Luna Honey Interview: “Everything before leads to everything after”

In many ways, the story of Luna Honey mirrors the unruly racket they make.

Emerging from the shadows of Washington DC’s DIY scene in 2017, Luna Honey was formed by vocalist/ guitarist, Maura Pond, and bassist Levi Flack. Less than 12 months after their formation, they released their debut LP, Peace Will Grind You Down (which also featured baritone saxophonist, Madeline Billhimer, who would later leave band during the recording of Ballast.).

Following the recording of Peace Will Grind You Down, Pond and Flack met Philadelphia DIY staple, Benjamin Schurr of Ruah Nyxy Nyx and founder of BLIGHT.records, whose other band Br’er, played a show supporting Arto Lindsay.

The trio struck up a kinship, and from there Schurr became a permanent member prior to the release of Peace Will Grind You Down, featuring on the band’s next full-length release, Branches (2019), before moving back to his native Philadelphia with Flack following soon after.

Following the COVID pandemic, Pond was also on the move, back to her hometown of Richmond, VA to be closer to her parents with Schurr following from Philadelphia. During this period, Pond’s mother passed away after a long battle with cancer. The singer contemplated whether to end the band completely despite commuting back and forth between Richmond and Philadelphia to continue writing songs alongside her bandmates.

Since, Pond and Shurr have moved to Philadelphia, which is where Luna Honey have continued to break new ground with each release. Whilst released in 2021, the long dark shadow of Ballast was recorded in DC, while the brooding undercurrents of Parables (2022) opened another portal for the band to untangle new complexities. The same could be said of their excellent collaboration alongside Norman Westberg, Aftermath (2023).

It’s the tumultuous and transient energy of Luna Honey’s past which feeds into their sixth release and finest yet, Bound.

Both thematically and sonically, this is Luna Honey baring all. The instruments alone, illuminating the ambition of Bound, as organ pipe, pitch-shifted kazoo, vibraphone, mandolin, ukulele and synthesizers are just some of the instruments that feature throughout these songs. There are appearances from drummer, Dan Angel, and upright bassist, Roger Martinez, too, adding new inflections to the Lunda Honey sound.

Starting with the rhino-charge avant-rock of Kerosene. A blistering moodscape of tension and unease, it bleeds into the equally wonderful Vacuum Cleaner – an sharp observation that explores gender and technology, as Pond channels her inner Scott Walker. Her spiraling falsetto smashing against a maelstrom of discord from Schurr’s guitar in one of the best performances she has captured between the studio walls.

Barbie Cake follows a similar thread, as Pond’s voice soars above the ringing noise Shurr and Levi conjure up; the trio, framing the youthful vigour of Einsturzende ’Neubauten. That energy is guided through a different seam on Bound and Lead – hushed drones that feed into a ceremonial Swansian long-form aesthetic, as Levi’s lumbering bass lines underpin both tracks.

The tourism of sound continues with the brooding drone-rock of Snarge and trip-hop-infused Lemon, while the ghostly echoes of Gravity and Hriddel tap into the notion of Luna Honey’s self-professed declaration: “A tasting menu of bangers and lullabies”.

In fairness, Bound is more than that. It pulls back the curtains for a view of the world’s vicious undertow. Released just weeks after the presidential election horrors, Bound sees Luna Honey harnesses the turbulence this world is set for. A tour-de-force from Philadelphia’s underground, there hasn’t been a more dynamic album unearthed from it.

At the beginning of the month, Maura Pond took some time to answer our questions about the journey of Luna Honey so far.

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S13: The thing that’s always so interesting about Luna Honey is that each album sounds like a totally different band! Is one of your main goals to reinvent yourself with each release? 

Maura Pond: “I know the albums sound vastly different from each other, but to me, it’s all driven by the same internal compass. It’s like being a sculptor with a giant rock chipping away bit by bit to see what reveals itself. The albums are like different tools in the toolbox, but all chipping away at the same thing. There is absolutely no thought given to trying to ‘reinvent’ the band because the entire process is much more stream of consciousness than that. As I sit here, I feel a very strong pull about the next album we have yet to start writing, but I have no idea what it will sound like. I have the feeling in my gut and then there’s what happens when the three of us create the space to start making things. There’s a heavy dose of instinct and premonition driving the band forward.”

S13: The band has a history in Washington, Richmond and Philadelphia. How much do you think the influence of these cities comes through in your work?

