Musicians Rae Haas, Jake Harms, and Gabriel Garman met at AA meetings while each was pursuing creative projects that weren’t working out for them. They quickly bonded over shared ’80s and ’90s reference points: Pixies, Deftones, Elliott Smith. Harms and Haas also confessed to a sort of parallel dysphoria: In high school, Harms was unable to express their latent femininity, while Haas never felt masculine enough to fit in with the boys; both are non-binary. In MX LONELY, the band the three artists started, Harms and Haas began splitting songwriting and vocal duties, pooling their experiences into their songs. They’ve called the protagonist of their latest album, ALL MONSTERS, a ghostly “anti-hero” named MX LONELY (the title taken from the name Haas gave their sleep paralysis demon). The album uses time-honored shoegaze and grunge tropes for a study of self-destructive impulses and maladaptive coping mechanisms, imbuing them with energy and humor.
The Brooklyn-based band fills these songs with loud-quiet-loud dynamics, walls of distorted guitars, and dreamy vocal lines, though there are too many post-hardcore and emo moments (such as on “Blue Ridge Mtns”) to call it strictly shoegaze. Engineer Corey Coffman finds a perfect balance: Every chorus and breakdown sound massive while still leaving room for the lead vocals. That’s good, because ALL MONSTERS’ lyrics are dense with surreal, melancholic humor, informed by Haas’ experiences with ADHD and autism and their trans identity. The sludgy “Big Hips” is probably the only shoegaze song that posits a hypothetical dick pic as a would-be source of affirmation, and definitely the only one with a spoken word interlude about sharing a meme. On “Shape of an Angel,” Haas and Harms efficiently communicate the curse of exchanging one dependency for another: “You don’t love me, honey, you love walking my dog/And I’m in love with Adderall and validation.” It’s sometimes hard to tell which singer we’re hearing, which feels appropriate for a composite narrator who’s a demon encountered in half-conscious states.
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When there’s nothing to numb the pain, they uncover the self-loathing beneath: On the punkish “Return to Sender,” Haas attempts to get in the head of someone who won’t give them the time of day, but the lyrics get so specific they start to sound self-incriminating: “You get numbers confused with angel signs/Carve a martyr out of opaline.” But they approach the loathing with a willingness to to integrate it. They’ve called “Anesthetic”—a highlight thanks to its occasional dissonant harmonies and unpredictable chord changes—a “love song to the addict,” though a line about someone “wastes their time clandestinely” is particularly tough love. The album’s centerpiece, “All Monsters Go To Heaven,” wonders if death brings any salvation. “All monsters go to heaven/And all the bad shit you did here was fine,” Haas sings, as if to ask: What’s the point of getting better if even the afterlife might protect the worst people from consequence? On an album thoroughly steeped in neuroticism and personal dysfunction, that acceptance feels like freedom.
