Luna Honey will release their new album Bound on November 22 on cassette, CD, digital download, and through streaming services.The Philadelphia band’s LP is described as a genre-blending, pyretic journey to the extremes. Recorded in Philadelphia at Dan Angel’s In The Shadow of Boner Forever studio space as well as at band members’ home studios. Since their debut album Peace Will Grind You Down in 2018, the band, consisting of vocalist/guitarist Maura Pond, guitarist Benjamin Schurr, and bassist Levi Flack. Ahead of the album’s release, the band are sharing the LP track Vacuum Cleaner.”

While Luna Honey performs live with Pond on vocals and tenor baritone guitar, Flack on bass and Schurr on guitar, Bound continues their history of exploration in the studio, with each member layering in textures and ghost melodies from a wide range of instruments and sound sources including an organ pipe from an abandoned church, dropped books, pitch-shifted kazoo, vibraphone, mandolin, sleigh bells, ukulele, synthesizers, etc. in addition to their regular instruments. Angel guested on drums on most tracks, and Roger Martinez makes an appearance on upright bass.

Album track “Vacuum Cleaner” is a brutal post-modern aria with hints of Flannery O’Connor that tackles technology,
gender, and progress with searing vocals that float above a maelstrom of noise and feedback. On the second half of the album, tracks like “Hriddel” provide stark contrast with its lullaby minimalism and gauzy intimacy upheld by simple vocals paired with Rhodes piano. The title track is a haunted conjuration of a manic drumming circle held at the New Moon. All the songs on Bound are quite different from one another–a result of following the creative sparks wherever
they may lead.

Luna Honey was originally formed in 2017 in Washington, DC by Maura Pond and Levi Flack who had informally begun playing together in Flack’s basement and set a goal to write an album’s worth of music. The pair met Benjamin Schurr (Ruah, Br’er, Nyxy Nyx), founder of BLIGHT.records, when his band Br’er opened a show for Arto Lindsay at the Black Cat and he soon after agreed to record and produce them. When they’d finished recording their debut album, Peace Will Grind You Down, Ben insisted that the pair begin performing live, agreed to fill in temporarily, then became a permanent member along with baritone sax player Madeline Billhimer. The four-piece line-up recorded Peace Lives, a live recording of songs mostly from their first album. Billhimer left the band during the recording of their next full-length album, Ballast.

Schurr, who was born in Philadelphia, moved back to his home city in 2019 with Flack following shortly after. Christmas Eve of 2019, Pond’s aunt shared she had months to live and asked her to write her some music to help accept her transition, asking that it could be released after her death. Still living in DC, Pond recruited Ben to come down to her house in Anacostia and record an intense week of highly improvised sessions. The two worked around the clock on what would become the fourth album Luna Honey, Branches.

After the pandemic hit in 2020, Pond moved back to her hometown of Richmond, VA to be closer to her parents and Schurr followed. All three band members commuted back and forth between Richmond and Philadelphia continuing to write songs. Parables was written during the period of geographic separation across DC, Philadelphia, and Richmond.

Three months after moving to Richmond, Pond’s mother passed after an over a decade long fight with cancer. In the wake of her mother’s passing, Pond had found comfort in the solo work of longtime Swans guitarist Norman Westberg and ended up striking up a long-distance collaboration. Aftermath resulted, a meditation on grief and what is left behind.

In 2022, Pond and Schurr moved to Philadelphia, finally reuniting the band within the same city. Re-energized after living through the difficulties during COVID and the past several years, the three began recording a new crop of songs that would make up the majority of Bound, with the goal of capturing the raw, powerful energy of their live shows.

Maura Pond from Luna Honey on “Vacuum Cleaner:”

“I got fixated on the vacuum cleaner because I felt like it was trying to tell me something. I’d been getting a bunch of ads for both ADHD medication and also various productivity tools. Basically folks talking about how overwhelming their lives were until they tried XY or Z. It made me think of vintage advertisements I’d seen. I went digging around looking at old vacuum ads, and they are pretty much exactly what you’d expect. “The machine of the future is here to liberate you from drudgery! Be happier and buy this vacuum cleaner!

We love to view technology as this thing that comes in and solves our problems and makes our lives easier. But is it always solving the problem, or just making it easier to not really change? There is nothing about the invention of the vacuum cleaner, for instance, that in any way challenged gender roles. If anything, it just made it easier for women to adhere to those roles. And that’s not to say it’s the vacuum cleaner that should be found at fault here. I do love my vacuum cleaner.

The question for me is have we actually gotten so good at the short-cuts that we don’t even remember what the original sin was? Not just in terms of gender roles, but all aspects of how we’re living our lives. Suicide in the US has gone up 40% since 2000, but meanwhile we are supposed to have made all this social progress during that time. So maybe it isn’t your fault your life feels unmanageable, maybe something bigger needs to change here and it isn’t just that you aren’t doing enough self-care or being “productive” enough?

The album art for Bound is a carpet beater. It’s become a personal symbol for me of the hard, inefficient things that are worth doing, that need doing and that we shouldn’t short-cut. I also like that it’s both a traditionally feminine tool but also one that requires physical power and strength to wield. And it is a reminder to me that we all need to drag our lives out into the yard and beat the dust from them from time to time.”

pre-order Bound by Luna Honey HERE