MP: “When we were recording Ballast, I kept having these intense feelings of dread around being in DC and that there was something horrible and inescapable coming. I loved living in DC and was there 13 years, but things get weird there, like not being able to leave your building on your lunch break because someone is throwing Molotov cocktails in the intersection in protest and no one bats an eye other than to be annoyed they can’t make a sandwich run. Cleanliness and The Sky is Blue on Ballast are definitely DC songs. We finished recording that album right before the pandemic hit, and then the feeling of looming dread seemed logical.

“Richmond was a time of extreme isolation, so you hear less the sound of the city and more the product of spending too much time in your own head. Parables to me is touched with a bit of this absurd madness since we recorded many of the songs during that time. And Bound just wouldn’t sound the same without the large warehouse studio space and general appreciation of dust and grit and noise people have in Philadelphia.”

S13: From the outside at least, it’s as if Luna Honey is constantly working on new music. Was the process to Bound any different from your previous records? 

MP: “Bound is the first album we recorded a good amount of the tracks in the studio, so it was a different process from recording in the smaller spaces of our home studios. For the louder songs, we wanted to capture more of the feeling of what we sound like live, and to do that you do need a bigger space where you are free to crank the volume and hear it in a real room. We also waited to record a number of the songs until we’d performed them live and worked them out in front of an audience, which is the opposite of our normal process of writing them in the studio and then figuring out how to translate them for a live setting after the album is complete. We intentionally took our time this time, but it has felt unnaturally slow as a result. If we didn’t have jobs and responsibilities, we’d probably crank out an album every four months.”

S13: What was the key aspect you wanted to achieve with the album?

MP: “This is our first album we’ve been able to make since 2019 where all of us were living in the same city. Each of us might have a different answer for what we were hoping to achieve, but I think all of us were eager to get back to tracking songs in a way that feels like we’re a proper band, which is hard to do if you’re just emailing tracks back and forth or blocking out a few days a month to drive and get together.

“In general, we wanted to keep the production simpler. Songs like Kerosene or Vacuum Cleaner are noisy, but ultimately are pretty close to the instruments we play live. We did stray away, of course, there’s strings added on Snarge for instance and synth embellishments sprinkled throughout, but overall we exercised restraint more often. In the past, we may have continued to work the quieter songs like Gravity and added more instrumentation, but I wanted to retain the vulnerability of the space and not try to fill up every corner with sound just because we can. 

S13: Your collaboration with Norman Westberg really struck a chord with me and having spent time with Bound, it feels like Aftermath may have been a gateway that led you to this record. I’m not sure whether you’d agree with that?

MP: “Well, everything before leads to everything after. Between the pandemic, the difficulty of working long distance, and grieving the passing of my mom, I was considering ending Luna Honey literally the week Norman initially reached out. There is a very good chance if that collaboration hadn’t happened, Luna Honey might not exist anymore and so we wouldn’t have gotten around to recording Bound.

“Norman probably did unknowingly save the band, and it also was a very welcome beacon of light into an otherwise dark time. Musically, both Branches and Aftermath were challenges that pushed our arrangement and production skills. But I don’t think I’d necessarily have thought of Aftermath as a gateway to Bound on my own, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. We were circling back to where we’d been as a band before the pandemic but carrying with us what we’d learned on the albums in between, and Aftermath was definitely a part of that.”

S13: Speaking of gateways, Kerosene is a barnstorming song. Was it the first track written for the record and, when you wrote it, did you instantly think it would open the album?

MP: “For Kerosene, we’d been to see Psychic Graveyard at the First Unitarian Church in Philly that week and I came back feeling generally rowdy and did sit down with the intention to write a loud one. It wasn’t the first song written, but I did instantly know it was going to kick off whatever the album ended up being. I do keep a running list of tracks in a rough order of how they could be arranged into an album as songs are written, and it’s very satisfying when you stumble upon your album openers or closers.”

S13: Vacuum Cleaner is one of your most spirited vocal performances. What was the inspiration behind this song? 

MP: “We don’t usually sit on music for long periods of time, but the majority of the music for Vacuum Cleaner was actually recorded by Ben and Levi in 2018 after we’d finished working on Peace Will Grind You Down. I was the holdup here, I immediately knew how I wanted to sing it and what I wanted it to be about, but the lyrics I came up with kept missing the mark and the idea felt out there enough, I did let enough self-doubt enter the process that I just got in my head about it. So every album, we’d drag it out and I’d try another pass, but I’d scrap the lyrics and melody and leave it fermenting on the shelf for next time.

