Welcome to Muna’s Hottest Era Yet

A week before Muna dropped their first single in February for their latest album, they took a moment to check in with each other in the last moments of calm before the storm. Naomi McPherson and Josette “Jo” Maskin visited fellow bandmate Katie Gavin’s place in Los Angeles for a bonfire in her backyard—they all live about 10 minutes away from each other, anyway. It felt like a ritual. “We kind of just manifested what we are hoping for the album cycle,” Gavin explains now on Zoom from her house, her fellow Muna members joining from their respective homes.

So what are those hopes? “The goal always is for the music to touch people,” McPherson says. “As far as material goals, we really just want to tour the hell out of the album. We want to be able to grow the band and grow the audience, while still staying true to what our values are.”

Now that the album, Dancing on the Wall, is out today, we’re about to find out if their manifestation session worked. All signs point to yes: The 13-track LP is built on the trio’s signature take on pop—a little electronic, a little punk rock, a little ’80s—with addictive, high-energy melodies that are sure to carry us through the summer and beyond. The lyrics are raw and real, resulting in yearning queer anthems, reflections on what they call “horniness and heartache,” and, at times, political protest. The music makes you want to dance, but it also doesn’t ignore the harsh reality of the world we’re living in right now. For example, the pulsing track “Big Stick” critiques American imperialism, censorship, and war, while “Wannabeher,” with lyrics like “obsessed, step on my neck,” is their version of “Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill. “A lot of what Bikini Kill and Le Tigre did, that energy is really woven into our DNA,” Gavin says. “We owe so much to those people,” Gavin says.

Dancing on the Wall is Muna’s fourth album, following their acclaimed 2022 self-titled record, which included the sapphic anthem “Silk Chiffon,” featuring Phoebe Bridgers. Before that, came Saves the World in 2019 and their debut album, About U, in 2017. The trio has come a long way since they first met at the University of Southern California in 2013. And they’re showing no signs of slowing down. Along with the album, they also dropped a music video for “Eastside Girls,” starring a handful of their famous friends like Hannah Einbinder, Kate Berlant, and The Linda Lindas.

Muna also announced their biggest global tour to date, spanning cities in North America, the U.K., and Europe, and running from July through November. It’s called the “Gets So Hot Tour,” after the album’s opening track, although they previously joked on TikTok that it would be titled “The Midwest Princess Midnight Sun and the Eras Tour as Well—With Geese and the Grammys.” For copyright reasons among others, they went with another name, but at a recent music video screening in L.A., one Muna fan showed up in a T-shirt featuring the joke title. That’s how their fans are: in on the joke, chronically online, and wholeheartedly supportive. All it takes is one listen to understand their devotion.

ELLE caught up with Muna days before the Dancing on the Wall release to talk about their album inspirations, songwriting, and leather pants.

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This album arrives at such a good time because it’s right ahead of summer, and it opens with “It Gets So Hot.” It feels kismet. Did you intend for it to be a kind of energetic, summer, spicy record, or is the timing coincidental?

Naomi McPherson: It’s somewhat coincidental, but “It Gets So Hot” was written between spring and summer last year, and we’re now in that space this year, so it does feel apropos.

Josette Maskin: When we were talking about the record, “hot and sweaty” was definitely a part of the visual aesthetic, and the propulsive feeling of the record. It’s very much, “going to a warehouse party during the summer, you’re hot, sweaty, trying to figure out what’s next.” I do feel like it is a summer record, but maybe not in the way that a summer song is normally talked about. It’s like a summer record, but in hell’s club. Wait… Maybe a gay club in hell.

Katie Gavin: It’s a summer record, in the hottest summer on record, because of climate change.

Katie Gavin, Naomi McPherson, and Josette Maskin of Muna.

It also sets a tone for the record, being hot and sweaty, exploring desire, angst, and things like that. Where did your inspiration come from? Were there things that you observed from the last album cycle that you brought into this one?

KG: Because we got to tour the last album so much, I think this album was inspired by that. It seems pretty clear that we wanted all of these songs to feel really good live. There’s a lot of BPM [beats per minute] on this record, and it’s just a really high-energy album.

As a songwriter, I really do primarily draw from what I’m living through at the moment. It’s a very human experience to have certain lessons that you have to learn over and over. Actually, there’s a lot of the same themes that were on the first album, like obsession with unavailable people, that were re-explored here—but in a different way, because I’m a different person now. I grew enough that I thought I could fuck around again, and then this record is what happened when I tried.

JM: We wanted a record that felt here and now, and wasn’t escapist.

When it comes to songwriting, how does that work when there are three of you in the room? How does that back and forth play out in the studio?

NM: It can happen in a variety of different ways. Katie’s the primary songwriter in the band, so oftentimes she will bring an idea for a song to the group, and then we collaborate to get it to the finish line.

Another way is we’ll have title ideas or things that are intriguing, and figure out a way to write about those. Also, we go through our own archives and collage stuff together sometimes. A song might’ve had a really amazing melody, but we’re not obsessed with the lyrics, and then we’re writing something else.

These things happen both with other writers that we sometimes work with, and sometimes, on the very rare occasion, we will actually 100 percent come up with something in the room. Which is what happened with “It Gets So Hot” [with songwriter Daniel Tashian]. That was almost stream-of-consciousness, just vibing, until we were figuring it out.

What were some of the collage-y songs on this album?

NM: The melody from “Eastside Girls,” the chorus, came from another song.

KG: In “Dancing on the Wall,” the ice cream lyric in the pre-chorus was from a different song.

And “Mary Jane,” we wrote from a beat that Naomi had, and then we wrote part of a song with this amazing songwriter, Justin Tranter, but it wasn’t really quite a real song that we really related to, but we took some of the melodies from that. Once I realized, “Oh, the song should be about this,” we took some of those melodies and repurposed them to make “Mary Jane.” We’re really not precious. We really pull things apart and Frankenstein them.

