Luna Honey’s latest album, Bound, represents a turning point in their artistic evolution, capturing a raw intensity and focus that feels immediate and unfiltered. The trio—vocalist/guitarist Maura Pond, guitarist Benjamin Schurr, and bassist Levi Flack—expanded their process by stepping outside their usual home studio setup, allowing for a more organic feel and the inclusion of live drums.
Since their formation in Washington, DC, in 2017, Luna Honey has released six albums, each reflecting their distinct ability to merge experimental soundscapes with emotional storytelling. They also collaborated with Norman Westberg of SWANS on the 2023 album Aftermath, a remote undertaking that explored themes of grief and transition. That collaboration was particularly meaningful for Pond, who found inspiration in Westberg’s music following the loss of her mother.
Over Zoom, Pond discussed Luna Honey and their latest album.
How did the making of this album compare to previous releases? From what I understand, you worked in an outside studio this time?
Maura Pond: Normally, we record at home. Ben, our guitarist, is a good sound engineer. So we’ve got a lot of equipment. All of us like to be pretty hands-on with the shaping of the sounds and stuff. So we like to work on that together. But you’re limited when you do that unless you’re lucky enough to live in a warehouse or a big barn or something like that. You’re limited by the space.
We recorded some demos, and we were just struggling with some songs to get the way it feels when you play it in front of a crowd. It is not an exact science to capture that, but it was just coming out a little too precise-feeling. Our friend Dan Angel runs a studio here in Philly. It’s crammed with his art and all kinds of things and is just a fun space. And he’s got everything all miked up. So we not only could play and get the sound of this big space but also set the PA up and actually pump the beats out so we could get the feel of the actual electronic parts in a space, adding a bit of organic texture and stuff there to the electronic pieces. And then, also, Dan’s an amazing drummer, so we would not record over there and not have him guest on the album as well. So this is also our first album that we’ve got drums on there, and I think that also just adds a little more dirt on there.
Are there particular songs on the album that you can cite as being particularly influenced by that working environment?
Maura Pond: “Vacuum Cleaner”? Well, okay, so that’s a funny one. I cite that. But actually we tracked most of the music for that a couple of years ago. But I’d been stuck on writing lyrics. I’d written some lyrics and tried to record it in the house and it just wasn’t coming together. With every album, I would kind of pull it out and then try again. It just didn’t feel right. And I think some of that is the headspace of where you’re at. It’s kind of wilder, those vocals feel a little stranger to do in your bedroom, with potentially the neighbors listening in or whatever, than it does in a big space where you can really sort of own it and hear it kind of echoing around and everything. We had a day left in the studio and it was like, ‘Okay, well let’s try this again. Maybe it’ll be different if we’re over there.’ And so that take on that is mostly improvised. It’s like the first take. We only really did one take. So that one, I would say that actual song wouldn’t have come together and been completed if we hadn’t done it there, even if maybe the whole recording isn’t of that space. “Kerosene”, the first song on the album is probably the one we did everything there. The drums are there, and it’s definitely the sound of the band playing together in that space.
Do you see each album as a unique entity? Or are you constantly working on new music, putting out albums when you have enough material?
Maura Pond: Yeah, I definitely think in terms of albums. I think everybody in the band probably has a slightly different way of approaching that, but lyrically, and I do like to organize stuff in these chunks, I think of it as a whole. Some albums have a very specific thing in mind with them. Branches, for instance, was written in response to my aunt who had said that she was dying and she wanted me to write her some music on accepting the end of one’s life. That’s a whole separate story. But even just compositionally, I like to kind of arrange as we’re working.
As I’m working, I like to take the demos and ideas that we’re working on and stitch them together into what would be a possible track listing. And that does actually kind of impact it, because you can have things assembled and maybe it feels like there’s a hole. I feel like there’s magic when you put songs next to one another. They’re not necessarily all around one theme, but there is an arc or a story that they’re kind of telling together, and they maybe take on a different meaning based on what you were just listening to before or what you’re listening to after. So I do really like to organize stuff around the albums and then even use that as a prompt for whether I feel like we’re missing something. And then kind of go back into the ideas and see if we’ve got anything that fits that to kind of turn into a song. So we have a lot of rough snippets from practice and things like that which are floating out there, but there are very few things that get to the point of having lyrics on them that aren’t directly onto the next album.
Following up on that, I’m curious about how much effort it is coming up with track sequencing. Is it fairly obvious how things fit together, or do you spend a lot of time figuring out the flow?
Maura Pond: It’s usually pretty quick. This album was actually probably the most challenging . I feel like we always have a fairly wide range in terms of styles of songs on the album. But with this one, it felt like putting the things in different orders felt really different. So trying to figure out where to put ‘Vacuum Cleaner’ relative to some of these quiet songs. And then there are longer sort of drone based songs. Do we stack those all right next to each other? Do we space them out?’ So with this one, I think there was a little more work, but it was probably ultimately a couple of days of just futzing with it. Usually we decide on the order pretty fast.
What is your creative process like in terms of balancing the experimental aspects with the more structured aspects and the lyrics?
