INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
Luke Ivanovich
MOVING FORWARD MEANS LETTING EVERYTHING FALL APART — We hold onto relationships, careers, and routines long after they’ve stopped serving us, afraid of what might happen if we let go of the lives we’ve worked so hard to build. On PERFECT HOUSE, MX LONELY explores what it means to dismantle the structures we’ve outgrown rather than continue protecting them. The four-track EP, composed of reworked demos, captures the liminal space between holding on and starting over, finding liberation in the decision to finally let things burn.
Arriving as a companion to the band’s debut album, ALL MONSTERS, the EP turns the instinct to preserve what we know into an invitation to burn it down. Rather than fighting to keep the walls standing, MX LONELY asks what might happen if we finally let them burn. Where ALL MONSTERS searched dark corners, PERFECT HOUSE is a collection of love letters about a house burning down.
“PERFECT HOUSE was all about making these really brutalizing life decisions where you burn it down,” Rae Haas says to Luna. “You leave your job, you leave your relationship, you quit that thing that's killing you, and try to see what it's like to not try to protect this burning home.”
PERFECT HOUSE’s cover depicts buildings engulfed in flames, challenging the fantasy of a perfect home and the lengths we go to preserve one. For Haas, the image reflects how easily we become complacent in our surroundings and behaviors because we’re too invested in protecting the structures we’ve built.
PERFECT HOUSE features recent single “Ex Rae Punk (feat. Caitlin Starr)” with Haas as the song’s namesake, channeling breakup energy into a cathartic and pummeling track about the cyclical nature of meaningful relationships. They sing “I’ll look around for you” over riffs that build atop of each other, eventually reaching a layered maelstrom of guitars.
“March 16th (Feat. Caitlin Starr)” reflects on a complicated relationship with sugar rush highs and destructive lows, the band reckons with reality as they sing “We’ve been here before / We’ve gone alone / Now we’re back for more / I’m on my own.” “March 16th” explodes around its choruses, as harmonies reach total catharsis with vocals from Caitlin Starr. The video features an all-out party, complete with a black-and-white-clad mosh pit.
Haas hopes the record encourages listeners to trust themselves.
“I think that my biggest hope is that it allows people to trust their instincts,” Haas reveals. “Our instincts and our gut feelings are really bogged down by microplastics and capitalism and everything else that we have to deal with, but I think that so many people actually know what they need and what they want… This record is mostly about letting go and working with what the universe is giving you. I think if we all did that, maybe more revolution would be possible.”
PERFECT HOUSE follows the emotional excavation that defines MX LONELY’s debut album, ALL MONSTERS, released earlier this year via Julia’s War Recordings. The record confronts its monsters as manifestations of trauma and addictions.
Where ALL MONSTERS confronts the things that haunt us, PERFECT HOUSE feels like the next step: questioning the environments and patterns that allow those monsters to remain. Haas describes the EP as “the baby sister record to ALL MONSTERS,” a natural extension of the band’s ongoing exploration of the relationship between internal struggles and the worlds we create around them.
Renee Newman
LUNA: Welcome back and thank you for talking to Luna again. It's super exciting to have you back since the last time we talked about “Big Hips” and ALL MONSTERS. I would love to catch up and see how life has been treating you and what have you been up to since the last time we talked.
RAE: When I was putting out this EP, there were a lot of personal life changes that I'm trying to match with the growth of a band. ALL MONSTERS reached more people than I thought it ever would. We just put that out, and we took a month off of practicing and rehearsing, which is the longest MX Lonely break of all time, and it was a really good reset for us. We're back at it, heading back out on the road, touring with this and writing LP three. I do all my scenic painting stuff in between that. I build sets for commercials, film and TV. I've been painting a lot. My life is pretty pleasurable.
LUNA: Your debut album, ALL MONSTERS, arrived earlier this year through Julia’s War Recordings. How has it been like to sit with the album through the year and see listeners connect with it? Any takeaways?
RAE: When I was putting out ALL MONSTERS, I was in such a heavy spot, and I feel like it was hard for me to really feel the joy of releasing. I was pretty numb to it all, and that's the best thing about making art is getting to see where you were at and a window into what went down. I feel as hard as it was for me on a personal level, it's a marker in time.
The thought of PERFECT HOUSE was this idea that I think a lot of people are sitting in these situations where we feel a little complacent in changing our surroundings, changing our behaviors, and our habits because we're trying to protect this thing that is our home. PERFECT HOUSE is the baby sister record to ALL MONSTERS. You're never alone, which feels like a bumper sticker to say, but it's so true. I think everyone feels pretty dismal about the state of the world and the state of trying to meet the world's expectations, socially and financially. It's been really powerful and comforting for me, and I've felt like it's certainly shifted my life very deeply. I've uprooted a lot of things in my own life. I want to think that ALL MONSTERS is the thing for that.