“It originally wasn’t supposed to be on Bound, but last minute while we had our sessions booked at Dan Angel’s studio, I thought maybe trying the vocals in that bigger space as opposed to just in the house might help unstick things. I wrote the lyrics a night or two before and went into the studio having vaguely timed out the cadence of how quickly to deliver the lines to make it match the length of the music, but not much sense of melody. We did one take and what you hear on the record is essentially improvised. But from the beginning I always heard it as being about household appliances and channelling a kind of mash-up of Nick Cave on The Friend Catcher with What’s Opera Doc?

“There’s anger behind the song, and I like to take my time with anger so you can approach it with some distance. It can feel really good to sing angry lyrics, but also can make it harder to clearly articulate complexities and I’m not trying to just feel good. 

“The vacuum cleaner made chores easier for women and gave us back time that led to other progress. But it didn’t challenge who was doing the cleaning – it didn’t actually fix the problem. It’s a metaphor for how we use technology and innovation to side-step problems, not just for gender issues but society more broadly. And those side-steps still make our lives better and easier but in some ways are part of just making a more comfortable cage. It’s not black and white.”

S13: Your music has always teetered on long-form hypnotics, and Bound and Lead really hone in out that rhythmic, tribal sound that reminds me of The Seer-era Swans. Was this a period you were thinking about when writing those songs?

MP: “Bound was originally written on a pitch-shifted kazoo going through a distorted karaoke amp, a ukulele, and a tambourine. I think Ben was away on tour with another project and I remember being home alone messing around and sending the demo off to him and Levi with the suggestion we have a Swans-y style production of the thing and thinking I was very funny. The kazoo and uke are still in there. But yes, 100 per cent for that one.

“Lead is probably more of an accidental similarity. It was written on piano initially, and I wrote the lyrics in the car on the way to band practice at Levi’s house while listening to that, then rushed in and we quickly hashed out our parts and recorded a demo. I had just learned about shot towers, which are the towers they used to pour lead down from to make bullets and was thinking about them and wrote the lyrics around the concept of them. Weird thing is we all went to a show together the next day and went for a night walk together and came across an actual historic shot tower, something I had not known existed a short time earlier. Lead is a hive mind song. I did come in with the kernel of an idea and the lyrics, but it really came out of all of us playing together and I don’t think we were aiming for a specific style.”

S13: Again, as each Luna Honey albums are so different from each other, does your process change? For instance, do you the lyrics always come before the music or vice versa? 

MP: “The lyrics are almost never first but are also rarely last. If I’m starting it, I might play a bass line or very simple beat and write to just that, then take it to the group to fill out. Or if Levi or Ben write something or we jam on something at practice, I’ll drive around in the car listening to it until the picture starts to form. Often, I scrap lyrics, but I’ll save them and reuse them when we’re working, and it suddenly seems like they might fit this other song. I prefer to work out melody and lyrics in the studio. As a general rule, I don’t like the guitar on there or too much synth when I am coming up with lyrics because it sounds too ‘done’ and I can’t access that subconscious space you pull ideas from as easily when I feel like I’m listening with my ears for arrangement instead of listening with my gut.” 

S13: Philadelphia seems like such a thriving space for DIY bands and culture. How important is it for a band like Luna Honey to be involved in a community like it?

MP:“You need to leave your house to learn things from other people, and to live a proper life as a human being. I mean, what, you’re going to get to the end of your life and think fondly on how many streams your Youtube video got? Forget it. And it’s really DIY or die, isn’t it? Everyone needs help and mainstream music doesn’t care about you. The only reason any of us are able to survive and keep making art is because of our fragile communities.”

S13: How much do you think Luna Honey reflects each band member’s personality? 

MP: “Ben’s loud and chaotic, which is present in his playing but in a refined, structured maelstrom way rather than as a free agent of destruction. Levi is laid back and able to chameleon himself to adapt to what’s around him and as the bass player, he’s holding down and grounding the songs. Me? I mean I think I’ll just say yes, my personality is in there. The songs are basically vessels of ID, so that would be hard to avoid. I don’t want to sing a song or live in a space that makes me feel weak.”

Bound is out tomorrow via BLIGHT.records. Purchase from Bandcamp.