Maura Pond: I think it’s not consistent. It comes from a number of different things. Ben’s kind of constantly tinkering with different sounds in different places. He likes to make tape loops. He’s sort of constantly experimenting with stuff. Levi, if we’re at a practice or something and there’s a baseline he’s working on… the thing is I think I will hear something and I’ll immediately know whether I can write a song to it, even if it’s a weird little thing. So I think we’re all kind of constantly generating, we’re generating the fodder for what’s going to trigger that. And then, once it’s triggered, then it’s like, okay, that goes in. I’ll usually save that in a playlist, like a little bucket, and then I’ll listen to those things kind of on repeat. I do a lot of driving around and listening in the car. That’s my downtime to get ideas for what feelings and thoughts that kind of triggers.
And then separately, for songwriting or for the lyric part of it, I will start writing lyrics, and it’s pretty frequent that I’m not happy with them. So I’ll kind of put ‘em aside. I’m like, those aren’t right, but I’ll end up with a file of discarded lyrics. And sometimes when we’re working on something, I’ll remember that there was one that maybe didn’t work for a different song, but does work for what we’re currently working on. So there’s a fair amount of swapping around. It’s pretty amorphous, but it is very instinctual. I don’t think that we’re ever really coming at it as like, ‘Okay, now it is time to write a song. Here we go.’ It’s more like, ‘Ooh, that thing.’ And then it just happens. It’s like all the sounds are meandering around, and then you kind grab one out of the air.
To me, the song “Gravity” really stands out because it’s very minimal, but I feel like the overall mood is such a big part of it.
Maura Pond: Yeah, that’s a good example, actually. That’s [built on] one of Ben’s tape loops. If I’m writing a song, it’s probably going to pick up the bass to do it on. All three of us are ultimately bass players, but we’re not all going to play bass in the band. And technically, I’m not a very good player, but I think there’s something about it that just triggers songwriting. So that one, and a couple of the other ones on the second half of the album are minimal, we intentionally decided to leave them that way. Because we did all kind of have the first impulse of like, ‘Oh, well, we could keep adding to this and make it a bigger feeling song.’ But I think I liked the vulnerability of, well, what happens if we just leave it alone? I feel like the emotions are there. We don’t necessarily need to fill up all of the space, just because we can.
In terms of adding and removing things, has there ever been a fear or a problem, especially when working in home studios, of not knowing where to stop?
Maura Pond: Yeah, none of us are that precious about it, so I think all of us don’t overwork things. So once we’ve got it done, there’s not a lot of futzing, but you can have those nights… some nights and you’re all sort of in the hive mind together adding stuff, and it’s great the next day. And then sometimes you’re like, ‘Well, that was too much. That’s dead now.’ There are some where we added stuff and then we took it back off. So yeah, we can get carried away, but I think we’re pretty good about knowing when we’ve got it, at least in my assessment. Maybe others would not agree.
I know you’re based in Philadelphia now, but originally you were based in DC. Does location have much of an impact on you as a band?
Maura Pond: I think that it always plays a role. We’re not really scene music. I think whether it was DC or here, I don’t think I’d necessarily be able to point to other bands around that are making the same type of music. And that’s always kind of fun, actually being kind of a square peg in round holes of a set list, you can play with anybody as a result, or almost anybody. Getting started in DC, there’s a kind of work ethic, I’d say, a DIY sense behind the music there. Or a do-it-together kind of sense, at least pre-pandemic. I can’t speak to how it is now.
And I think that support and encouragement meant a lot in getting the band initially off the ground. We did have a lot of positive feedback. And I think also DC felt smaller in a lot of ways. Your community of people making music overlaps with each other more, so you have more genres shoved into the same space, which is cool. And then Philly here, there’s a ton of stuff happening, and I’d say the loud things tend to be louder and dirtier, and we’ve definitely caught a bit of that where it’s like, “Oh yeah, that would be kind of fun to do.”
Can you talk about working with Norman Westberg?
Maura Pond: So that was really delightful. We got to work with him on Aftermath. That was remote. It was during Covid. So the first side, side A of Aftermath, was sort of us sending little snippets off to him, and then he’d react to it and send it back to us. And then the second half was a longer piece that he had done that he sent to us to do the same kind of reaction and add our parts there. We weren’t really working on it necessarily with the idea of it specifically being anything.
But I think just because of how I think about writing lyrics and sort of organizing stuff together, I was kind of organizing it as it went along. I was like, okay, I think this is the pretend album in my head, even if that doesn’t happen. And then I think we were all just really happy with how it turned out. When we first started talking, I think it was two months after my mom had passed, and so I had been listening to a lot of Norman’s music to help get me through that time. And it was spooky because I had been listening to it and thinking about how wonderful it would be. I was hearing all kinds of things in his music and thinking about how great it would be to work together. And then he emailed us the next week or something. So it was one of those serendipitous kind of feeling things. That album means a lot to me, not only because it was kind of a way to put my grief into a thing and then kind of set it over somewhere, but also because I was able to work with a person I’ve looked up to for a really long time. I think at that period of time, if you had asked me who would I most want to work with, he would’ve been the answer. So that was pretty cool that it happened.
For more info and to buy music, visit lunahoney.com.
