Written by Manon Bushong

I habitually watch shows from the back of the venue. Partially, because I am six foot three and a bit self-conscious about my predisposition for view obstruction, and partially, because I believe it’s the best place to absorb the crowd. There is an interesting dichotomy between the nature of music consumption as a solo act and as a live experience; throughout the day, I watch people with headphones wedge themselves between strangers on a train car, each tuned into their own self-serving listening campaign. Of course, there is a beauty to listening alone, and to the way it can help us make sense of our own minds – but I think music is at its most invigorating when you can experience the vulnerability of someone else’s art alongside a stranger. I love standing in the back as if the crowd in front of me is half of the event, and I love witnessing the collective catharsis that live music can generate. However, sometimes a set moves me enough that I subconsciously detach from the corner, absorbing the energy of the crowd from within it instead of observing with my back velcroed to the sound booth. I assume this would have been the case at the release show for MX Lonely’s “Beauty Lasts for Never”, although I will never truly know. I got stuck crammed next to the stage on my way back from outside, standing an arms distance from the stage (and unfettered by any unease that the proximity would otherwise trigger within me) at what was undoubtedly my favorite set of 2024.

I wrote that last year. It was shortly after I saw MX Lonely at Trans-Pecos on November 23rd, and I stashed it in a Google Drive folder of music thoughts that have never seen the light of day. November 23rd of this year, I spoke to MX Lonely on a cocktail of video chat platforms – using up my thirty free Zoom minutes before continuing our conversation about their forthcoming record via Google Meet. I wanted to reference my own stockpiled captivation; not merely out of the coincidental November 23rd novelty of it all (and certainly not because I was itching to leak an entry from my digital diary), but because throughout my conversation with the band, I was reminded of those feelings. Of how, for thirty or so minutes, I somehow forgot I was an uncomfortable person. Or at least, I forgot to let that self-assessment plague me. The most powerful thing music can do is alleviate us from ourselves – to siphon the weight of our own insecurities and anxieties, to help us feel less alone, or to even just help us feel anything at all; perhaps by thwarting into states of numbness and pulling us out of emotional auto-pilot. While any band can easily declare that they hold these ethos and intentions, from every experience I have had at their sets, I can attest that MX Lonely truly sees them through. “The band is named after my own little sleep paralysis demon. I would say that the monster that is most prevalent for me is loneliness and isolation and feeling disconnected, and I like to think that’s who we make music for, people who feel like that”, Rae Haas tells me. “To be able to have community and space for people who all relate to those themes is so incredibly rewarding. Selfishly, because that’s what I need, and unselfishly because it is bringing all these people together. You realize there is space in music for everybody.” 

Brooklyn-based MX Lonely consists of Rae (synth/vocals), Jake Harms (guitar/vocals), Gabe Garman (bass), and a cycling of drummers over the years. They started the project about five years ago, and, in the fashion of most great bands, initially conceived it as a “for fun” endeavor. They began by learning a solo record Jake had released under the project HARMS, telling me the band did not come to fruition until a year or so later – around the time they collaboratively wrote “There’s Something About You That I Don’t Believe In” (which prompted a sort of “oh shit…” moment) and began playing small shows around New York. 

Now, they self-identify as “Loud as Fuck”, which I would say is pretty accurate, though I find it necessary to emphasize that their noise never poses as inadvertent. There is something soft tucked neatly within MX Lonely’s propensity for swelled volume, as if the project is begging to subvert any predisposed notions you hold about music that is “Loud as Fuck”. They pull tunings from Elliot Smith, they take stage presence inspiration from drag artists, they harvest emotional delicacy from the subdued depths of their own minds. “I feel like we all [try to] take emotional music and make it pretty heavy and visceral and more of a shared experience. I think music this heavy and personal generally becomes something that is folky or more insular.” Rae explains. 

MX Lonely’s emphasis on the potentials of live music and the shared experience it can offer is equally potent in their recorded music as it was in my gushy Trans-Pecos introductory anecdote. They are set to release All Monsters early next year, and while you cannot listen to it in full until February, every single track had been experienced by a crowd prior to recording. “I think it was nice we got to road test it, and also just focus on preserving what we consider to be an authentic, ‘band in a room’ sound,” Jake explains of the songs, of which all center the live experience of MX Lonely. “It’s essentially a magnified version of what the songs sound like when we play them all together.”

The result is not only a magnified version of what MX Lonely sounds like live, but a concentrated punch of the catharsis their live shows in packaged form. All Monsters is equal parts relentless and rewarding; it starts on a fervent note and maintains its intensity until the last second of hypnotic final track, “Whispers in the Fog”. Although the record is an undoubtedly charged front to back listen, it’s also far from monotonous, serving as a canvas for MX Lonely to explore various routes of heavier songwriting that all lead to the same destination (cascading emotional purge). Some tracks are cushioned by velvety, fuzzed out soundscapes, while others take on a drier form, owning their jagged edges and ever so slightly scalding you with them. 

“I think it should feel cathartic in some way, but maybe not necessarily good while it’s happening, sort of like shadow work.” Rae notes.  “A lot of people have described some of the songs on All Monsters as being racked with anxiety, sort of like this fist clenching thing that lets go.” 

