Hook & Reel: MUNA’s debut album is still a queer-pop masterpiece

Welcome to Hook & Reel, a series showcasing music that’s guaranteed to catch your ear.

I remember the first time I heard “Winterbreak.” It was during the summer of 2016, and I was sitting in a call room at work, taking my lunch hour to look for some new music. I remember immediately being so struck by the beauty and grace by which MUNA wrote about the complexities of an on and off relationship, the practice of constantly kicking up ashes in an attempt to rekindle a flame.  It felt like the start of my deep-dive into queer music, a gleeful treasure hunt across the pop genre to find acts that wrote about the full spectrum of the LGBTQ+ experience like this.

That summer I was less than a year out of the closet, and I had just started casually dating the man who is now my boyfriend, but at that point we were both stuck in our own misunderstanding of how to navigate our feelings for each other. We weren’t compatible at the time, and some part of me knew that despite the fact that I was falling for him. Thus, I resonated heavily with the emotions that coursed so heavily through “Winterbreak” ⏤ it encapsulated how I felt, like eating ice cream with honey in an attempt to forget about an open wound. Even two and a half years later, the breathless, Imogen Heap-esque middle eight in “Winterbreak” still gives me chills:

“A tentative ellipses, the parting of your lips, and the ache in your eyes…

But I think I’m gonna kiss you, all despite what we both know,

This is the love that we won’t get right.”

MUNA made it very clear from the get-go that their arrival to the music world would be marked by beautifully-written, smart, queer rock and pop tunes unabashedly covering the broken parts of love and longing, both of oneself and of those around you. They sang about every aspect of learning to live and love as LGBTQ+ identifying, and above all the act of searching for hope and love out of the suffocating isolation that can come with embracing your uniqueness as a queer individual. They understood that the freedom that comes from realizing yourself as LGBTQ+ can be as messy as it is liberating, that understanding your sexuality and gender identity on multiple layers as a defining part of who you are, and having such a limited pool of role models to look to in order to understand how to progress forward can be incredibly difficult.

Two years ago this week, they released their official debut album, the sweeping, dizzying About U. It stands as one of the most underrated works of musical art in the pop and rock world, a 12-track epic about existing in the darkest corners of heartbreak, the deepest depths of codependency and the bittersweet highs of embracing one’s truest self. It’s not all shadows and sadness, though; peppered among the gorgeous breakup anthems are beacons of self-empowerment. “Loudspeaker” is an ’80s flecked ode to proud and powerful feminism, standing strong and tall to fight back against those who seek to silence women, detailing the misogynistic wrongs they suffer at the hands of their patriarchic oppressors. It’s a rallying cry, a fist in the air and a statement of solidarity.

Directly after “Loudspeaker” is one of the best songs on the album, and their ode to survivors of the Pulse shooting, both those victims directly involved and those who felt the shock wave it sent throughout the LGBTQ+ community. The track is called “I Know A Place,” and it’s an iridescent musical hug, warm and protective like wrapping yourself in a velvet blanket to keep out the harsh, unforgiving cold. The trio lift their harmonies up to the heavens with lush, flowering choruses full of love and hope, and through the song, they effectively remind the listener that queer people will always find safety in their communities and supporters, even if people outside those circles wish them harm.

Nothing can hold a candle to “Everything,” though, a profound and heartrending song about the empty haze that permeates the mind and soul after a breakup. Singer Katie Gavin sounds detached and disoriented as she stumbles through the days after separating from her lover, at first quietly ruminating on how her former beau would react to her day-to-day experiences, then beginning to embrace her agonizing loss. Her fire grows as the song builds in its intensity, peaking as she screams her undying love to the heavens amidst guitar licks that patter like rain and drums that boom like thunder. It’s a call out to the void as one reaches for someone from their past, feeling the flicker of a relationship that once was, but knowing that despite your hardest efforts, you’ll never have what you had again.

The rest of the album is similarly full of big, emotive, beautiful synth-pop and rock songs, exploring different angles of love, loss and growth, all coated with a glossy, queer sheen. MUNA clearly worked to make a cohesive musical statement with their debut, and through these twelve tracks, they establish their prowess as musicians and songwriters and their status as musical icons in the LGBTQ+ community. It’s telling that even two years after the album’s release, the duality of darkness and light within About U hits just as hard as it did when it first was released into the world.

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