MUNA – “Kind Of Girl” [Video]

Los Angeles-based trio MUNA – composed of Katie Gavin (she/they), Naomi McPherson (they/them), and Josette Maskin (she/they) have released new single “Kind of Girl” along with a Taylor James-directed video.

Katie Gavin of MUNA tells us “This song is the album’s country moment, and in some ways we feel it is the heart of the record. This song explores the power of language and the words we use to describe who we are and who we want to be. Even though it is a happy, hopeful song, I shed the most tears of the record in the vocal booth recording this chorus. I think there’s something very vulnerable about plainly expressing my desire to be kinder to myself and comfortable receiving love (and my desire to garden even though I kill everything I plant).”

Gavin, McPherson, and Josette Maskin, MUNA’s guitarist, are coming up on ten years of friendship. They began making music together in college, at USC, and released an early hit in the 2017 single “I Know a Place,” a pent-up invocation of LGBTQ sanctuary and transcendence. Now in their late twenties, the trio has become something more like family. They spent much of the early pandemic as a pod, showing up for each other and for MUNA — a project that at this point feels bigger than them — even when they weren’t sure about anything regarding the future. They’d been dropped by RCA, and there was little in terms of income, no adrenaline to work off of, no live shows with audiences reminding them of the succor their songs provide. They asked each other: Is this career even feasible in this new reality? Can we find a way to be self-motivated, to be fulfilled intrinsically? For months, they surrendered to this confusion, to the reality of being humbled by change. “You have to let things fall apart,” Gavin said. “And it was only possible because of this tremendous trust. I have so few relationships in my life where I have the kind of trust that I do with Naomi and Jo — where I can trust that there’s a higher purpose, that we can work through all the boundaries and compromises and mess that comes with long-term relationships, and then return to form.”

You can order the album HERE.