From the street, the house looks perfect. Inside, everything is about to go up in flames. That contradiction sits at the heart of Perfect House, MX LONELY’s new EP, released just a few months after their debut album, All Monsters. On that record, the New Yorkers went looking for monsters in the darkest corners. Here they bring them straight into the house, with four songs from different stages of the band’s life, reworked in their own studio.
With guitars steeped in grunge, post-punk and noise rock, MX LONELY explore different forms of vulnerability. The horror of collective violence bursts into «March 16th», inspired by the Brown University shooting and a friend of Caitlin Starr‘s who lived through the lockdown on campus. The repeated vocals from Starr, Jake Harms and Rae Haas are genuinely unsettling: three voices singing about loneliness while reminding us that this has happened before and could happen again. The opening has the melodic darkness of The Cranberries‘ «Hollywood», before the song lurches into much denser, rougher, heavier grunge guitars.
Personal relationships don’t offer much shelter either. On «Ex Rae Punk», again featuring Caitlin Starr, the title plays on «X-ray» to describe an ex who thought they could see right through Rae but never really knew them. The near-obsessive repetition of the chorus captures the urge to keep searching for someone who’s already gone, over a wall of distorted guitars that nods to Pixies and Sonic Youth‘s dissonance.
The image that best sums up the EP comes in «Twenty Seconds», featuring Connor from Wiring: ribs turned into the perfect house to hide in. But with images of drowning and self-destructive thoughts, it’s clear that not even your own body is a safe place. The interlocking guitars, dissonance and hypnotic rhythms point towards Unwound at their most experimental.
The noise drops back on closer «Bird», which drifts towards dream pop, folk rock and psychedelic pop, with acoustic guitars, a prominent bass line, flashes of electric guitar and vocal harmonies that add to its nostalgic feel. But the calm is deceptive. Between roads, fires and someone buried under a house, the song tells of an escape that doesn’t seem to lead anywhere safe.
Four very different songs, and yet Perfect House hangs together surprisingly well, both musically and thematically. Every track circles back to the same search: a safe place that, however hard we try, we never quite find.
Listen to PERFECT HOUSE in full here.
Follow MX LONELY on Website | Instagram | TikTok | YouTube