The record dismantles a lot of notions surrounding monsters, which serve as an all encompassing idea for the various antagonists that besiege our day-to-day. Some are external, but most come from within; they range from anxiety and addiction to loneliness and isolation, and they are far more daunting than any under-the-bed creature you may have conceptualized as a child. These are themes MX Lonely has explored before – found in the dysphoric haunting of “Too Many Pwr Cords” on their 2024 EP SPIT, and amidst the heartbreaking pleas of “Paper Cranes” on their 2022 record Cadonia, but on All Monsters, it feels as though they have achieved a resolution. Not in an overt way, you can’t expect MX Lonely to feed you secrets to fulfillment on a silver spoon of distortion lathered in magnetic bass lines and frothy synths. Rather, it feels as though the band have eradicated their monsters by merely acknowledging that they exist. Instead of running or attempting to suppress them, on All Monsters, MX Lonely confronts their own fears and vices head on; armed with some of their most cunning and dynamic songs yet and liberating years of shame in a thirty-seven minute, total adrenaline rush of a record. 

We recently spoke to MX Lonely about their relationship to live music, building their own studio, and All Monsters, out February 20th via Julia’s War. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Manon: Jake – I read that you wrote “Blue Ridge Mtns” in high school, and put it away because it felt too vulnerable at the time. Over the last five years, how have you grown MX Lonely, not only as a project, but as a safe creative space and collaborative outlet where you are able to revisit old material or chapters that you may not have been comfortable doing on your own? 

Jake: I feel like the band is definitely a pretty safe space for me to try ideas out, and there is a lot more reception for bringing in more vulnerable, emotional material than I have had in previous projects. Nobody has ever made fun of me for bringing an idea that was too “weenie”, I mean sometimes Gabe will be like “that’s pretty emo”… 

Gabe: Yeah, but we know how to work it. 

Rae: I feel like that was from the start. Everyone’s pretty open, everyone writes on the records, everybody brings in songs and ideas and as well as being critical and editing a lot, we try to be receptive to the vulnerability in the songwriting. 

Manon: When you’re writing and recording, do you think about playing the songs live a lot? Is considering that experience very front of mind?

Jake: I would say so,  I mean this album was cool because there were demos that existed since probably 2022, 2023, that were part of the crop of demos that became SPIT. But then we were touring really extensively for the first time, so we got the opportunity to play all of these songs, some of them many times prior to recording. Every song on the record was played live on those tours, and we got to see how people reacted to them. I don’t know how much it necessarily changed the structure, but it does change how you think about them. 

Gabe: I definitely feel like when we were making the record, there was a lot more of the thought of “I don’t know how that will work live”, and that may have affected what we did. Whereas when you are just making music on the computer for a very long time, you might think about that less. Both SPIT and this record were very live focused. The next record might be like that, or it might not. 

Manon: I also saw you recorded live versions of several of the songs, and you just put out one for “Big Hips”. Was that important too, to have maybe an alternate live version accessible at the same time as some of the songs and just having that out right away, or that was just maybe more for fun?

Rae: I think both. I think one day we would like to do an Audiotree or a KEXP, but until that opportunity happens for us, we figured we would just do it ourselves.  I guess it was in lieu of, I don’t know, making TikTok videos or something stupid. We are all builders and do a lot of stuff in house so I guess that was our version of making a TikTok dance for “Big Hips”. 

Manon: You guys also just built your own studio too, right? I would love to hear about that and your relationship to DIY as a band. 

Rae: Gabe, you wanna lead on building the studio? 

Gabe: I don’t know if this will make sense, but I feel like because of who we are as people, we are always a step behind where we should be, but it’s because we love having control of our situations and we love being able to do things ourselves. Like Rae said, we’re all builders. I’ll personally take on any project where I get to create something with my hands and I think there are always limitations with going to a studio that we didn’t want to have. We just wanted to have our own space where we can create things, even if it isn’t the most high end studio with a million dollars worth of equipment inside of it. We had the ability to do it ourselves, so we built it, and now we can make some records in it. 

Rae: It’s nice not being at the whim of like other people too. Our band is not really a major music corporation’s dream, the stuff we make is weird and none of us are super rich or hot or cool, so opportunities are not going to come slamming down the door. But what’s so amazing about DIY and being able to build is you have the power and control, you’re not relying on somebody else’s studio or show or whatever it is. I think that’s really special. 

Jake: We’d rather fail through the process slowly on our own, than have our hands overly held. A lot of bands in our position have management, all we have is a booking agent that helps us get some better deals and a platform to negotiate. But Rae does all our graphic design, Gabe does accounting and engineers the records, I do the sort of day-to-day emailing with people and keeping up with things, and I would say from that sense we are pretty DIY. And we also all grew up going to shows, for how built up Brooklyn is, I do feel like all of us have experience going to DIY shows when we were younger. I feel like that’s not as prevalent now, but there’s probably still stuff going on. Probably shit we don’t even know about. 