LUNA: PERFECT HOUSE brings together four reworked demos that capture the tension of trying to hold everything together while falling apart. What initially connected these songs for you, and when did you realize they belonged together as an EP?
RAE: We have a shared Google Drive folder of just all of our demos, and sometimes we'll add to it. There were four that we brought into the space. They felt really fun. I met Caitlin Starr. She came to our show. She brought me back to a really cool house venue that she lives in called Mud House. It's such a gem, especially in New York, where places like that get shut down a lot. Mud House was the place that I found when I felt like my personal home and life structure was on fire. That spot had a lot to do with writing this record about looking for some sort of an escape from where you are.
I love Caitlin to death. It was so fun this whole summer. I did all the Speed Saves music videos. Caitlin is somebody that's reignited a love for art. I think, especially when you're making stuff, and it gets to this level of success where you're playing shows, and you're playing enough shows that you have to think about making money and making a living. Caitlin really brings this whimsy and takes time to experiment and find where the magic is in things and that is so that's so special to me.
LUNA: What was it like revisiting older material with the perspective you have today, and how did your relationship with these songs change over time?
RAE: “Ex Rae Punk” was the first song that Jake and I ever wrote, and I was going through a breakup, but it felt really fun to reimagine that song from the same perspective. I had just gone through a breakup, right as I met Jake, and then it's like going through another breakup after many years. It's seeing how different of a different place I'm in, but also, there's these threads and throughlines in your life. You leave yourself breadcrumbs, or I think a lot of songs sometimes predict the future. I'm really into songs that come from an ether. I wrote them for this moment and I have a lot of things like that. There are plenty of folders of samples and things that will be used one day and one day it'll make sense.
LUNA: Do you have a personal favorite song on PERFECT HOUSE — one that feels closest to your heart or most revealing of who MX Lonely is right now?
RAE: “March 16th” because that song is just a banger, but it's also so fun to bring in Caitlin as a new element. I think we're trying to do more stuff where we're writing in the room. Jake and I are both the primary songwriters, and we'll bring in structures. But that one came out in the session, which was cool. I would say that's definitely the heart. On a kinky, freaky level, “Twenty Seconds” is so sexy. If you're a fan of asphyxiation and a depressed being, it's definitely one that has been stuck in my head for years. I'm so happy that it's in the world.
LUNA: When listeners finish PERFECT HOUSE, what do you hope they take away from the project?
RAE: PERFECT HOUSE was all about making these really brutalizing life decisions where you burn it down. You leave your job, you leave your relationship, you quit that thing that's killing you, and try to see what it's like to not try to protect this burning home. I think that my biggest hope is that it allows people to trust their instincts. I think our instincts and our gut feelings are really bogged down by microplastics and capitalism and everything else that we have to deal with, but I think that so many people actually know what they need and what they want. I've just been trusting that. When you're truly aligned, things just make sense and they fall into place. It's hard to accept that at the moment. I think people want to push upstream in things, and this record is mostly about letting go and working with what the universe is giving you. I think if we all did that, maybe more revolution would be possible. We're going to France, and there's all these huge protests going on, and there's this wave of political uproar that's happening around the same time. I'm not saying it's because of this record, but I'm saying it's in the zeitgeist.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the upcoming year look like for you that you would like to share with Luna?
RAE: I'm feeling so blessed and tired. I have so many friendships in my life right now that are new, exciting and beautiful. This record marks me trying to reinvent myself. I feel like sometimes you have a lot of depression or you're a little isolated and you just think that's how it's supposed to be. As soon as I let go and followed what my gut instincts were, and what I followed, the universe was leading me to. Things really fell into place, so I'm feeling happy. I'm feeling tired. I'm feeling super unpacked for Europe.
Once we get back, I'm trying to move into a new house, so hopefully I will have a new apartment in December. I'm trying to mostly hibernate and work on some new music. I'd like to put out some solo stuff, so that might happen, and then also LP three stuff. I might go into a little winter hibernation, do a lot of experimentation, do a lot of writing, try to get real freaky with some theremins, get real freaky with some samplers. I'm trying to take everything that I'm doing and bring it into the next level of sampling things that are real and in my world, which is something that I really love as an art practice that I haven't done as much as I'd like to.
Luke Ivanovich
