a observe begins to click on into place. “You try to retain the magic,” Maskin mentioned.
The group spends the remainder of its time hanging out — watching YouTube, doing bits. The simple intimacy, the way in which they end one another’s sentences or can talk with an eyebrow elevate, is central to their course of. It additionally takes work. Gavin and McPherson dated for years, and once they broke up, Maskin threatened to give up the band in the event that they didn’t go to remedy. (The trio has additionally gone to what they name “band therapy.”)
Recording will be traumatic. “I would record all my vocals alone in a closet if I could,” Gavin mentioned, after the band relayed that it needed to redo the track “Solid” 5 – 6 instances as a result of she stored cooing the lyric, “My baby’s so solid,” in a manner that gave the impression of, “My baby’s a salad.” But Muna has realized to hype each other up and never overwork the music.
“At some point, you’re going to have song dysmorphia where you’re like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to sound good, you guys,’” McPherson mentioned.
“Muna” is a shift for the band, a step additional into glitzy, shimmering pop. “At RCA, we were like, ‘We’re staying true to ourselves, we’re going to make interesting, indie-pop music, we’re not here to make hits,’” McPherson mentioned. “And then the moment we leave, we’re at an indie label and we’re like, ‘Here’s our poppiest song ever.’”
The small label is Saddest Factory Records, which is run by Bridgers, the indie-rock breakout star. The band refers to her as “Papa,” and he or she sings a giddy verse about straggling stoned by way of the aisles of CVS on “Silk Chiffon.”
Another indie powerhouse, Mitski, left fingerprints on the album, too. She had first met the band at a pageant. “We just started chatting, which is rare for me, because I’m very introverted and don’t just ‘start chatting’ with people,” Mitski wrote in an e mail. “It’s a testament to how friendly and kind they are.”
Mitski got here to McPherson and Maskin’s residence in Highland Park and made them tea whereas they listened to disco. (Their downstairs neighbor stored texting them to be quiet.) “You have no idea/the things I think about you when you aren’t here,” Gavin sings on “No Idea,” the steadily constructing track that emerged from that session. “Mitski is the sexiest songwriter that I know,” she mentioned.
Like most songs on the document, “No Idea” toys with the hole between notion and projection, the readability and confinement that include claiming a label. “She is not a mirror in which you reflect,” Gavin coos over a thrash of guitar on “Solid.” On the slower, Shania Twain-indebted “Kind of Girl,” she will get extra express: “I’m a girl who’s learning everything I say isn’t definitive,” Gavin sings.
The album oscillates between dance-ground anthems and lyrics about meditation, coruscating synths and twinges of twang. “The album is kind of disparate sonically, disparate in terms of what the songs are saying, but the connective tissue is self-definition and agency and identity and interrogating those things,” McPherson mentioned. “And also knowing that nothing is fixed.”
While the band’s circumstances have modified, Gavin isn’t letting go of its previous. “I don’t want this era to be, ‘Oh, we used to be one way, and now we’re another way, and everything’s great now,’” she mentioned. “We are who we are, but it’s the compassion we have for ourselves, the awareness we have.”
Earlier this month, the trio returned to “The Tonight Show,” and Gavin felt a number of the panic she had skilled when the band first performed there in 2016. The band members spent the cab journey to the resort after the taping processing their efficiency. They talked concerning the significance of doing the present, how Gavin was feeling, what they hoped the album may do for them, if it may assist them preserve making music for so long as doable “and not have as much existential stress as we have now,” McPherson mentioned.
The driver finally chimed in. “He said, ‘In my 20 years of driving, I’ve never heard people be so kind to each other,’” Gavin recalled. She and McPherson have been wedged onto a mattress of their resort, beaming at a laptop computer display; Maskin was in her room down the corridor, packing and peeling a banana. “It just felt like the cheesy thing where — it’s a feat to do these big moments, but I do think that, like, the bigger thing —.” She paused. “I’m such a cheese ball.”
“Do it!” McPherson shouted.
Gavin rolled her eyes. “I do think that the bigger feat is having these friendships with each other.”
All three went quiet for a second. Then they began guffawing, faintly after which furiously.
