MUNA on "Dancing On the Wall": We’re "Trojan Horsing Sad Lesbian Music Into the Gay Club"

From the start of Dancing On the Wall (out today via Saddest Factory Records), the LA-based band’s fourth studio album drops listeners into a sweaty warehouse of queer power pop filed with heartbreak and lust. And it only accelerates from there, hardly letting up until the closer “Buzzkiller” — save for two interludes that serve as brief intermissions across the albums 40 minutes.

“This record is super propulsive. We want you to be able to digest everything,” says Josette Maskin, noting that the first break comes before the politically charged “Big Stick.” “You need a moment to take it in, like what has occurred and what is about to occur. We use any interlude to give the listener a break from the information.”

The album is a departure from the delicate strumming of “Silk Chiffon,” the Phoebe Bridgers’ collaboration that put the band on the mainstream map. The song – along with MUNA’s triumphant self-titled third album that welded ballads, dance hits and a little bit of country together with unapologetically queer force – multiplied its fanbase and placed MUNA in front of massive audiences as an opening act for Kacey Musgraves, Lorde and Taylor Swift.

Instead of attempting to recreate the intangible alchemy of “Silk Chiffon,” MUNA doubled down on the sound that launched the band, what Katie Gavin calls “MUNA’s actual DNA.”

“There is an element of all three of us, where we all have a part that’s a little bit like the rebel artist spirit. There’s an urge to defy understanding. There’s an urge to be like, ‘you don’t know the whole story,’” Gavin tells Billboard . “That led to this impulse of like, we need to go back to our roots instead of leaning into, ‘Oh, you guys like “Silk Chiffon?” We’ll make 10 “Silk Chiffons.”‘”

“There is a reality in which, if you love ‘Silk Chiffon’ and you don’t know any of our other music, you might not like our first album. And that’s fine. There is a world in which that song could pull you into the other stuff in our catalog or it could be the only song of ours that you like, which is totally fine,” says Naomi McPherson. “We’re not complaining about having a popular song that people like, but we wanted to hone the band sound on this album.”

From the first track, “It Gets So Hot,” this album takes off and doesn’t relent until the end. Was the consistent up-tempo intentional?

Josette Maskin: We’ve been a touring band for forever, since our inception. We feel like songs really have a use in how they feel in the body that could be some sort of physical release. So, it was definitely intentional. Push the BPM [beats per minute] and make things feel good. You get reinforced in the show. People respond differently to a faster BPM than they do a slow one. And it is where we are at and what we’re interested in.

Naomi McPherson: It was also a reaction to a little bit to Katie having done a solo record of folky stuff. So for this one, we were like, “okay, we’re not gonna have a country ballad. We’re gonna push further into the dance world,” which we’ve always straddled. We wanted to push it hard towards more up tempo dance inspired music.

Hearing that you record with live in mind makes sense given the undeniable electricity of a MUNA show.

Katie Gavin: We’re so lucky with that because it’s really not us. At a certain point, it’s the fans. They are coming to shows, knowing every word of every song and really performing to us to the same extent we’re performing to them. It creates such a special atmosphere. A band can be giving 110%, but if the crowd isn’t going just as hard…we can’t create that feeling on our own.

The first single “Dancing On the Wall” really delivered on that signature MUNA sound of ‘80s electro pop with a handful of modern embellishments.

Maskin : It felt like the most MUNA song that we’ve ever actually made. More than it being any of our favorite songs, which I think it’s Katie’s favorite song, but it’s the most MUNA thing we’ve ever done. So, I guess that is the sound.

McPherson : Emotional, yearning synth pop is where we shine.

Historically, a lot of mainstream music for women and non-binary queer people has been more on the folk, singer-songwriter, softer side. Where do you find inspiration in queer musical ancestry?

Gavin: I’ve never really thought about it in that way but it’s helpful in terms of conceptualizing the way in which we as a band straddle a few sounds and cultures. There’s always a bit of tension there because we have the heart and spirit of Tegan and Sara and the Indigo Girls, but we have the BPM and the energy of…one of my queer ancestors is that ‘80s band Erasure. It was a Queenie guy and he made pop sounding music but it is sad. We’re Trojan Horsing the sad lesbian music into the gay club.

It doesn’t feel totally natural to us to make music that is singularly fun and joyful. Or if we are, it is in the same way that anybody who lives in struggle needs to make something that’s fun and joyful. It’s out of necessity. There’s always going to be layers to it.

The aesthetics for this album have been warehouses with red lights and a bit of Flashdance . What was the inspiration for these looks, especially for the music videos?

McPherson : We went into this cycle specifically with the hope of being able to create a world for these songs to live in that felt and feels cohesive and like an extension of the music. We were really attracted to the idea of creating this slightly surreal, heightened, somewhat abstract version of the warehouse club city thing. Shooting the videos in 16mm feels a bit like an extension of what we were attempting to do with the music, which was create this gritty but beautiful universe that had some texture to it. Red came to mind pretty early on and it ended up taking shape across the record in different ways as a very emotional color.

Gavin: We like to portray queer power in some sort of way. And I like that when we sent this album to our drummer, Sarab [Singh], he texted us being like, “Every song feels like a f–ing punch to the gut.” It’s quite a robust record. We wanted to create a powerful and strong image.

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/muna-dancing-on-the-wall-album-interview-1236242830/)._