Are we Home By Now? Well Muna is, hear their latest here!
Photo Credit: Isaac Schneider
Los Angeles-based trio MUNA are back in the US after a buzz filled trip to the UK which included very sold out performances at The Garage and Rough Trade East as well as a packed performance at The Great Escape, living up the hype with their energetic and mesmerizing live show. Now with less than a month before their highly anticipated and career defining self-titled album is out into the world, MUNA are giving us another reason to be excited.
MUNA’s Katie Gavin spoke of the new song “Home By Now”, saying, "Home By Now is the song on the record that we feel might be closest to our first album in that it’s a dance song with brutal lyrics and an emo bridge. It’s a breakup song that’s a bit more full of longing and doubt than Anything But Me. While a lot of this album does seem to be about trusting my instincts, this song acknowledges the pain of not knowing if I left a relationship that I was meant to be in."
Tour Dates
June 5 - West Hollywood, CA - OUTLOUD Raising Voices Music Festival at WeHo Pride
June 14 - Brooklyn, NY - Prospect Park Bandshell (supporting Phoebe Bridgers)
June 15 Brooklyn, NY - Prospect Park Bandshell (supporting Phoebe Bridgers)
June 16 - Queens, NY - Forest Hills Stadium (supporting Phoebe Bridgers)
July 29 - Chicago, IL - Lollapalooza
July 30 - Cleveland, OH - Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
August 2 - Columbus, OH - Newport Music Hall
August 3 - Pittsburgh, PA - Mr. Smalls Theater
August 5- Louisville, KY - Headliners
August 6 - St. Louis, MO - Delmar Hall
August 7 - St Charles, IA - Hinterland Music Festival
August 8 - Minneapolis, MN - First Ave (UPSIZED FROM FINE LINE DUE TO DEMAND)
August 11 - Boise, ID - Knitting Factory
August 12 - Seattle, WA - Day In Day Out Festival
August 13 - Portland, OR - Wonder Ballroom (SOLD OUT)
August 15 - San Diego, CA - Observatory Northpark (SOLD OUT)
September 18 - Boston, MA - Royale (2nd SHOW ADDED - SOLD OUT)
September 19 - Boston, MA - Royale (SOLD OUT)
September 20 - Washington, DC - 9:30 Club (SOLD OUT)
September 23 - Nashville, TN - Marathon Music Works
September 24 - Atlanta, GA - Masquerade - Heaven
September 26 - Washington DC - 9:30 Club (2nd SHOW ADDED - SOLD OUT)
September 27 - Toronto, ON - Phoenix Theater (SOLD OUT)
September 28 - Philadelphia, PA - Fillmore (UPSIZED FROM THE FOUNDRY DUE TO DEMAND)
September 30 - New York, NY - Irving Plaza (SOLD OUT)
October 1 - New York, NY - Irving Plaza (2nd SHOW ADDED - SOLD OUT)
October 2 - New York, NY - Irving Plaza (3rd SHOW ADDED - SOLD OUT)
October 4 - Detroit, MI - The Majestic Theater
October 6 - Kansas City, MO - The Truman
October 10 - Houston, TX - House of Blues
October 11 - Dallas, TX - The Echo Lounge & Music Hall
October 16 - Denver, CO - Gothic Theater
October 17 - Salt Lake City, UT - The Depot
October 19 - Phoenix, AZ - The Van Buren
October 23 - San Francisco, CA - The Fillmore (SOLD OUT)
October 24 - San Francisco, CA - The Fillmore (2nd SHOW ADDED)
October 25 - Los Angeles, CA - The Wiltern (SOLD OUT)
October 26 - Los Angeles, CA - The Wiltern (2nd SHOW ADDED)
November 10 - London, UK - Roundhouse
November 11 - Brighton, UK - Chalk
November 13 - Bristol, UK - O2 Academy
November 15 - Glasgow, UK - SWG3 TV Studio
November 16 - Edinburgh, UK - Liquid Room
November 17 - Newcastle, UK - University Union
November 18 - Leeds, UK - Stylus
November 20 - Birmingham, UK - O2 Institute 2
November 21 - Manchester, UK - Albert Hall
Previous singles like “Silk Chiffon” and “Anything But Me” have fans ready for the next new, exciting chapter but it was “Kind Of Girl,” released last month, that well and truly signaled MUNA had arrived. The song received rave reviews for it’s raw, emotional honesty and leaves no doubt, MUNA is the band’s masterpiece.
The band, comprised of Katie Gavin (she/they), Naomi McPherson (they/them), and Josette Maskin (she/they) will set out on a massive North American tour this summer and will also open for Phoebe Bridgers in NYC for shows at Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn on June 14 & 15 and Forest Hills Stadium in Queens on June 16. MUNA has also announced a run of UK dates this November; see below for a full rundown.
More on MUNA….
