“It’s a really dangerous time for trans people in America,” says Rae Haas, co-lead singer of the alt-pop shoegazers MX LONELY. “A lot of health care is being cut for trans kids, even in New York. It’s a terrifying thing to grapple with,” they say. “It’s a dangerous time for immigrants in America too – we’re all fighting this tyranny together.” Haas, in a punkish green jumper and black pixie crop, is calling in from the band’s tour bus, as the band zip across the USA promoting their debut All Monsters (tonight they’re en route to play a free show in Chicago). The album wrestles with deeply personal topics through layers of sonic gauze, quiet/loud dynamics and gothic undercurrents. Its unifying concept is the inner demons inside all of us. “All Monsters came from a deep depression,” explains Haas from the passenger seat, their distinctive hexagon neck tattoo popping into view occasionally. “Trying to understand the evilness in the world and also the darkness inside yourself.”
Through curious open chords and a cracked nursery rhyme harmony (between Haas and vocalist/guitarist Jake Harms, channelling The Pixies Kim Deal and Black Francis), the title track hits hard with its lyrics “war and violence” and “all the bad shit you did.” “All monsters,” Haas sings, “go to heaven.” “It’s a little bit about killing your monsters, rather than killing yourself,” explains Haas. “The implication of ‘all monsters go to heaven’ is that your monster can die and you don’t have to torture yourself to get to somewhere better.”
The trio of Haas, Harms and bassist Gabriel Garman met in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, just before the pandemic hit, with drummer Andrew Rapp joining a few years later. And the concept of addiction and reconciling your current self with your past monstrous self hangs over All Monsters with half the songs on the album implicitly or explicitly tackling it. “It’s like people say: recovery is forever, it’s something you deal with your whole life,” says Haas. “The same can be said of addiction.”
“I’m in love with Adderall and validation,” Haas sings on the Silvers Pickups-esque ‘Shape of Angel’, which is about their addiction to their ADHD medicine. “I struggle a lot with feeling like I’m functioning at the level Capitalism demands,” Haas explains. “Adderall is something that really helped me function: I could send emails! But I fell into an addiction with it.” They laugh: “(The lyrics) are also not that deep: I am in love with Adderall and validation! Sometimes I love things that are toxic for me.”
Meanwhile the atmospheric five-minute-plus slow burner, ‘Blue Ridge Mtns’, tackles Harms’ tempestuous drive to rehab (“In the back seat, freaking out with my family/Blue Ridge Mountains, clear as cocaine”). The narrator dips in and out of consciousness, toggling between timelines. As a child version of Harms recalls the song his family would sing as they were doing the dishes (“You can’t get to heaven on a pair of skates”). It plays like a piece of impressionistic cinema, articulating the way memories fall into each other and timelines merge together. “It’s an adaptation of a song I wrote in High School that my parents liked,” says the shaggy-haired Harms. “It’s sort of revisiting this idea of what happens years later.”
The spectre of childhood trauma is knitted into All Monsters‘ lyrics. On the anthemic single ‘Big Hips’ (with its chorus “Big Hips! For A Boy!”), Haas looks back at the horrors of puberty from their trans perspective. “I try to make my younger self proud,” they say. “It’s about having trans boy swag – it’s also challenging but musically it just hits.”
With a setlist full of songs that hit, MX LONELY are getting a kick out of playing the new songs live. “It’s gratifying seeing people knowing the words to the songs,” Haas says. “As a writer it’s like, ‘Oh people are reading my diary out loud.’ It’s great!”
MX LONELY’s All Monsters is out now via Julia’s War.
