MUNA - Muna LP

Label: Saddest Factory / Dead Oceans

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.