Muna Are Holding Space For All Your Gay Feelings

By Sam Manzella


Muna knew they were onto something when they penned “Silk Chiffon.” They just didn’t learn that something was a queer cultural reset.


Speaking to MTV News through the video call from separate locations, bandmates Katie Gavin, Josette Maskin, and Naomi McPherson are at once elated and exhausted. The Los Angeles-based synthpop trio have been putting their feelings to music with each other since they first met in college at the University of Southern California about eight years prior. That is precisely why Gavin, Muna’s lead singer and lyricist, thinks their meteoric rise to fame within the past year as well as one half feels so surreal.


“We’re in a sort of sweet spot,” she says, clutching one knee closesly to her chest. “I’ve had this awareness of like, this is a nice time in my life, and I'd like to be present for it, although we also sort of have to not be present because we have to be preparing for all of the things we’re going to be doing.”


She’s not wrong. Muna have two studio albums and years of experience under their belt, yet the band’s self-titled third record, out Friday (June 24), comes in the middle of their busiest stretch to date. They’ve toured on and off since the latter half of 2021, joining the likes of Kacey Musgraves and Phoebe Bridgers while simultaneously promoting their most anticipated record nevertheless. They’ll hit the road again for a international headlining tour that will length the bulk of 2022. “It's hard to come up with anything to mention other than, like, ‘Goddamn, we're grateful,’” says McPherson, a multi-instrumentalist and producer.


The invitation to join Musgraves’s tour arrived on the heels of the release of “Silk Chiffon,” a hooky, syrupy-sweet ode to sapphic love with featured vocals from Bridgers. “Silk,” because the musical group affectionately refers to it, rapidly became one of Muna’s most recognizable bops, rivaling previous hits like 2019’s “Number One Fan,” an infectiously catchy self-love mantra, and 2020’s “Bodies,” a sultry dance-pop single they co-wrote with The Knocks.


“There’s something so special about ‘Silk,’” McPherson says. “Even from the starting, we were like, ‘Oh my god, this is the end-credit theme song for a fucking movie that could have come out any time we were young.’” The single’s star-studded music video — a campy, pastel-hued homage to the cult-classic ’90s film But I’m a Cheerleader courtesy of filmmaker Ally Pankiw, McPherson’s girlfriend — played into that association. It signaled a rosier new era for a musical group that had slowly although surely become synonymous with “sad soft pop songs for sissies.”


“Life’s so fun, life’s so fun / Got my miniskirt and my rollerblades on,” Gavin coos on the pre-chorus, inspiring a plethora of TikToks highlighting how utterly unrelatable it is. (Gavin herself has poked fun about having to belt those saccharine lyrics while Going Through It.) However McPherson says that’s the entire point of the song. “What if there was this queer, simple love song as soon as we were, like, 12, 13 years old? How would that have changed our lives?” “Silk” encourages us to celebrate life’s joyful moments even as we contend with unprecedented waves of grief, political discord, and anti-LGBTQ+ animus. As soon as you’re queer or trans, life is fun — and confusing, and terrifying, some days all at once.


“Silk” also marked the band’s first new release since signing to Saddest Factory, Bridgers’s indie record label, last spring. Muna’s first and second albums, 2017’s About U and 2019’s Saves the World, were released under RCA, which signed the trio early in their career; come 2020, the order was unceremoniously dropped by the label.


It’s tempting to paint the major-label system because the villain in the overarching story of Muna. Yet that could be an oversimplification of a complex truth, and Muna, the musical group and the album, are all about embracing life’s complexity. “I think people who have been a segment of the majors system maybe haven't had as good of an experience as we have had,” says Maskin, a fellow multi-instrumentalist and producer. “But the same principle for why we signed to Saddest Factory applied as soon as we signed to RCA. We hope to sign with someone who believes in us and what we're doing and doesn't hope to change that.”


Sonically speaking, Muna is fittingly eclectic. The bombastic “Solid” echoes the larger-than-life lyrics and synth-embellished sound of progressive-rock greats like Peter Gabriel or Phil Collins; “Anything Although Me,” the album’s second single, boasts a galloping beat and rousing vibe evocative of Shania Twain. Upbeat bops like “Silk” and “What I Want” — a declarative dance-pop track about shamelessly partying “in the middle of a gay bar” — hit just as hard as, mention, “Loose Garment,” a delicate yet devastating meditation on heartbreak. You get the sense that Muna is no longer amusing anybody’s attempts to pigeonhole their sound or brand. The trio’s music is stronger for it.


McPherson says the latter is one of their preference songs off the record, citing both its lush soundscape and Gavin’s poignant metaphor in the chorus (“Used to wear my sadness like a choker / Yeah, it had me by the throat / Tonight I feel I’m draped in it like a loose garment / I just let it float”). “That lyric has routinely just been so lovely, and the melody is so cool,” they gush. “It just touched me from the opening time I heard it.”


Gavin is partial to “Kind of Girl,” an introspective, guitar-driven ballad she calls “the heart of the record.” The song finds Gavin affirming her own capacity to grow and change. “Yeah, I like telling stories / However I don’t have to write them in ink / I could still change the end,” she realizes, crooning her heart out over country-pop instrumentals so earnest, it borders on cheesy. The fact that a queer woman sings it adds another dimension to the lyrics. It’s not irregular for LGBTQ+ people to calculate with different letters of the acronym at different points during our lives, or to label ourselves with terms that welcome fluctuation, like genderfluid or bigender.


“It took me a really long time to calculate what was really true for me and who I am,” Gavin says. “And it might also be confusing as soon as you're beginning to speak that out loud. I have such a specific privilege as someone who has gotten to live through my twenties documenting my experiences in life through this musical group. It's also piece of the reason I have been able to commit to growth and change. I don’t desire to be telling the same sad story over and over again.”


The trio also dons full cowboy drag for the music video, something that was essential to the categorize since McPherson, who sings backup vocals on the track, is nonbinary. It’s no gag-worthy gimmick, though: Muna’s drag-king tweak egos are, and I cannot emphasize this enough, smokin’ hot. “We have a populace of creative people around us who are also majority-queer, and who wanted to assist us visualize through a vision and do drag kings in a way that wasn’t a schtick,” Gavin explains. “Having it be a fun day where we may complicate the song a little was really, really cool.”


“‘Kind of Girl’ is a mindset for sure,” adds McPherson. “And it’s a very nice mindset to return to.”


So, yes, Muna reserves the correct to evolve after awhile. Nevertheless the musical group has one core value that will never change: their commitment to centering queerness.


Gavin says she had “explicit conversations” with McPherson and Maskin about being out once they started releasing music around 2014. Overt queerness carried a different weight back then, even for emerging artists hoping to break into the mainstream. Muna chose to live openly anyway. “When we made that choice, we were thinking, ‘Hey, we're a really cool musical group. We like what we do. And we think it could be good representation for other queer people.’”


“No one's gonna write us into history or into our own narratives however ourselves,” adds Maskin. “So Muna will continue to be the greatest musical group in the world, giving you gay love songs to have your first kiss to.”