Gabe: Yeah we’re not cool enough

Jake: We’re like “what about Trans-Pecos” 

Manon: I love the way you approach the concept of monsters on this record. You inject a lot of nuance into something that, I think when you consider a more juvenile perspective of, can be a very black and white, good or bad, sort of thing. I’d love to hear more about, and why you chose All Monsters as the title for the record? 

Rae: I like to think of monsters as the things that haunt us, the things that you personally need in your life to kill. A lot of this record feels like shadow work to me, but also I think you can have a lot of vengeance and just feel as though something is haunting you and sometimes that just needs to be released. So that’s the idea, releasing them to heaven, “all monsters go to heaven”. I think a lot of times, songs or a record all come through you, you feel sort of like more of a vessel or something and the shape, the image of what you’re trying to say becomes more clear. This definitely felt like one of those, where all these things kept coming up and as each song fell into place, I realized it was all about darknesses or things about yourself that you hate and want to kill. 

Manon: As for shadow work – I know that is something that’s pretty prominent in your lyrics, but how do you feel that the style of music you make plays into shadow work as well, maybe as a catalyst for that process? 

Rae: I like to think of the music as very releasing. You know when you’re really sad and you put in a record and cry? Maybe you’re going through something and you’re like, ‘I need to listen to Elliot Smith and weep for a second’, because he is really just harping on this emotion. I like to think of MX Lonely as music for someone who is neurodivergent and racked with anxiety or depression or whatever it may be, and then puts on MX Lonely and is able to feel those emotions with somebody else. It’s less lonely. 

Gabe: MX Less Lonely 

Manon: What are some of your biggest music inspirations?

Jake: People are scared to come across like a weenie saying Radiohead, but I think Radio Head, Pixies, Elliot Smith are my top three.  

Rae: There are a lot of contemporary people I am interested in and inspired by. I think synth-wise, there’s an artist, Caroline Rose, they are a guitar player but they are also an incredible synth artist and an amazing album curator. 

Gabe: I mean Radiohead, Pixies, but I also think there are a lot of newer artists that we are definitely inspired by, at least for this record. Curse the Knife, Downward, Trembler, Trauma Ray. But we also definitely like our nineties rock. 

Jake: Yeah we can’t underline enough how important Pixies are to us as a band. Also Elliot Smith – we use the Elliot Smith tuning. 

Rae: And the Kurt Cobain vocal tracking technique 

Gabe: I thought you were going to say you use the Kurt Cobain tuning on your synth. 

 Jake: We do the blind double. It’s like when Butch Vig tricked Cobain into doubling, tripling, quadrupling all of his parts by saying ‘oh, you didn’t get it, can you do it one more time?’ 

Gabe: No he kept saying there were technical issues, he was like ‘ah, it just didn’t record.’ 

Jake: Yeah so that’s what we do with Rae, except they know it’s happening. But yeah, definitely the nineties, we also all like heavy music in general. Gabe and I love listening to really abrasive, terrifying, black metal and hardcore. 

Gabe: Especially when you’re driving 80 miles an hour in the van and there’s a wind tunnel around you and you have been driving for ten hours. When you listen to really aggressive music you enter a different realm. The most important bonding point between me and Jake was when we first met, we were working together and we went on a twelve hour drive straight to Chicago to drop something off and we were just listening to music in a truck that had no ceiling. There was just wind gushing the whole time. I think that made MX Lonely what it is today. 

Jake: It influenced the aesthetic of the sound. 

Rae: For this record in particular, I was watching a lot of Dragula, which is a show by the Boulet Brothers. But I am inspired by a lot of drag artists, and the idea of monsters stemmed a lot from that. I also take a lot from drag artists performance-wise, like Hoso Terra Toma, A’Whora. My friends run a really cool collective, Sissy Fist Productions. There are tons of really incredible performers in Brooklyn right now, and that’s very exciting and cool.  

Manon: I would love to hear a bit more about that, especially in the context of MX Lonely sets. You are so phenomenal live, and your shows have so much energy – what are some ways drag has inspired that, and also what do you hope to bring to a live set in general? 

Rae: There are so many things that drag artists do, but when it comes to a lip-syncing, they really carry the songs more than anyone. I think I try to pull from that ethos when I step away from the synth. I almost think of it like a possession or exorcism – just really allowing for a space for a full body experience to happen and for it to be different than the record. I think there are a lot of performers that sound just like how they do on their records, and I have so much respect for that, but I also like to let the energy of the room and wherever we are and the emotionality of the music be a bit more paramount. I am thinking more about how it’s hitting people emotionally than getting everything pitch perfect, at least from a vocal perspective. 

Jake: I’d say it’s like that in general and from a band perspective too. The best shows we have ever played are usually not the ones that are not-for-note perfect, they’re the ones where there is crazy energy in the crowd or the flow is really dialed in. You have also created the runway, I feel like that is a callback to drag. 

Rae: Absolutely. I think a lot of times you can see music and get a bit dissociative, and I think the runway is a cool way to break people up. I also love when people aren’t necessarily watching you, maybe they are watching each other and moving with each other. That’s exciting to me. 

Jake: You just want people to interact. 

Rae: Yeah. MX Less Lonely.

Photo by Luke Ivanovich