Katie, you mentioned the theme of being obsessed with someone who’s emotionally unavailable, and I thought of the song, “On Call”: “I’m on call if you set yourself on fire.” Now that you and many of your fans are in your thirties, what is it like looking back at those life experiences after you’ve lived a little bit more?

KG: It’s like, things change, and they don’t change.

JM: Maybe you don’t fall as far down in the hole, but you’re still in the hole.

KG: When I was younger, I might’ve written a song just like “On Call,” but the difference is that I actually would’ve been living it for much longer, and I would’ve put myself in much worse situations for much longer. And now that I’m 33, I’m still writing the song about being horny for the asshole. But realistically, if the asshole texts me at midnight being like, “I set myself on fire,” I’m like, “That really sucks. I have to get up early in the morning, because I have to take my dog on a walk, so good luck with that.” You know what I mean? I’m writing the song about the feeling of it, but I’m not going to put myself in the middle of a situation that I know is going to cause me harm. I can’t. I’m not doing it anymore.

We’re grown up now.

KG: I mean, most of the time. I have a friend who says, “Sometimes you have to put your hand back into the bag of shit, just to check that it’s still shit.” And I do that sometimes. Up until now, it’s always still been shit. Maybe next time.

The “Eastside Girls” music video is out and the cast looks amazing. I was very excited about Hannah Einbinder; I’m a huge fan of Hacks.

KG: I love Hannah so much. Hannah’s been a friend who, honestly, has been really helpful while we were making this record. This record is very of and in this current political moment, and we’ve talked about—in a song like “Buzzkiller”—the importance of being able to talk to other people about burnout. Hannah’s someone in real life who has been a resource for me, and also a North Star in terms of continuing to show up, especially for Palestine.

Speaking of, you raised $20,000 for Pal Humanity with the song “Big Stick.” You’ve always stood up for what you believe in on stage, but tell me about bringing that more explicitly into the lyrics of your songs, and using music to raise resources for people who really need them.

NM: I think it’s interesting when people say, “‘Big Stick’ is such a huge left turn for the band,” because we wouldn’t think of it that way.

We wanted to do something with the song in advance of the release of the album, because it just didn’t feel right to put that song out, and not try to use it to fundraise for Palestine in particular. We’re very distressed by the things that are going on in our country and what our country is doing abroad. It just felt like lying to make an album without a song on it that addressed the elephant in the room, just like: We are living through insane times, and it can be really, really distressing.

Katie just wrote an excellent lyric, and we built a track around it, and we’re just very grateful that it worked.

I want to ask about your current style. I’m seeing a lot of leather pants, some red. How did these looks come to be?

JM: Leather pants to torture each of us in our own specific way.

NM: Specifically to psychologically torture Josette.

JM: When we did Lollapalooza, I used to wear these leather pants that were from the ’80s or whatever, and you’re sweating so much. The three of us used to all sleep together in a hotel room, and I remember, after the show, they were helping me take my pants off because they would get hermetically sealed to my skin. And the pants dyed my skin blue.

NM: Yeah, you had blue-green legs.

JM: Anyway, we like the aesthetic of this record.

The band leaned toward “a somewhat post-punky, almost goth, but also ’90s minimalist inspiration” for their style and aesthetic for this album, McPherson says.

NM: We wanted to create a visually cohesive world around the album. Red popped up as a color pretty early on for us. Obviously, it’s a color that has a lot of different emotional meanings and symbolic resonance, so that felt like a cool touchstone.

Our creative director, Justin [Moran], approached us with this idea of this red room based on the Kembra Pfahler apartment in New York City. It just felt so correct in a way that is hard to even put into words.

That pulled us into this somewhat post-punky, almost goth, but also ’90s minimalist inspiration for the clothes. It is a little rocker, kind of classic. We were just really psyched on the idea of making videos that had a similar look, through line, and feeling to them, to help bring the album outside of itself and expand further into another sensory experience.

KG: The aesthetic and the clothes, it’s a little bit of a flex. A lot of pop stars want to look like they’re in a band, but we are actually in a band. You know what I mean?

NM: Tea.

When you look back at the three of you meeting in college at USC, what were your first impressions of each other?

JM: Katie was addicted to wearing harem pants with sneaker heels. She had a bowl cut, and then one long tendril, and rode this child’s mountain bike, with her sneaker heels.

NM: The look of a true artist.

JM: And then, Naomi was wearing dress pants and a lot of polka dot button-down shirts and purple lipstick.

KG: And an ankh earring.

JM: I looked totally normal. [Laughs]

NM: Everyone did think Katie was so cool.

JM: She transferred from NYU, and just was doing the freakiest shit of all time. I thought you guys both were very cool. Naomi was the first gay person I met that I really saw myself in. We had a certain mutual understanding, I think, of just being stone-cold butch.

NM: We were futching it at the time, but we should have been butches. We were both too scared.

It was hard. It wasn’t cool to be gay yet. We literally lived through the time when it was still loser shit to be gay, and we were losers, so we survived.

KG: It was like we all experienced different [versions] of what “Wannabeher” is about. I think I was super drawn to both of them, and at the same time, it was super intertwined with sexuality, because… Well, first of all, I had a crush on Naomi, but I didn’t really realize it until we were fully in love. And Josette, there was this inevitability. I was like, “I don’t want to be gay, but I’m only interested in hanging out with these lesbians.”

One of the big ways that I related to both of them was that I was jealous of them. I was just like, “They’re so cool. They’re so attractive, and they’re so talented, and they have stuff figured out.”

This interview has been edited and condensed.