MUNA is magic. What other band could have stamped the forsaken year of 2021 with spangles and pom-poms — made you sing (and maybe even believe) that “Life’s so fun, life’s so fun,” during what may well have been the most uneasy stretch of your life? “Silk Chiffon,” MUNA’s instant-classic cult smash, featuring the band’s new label head Phoebe Bridgers, hit the gray skies of the pandemic’s year-and-a-half mark like a double rainbow. Pitchfork called it a “swirl of stomach butterflies,” NPR a “queerworm,” Rolling Stone “one of the year’s sweetest melodies, radiating the kind of pure pop bliss so many bands go for but almost never get this right.” For Naomi McPherson, MUNA’s guitarist and producer, it was a “song for kids to have their first gay kiss to.” And several thousand unhinged Twitter and TikTok memes bloomed.
Katie Gavin, MUNA’s lead singer and songwriter, wrote “Silk Chiffon” right after finishing the band’s 2019 album, Saves the World. That was an LP whose lead single began “So I heard the bad news/ Nobody likes me and I’m gonna die alone in my bedroom/ Looking at strangers on my telephone,” and which ended with a hypnotic, self-searching confession about failure and consolation. Since the beginning of their career, MUNA has embraced pain as a bedrock of longing, a center of radical truth, a part of growing up, and an inherent factor of marginalized experience — the band’s members belong to queer and minority communities, and play for these fellow-travelers above all. But in “Silk Chiffon,” there was just longing, and it was blissfully requited at that. “It’s kind of a smooth-brain song,” Gavin says. “Saves the World was therapy on a record, and I was starting to see changes in my life, more moments of joy. It’s a big deal that someone like me could write that smooth!” What makes the confetti-gun refrain of “Silk Chiffon” so potent, though, is the underlying sense that the band understands exactly what has to be suppressed, or reckoned with, in order to sing it. “We are three of the most depressed people you could ever come into contact with, depending on the day,” McPherson said, with a smile.
Gavin, McPherson, and Josette Maskin, MUNA’s guitarist, are coming up on ten years of friendship. They began making music together in college, at USC, and released an early hit in the 2017 single “I Know a Place,” a pent-up invocation of LGBTQ sanctuary and transcendence. Now in their late twenties, the trio has become something more like family. They spent much of the early pandemic as a pod, showing up for each other and for MUNA — a project that at this point feels bigger than them — even when they weren’t sure about anything regarding the future. They’d been dropped by RCA, and there was little in terms of income, no adrenaline to work off of, no live shows with audiences reminding them of the succor their songs provide. They asked each other: Is this career even feasible in this new reality? Can we find a way to be self-motivated, to be fulfilled intrinsically? For months, they surrendered to this confusion, to the reality of being humbled by change. “You have to let things fall apart,” Gavin said. “And it was only possible because of this tremendous trust. I have so few relationships in my life where I have the kind of trust that I do with Naomi and Jo — where I can trust that there’s a higher purpose, that we can work through all the boundaries and compromises and mess that comes with long-term relationships, and then return to form.”
MUNA, the band’s self-titled third album, is more than a return. The band’s period of uncertainty and open questioning burned everything away, leaving a feat of an album — the forceful, deliberate, dimensional output of a band who has nothing to prove to anyone except themselves. The synth on “What I Want” scintillates like a Robyn dance-floor anthem; “Anything But Me,” galloping in 12/8, gives off Shania Twain in eighties neon; “Kind of Girl,” with its soaring, plaintive The Chicks chorus, begs to be sung at max volume with your best friends. MUNA is working the source code of pop that pulls at your heartstrings; the album is full of longing and revelation and hard-won freedom. They’d made their first album themselves, with free plugins, in a home studio; they’d made the second one in proper sessions with co-producers, thinking they ought to professionalize. With MUNA, they did it all by themselves again, with newfound creative assurance and technical ability — in terms of McPherson and Maskin’s arrangements and production as well as Gavin’s songwriting, which is as propulsive as ever, but here opens up into new moments of perspective and grace.
“What ultimately keeps us together,” Maskin said, “is knowing that someone’s going to hear each one of these songs and use it to make a change they need in their life. That people are going to feel a kind of catharsis, even if it’s a catharsis that I might never have known myself, because I’m fucked up.” McPherson added, “I hope this album helps people connect to each other the way that we, in MUNA, have learned to connect to each other.” And that’s what MUNA does, in the end: it carves out a space in the middle of whatever existential muck you’re doing the everyday dog-paddle through and transports you, suddenly — you who’ve come to music looking for an answer you can’t find anywhere else — into a room where everything is possible, where the disco ball’s never stopped throwing sparkles on the walls, where you can sweat and cry and lie down on the floor and make out with whoever, where vulnerability in the presence of those who love you can make you feel momentarily bulletproof and self-consciousness only sharpens the swell of joy.
