It's gonna be okay: a "Saves the World" review
I discovered MUNA by complete accident. While listening to the lead-off single from The Venus Project in February 2018, Spotify shifted to a recommended song after "Won't Hurt" was done: MUNA's "About U." I was spellbound on first listen. A five-minute post-break-up song where suburbia is blessed, sex is "a holy rite," and Arizona Half-and-Half's are downed amidst shifting in the atmosphere, it's a grandiose slice of alternative pop that sticks with you. Not long after that lucky find, I listened to their debut album, About U, and was quickly enamored with this trio of women. Packing queer celebration, heartrending relationships, and bittersweet longing into a cinematic record is no small feat, and MUNA accomplished it in ways I wasn't expecting and am still surprised by a year later.
With this record, however, MUNA had a bold declaration to make. Saves the World is quite the goal, and MUNA seemed to achieve it right off the bat on the first single from this record, "Number One Fan." "So I heard the bad news," lead singer Katie Gavin declares over a pulsing synth. "Nobody likes me and I'm gonna die alone." Calling out to the hopeless, the song turns into a self-empowerment anthem, the chorus ringing out with "Oh my god, like / I'm your number one fan / You're so iconic, like, big, like, stan...." It was the perfect wake-up call in June (Pride Month!), a reminder to take your insecurities and make them your strengths. With that ideology, I pre-ordered this record and waited with baited breath for September 6th to hear Saves the World in full. Did MUNA accomplish their wildest dreams?
They did, and so much more on top of that. Saves the World is a dynamo of an album, full of propulsive reflections from start to finish. Their immediacy, level of detail, and power need to be heard to be believed, and the trio's focus on heartbreak, self-love, and growth create a visibility that penetrates through the music and reaches listeners with a gut punch so visceral that inserts them into the stories, reminds them of past pain they're able to reflect on and remember but never regret. It's a truly great listen, one that should definitely not be missed. MUNA's second record may be Album of the Year material in the making.
The album opens with "Grow," a piano-accented intro that pulls a listener in despite its length of being under two minutes. Gavin decides she's ready to grow up, "ready to / Take this song off repeat." Doing away with "childish things" and "the party games," "calling their bluff" in the process, may be simple to say, but the process is harder than it looks, especially as Gavin's voice rises to a plea as several piano lines crescendo over each other by the end. This important step sounds like it'll be one of the most painful things to do; perhaps Gavin isn't as ready as she thinks she is. Perhaps she's resisting. Even after the piece buzzes out to be replaced with the bombastic "Number One Fan," there's a niggling fear creeping in the back of her mind, and maybe even the listener's as well. "In the thick of it / Will you stick up for me?" Sometimes the demons return to haunt us, to deter our growth, and it seems like that storyline may repeat once more.
"Stayaway" and "Who" follow the lead-off single, the horrendous creatures of heartbreak back to rip little pieces out of a chest. The former follows a pattern similar to the classic picture book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, one action leading to another until the protagonist is spiraling down a black hole. Even as Gavin successfully resists the triggers that will bring her back to an old relationship, she still remembers every painful memory of the break-up and how her brain rewrites it to make it appeal more to her vulnerable state. "If I don't stop it / Before I know it / All the bad things / Never happened / You never lied or / Treated me bad and / If you did, then you'll wish you hadn't," Gavin realizes, and as the bridge rises to a desperate cry, this train of thought becomes a recurring nightmare, playing out once more. The latter reveals that the desire to go back has vanished, but now that Gavin's partner has found somebody else, she is left bewildered and devastated. "I never thought you knew what love was / Until I heard you sing a love song / From the way that you treat me / I had to reach my own conclusions," she muses over the steady slow pulse of keys and drums of the first verse. By the end, however, "Who" reaches a cinematic high, the pain of that "sweet melody" of love that's no longer Gavin's taking a toll as she wonders who is this person behind the new music of her ex's life. As someone who has read and seen people get together with others after splitting things off with exes and watching those exes crumble, this resonates with me in a way I didn't expect.
This acute loneliness is featured a lot on Saves the World. "Navy Blue" pins a specific shade on the emotion in an extraordinary and somber mid-tempo ballad. "Pink Light" frames mid-morning light filtering through a window as a reason why a lover should stay, even though they never do. The short and cutting "Memento" brings a physical mark to the cycle "Pink Light" left behind, a bee sting reminding the protagonist "this is what you get / When you're reckless and you're playing in the dark." "Good News (Ya-Ya Song)" is peppier about devastation, attempting to move on despite being hit with the heartbreaking revelation that "if you don't like life / They say it doesn't last so long" and how that permeates everyone. Then there's "Never," a bold statement about never loving or singing again that escalates to a hazy scream-filled outro filled with matching instrumental intensity to echo that fury.
There's something different about "Taken," though. The eighth track on the album and the final pre-order single, it starts off rather delicately, a single note of a synth and clipped vocal samples ringing out before a keyboard and a distant acoustic guitar kick in. From there, however, the lyrics reveal a messier picture. A late-night date in the first verse morphs into the story of Gavin's dad leaving the family at eleven due to infidelity. To go full circle, the track anchors itself in the idea that Gavin only wants the title of girlfriend with her partner "if it's taken," if they're already seeing someone and if she can take the position from them. It's an ugly thought and proves disastrous for everyone involved, even Gavin herself. "I just / Thought that / If I could take it from her / Maybe then it would prove that I'm worth / Something / Now [I wish] I'd taken you at your word / When you said you were taken," Gavin cries in the bridge, and the lyrics hit like a knife to the heart. Cheating is never a pretty situation, no matter how alluring it can be, but this track's trickle-down effect is fascinating to listen to as it becomes apparent why this is happening in the first place and why it was even appealing. Even more unfortunate, this kind of thing is common in both heterosexual and queer contexts.
Although much of the album's narrative is centered on heartbreak, MUNA recognizes that there needs to be more than just that. Hence the ninth song and the closer, "Hands Off" and "It's Gonna Be Okay, Baby." There's a fun and jubilant energy riding underneath "Hands Off," the dangerous rekindling sparks of running into an old ex that are doused once Gavin feels that ex against her, remembers the power struggle between them. That refusal of exploring hands without an explanation given is a sign of growth and strength, and as the track ricochets along, picking up funny pitched-down questions from Gavin in the booth along the way, it becomes a celebration of embracing your sexuality and not letting anyone else control it. "It's Gonna Be Okay, Baby," on the other hand, is a personal narrative, Gavin reflecting on her life and what led her to MUNA, assuring her past self while recounting sometimes humorous and often heartrending stories ("You're gonna move to New York / And experiment with communism" and "Learn by trial and error / That threesomes are more sad than fun" are two details that stand out). All Gavin hopes is that she can one day look herself in the mirror and assure herself "it's gonna be okay." As the synth twinkles out and fades away near the six-minute mark, Gavin's last whispers of the title remind the listener to be the biggest cheerleader they can be for themselves. Stick up and hold yourself accountable, but recognize that every mistake you make shapes you to be the best person you can be.
MUNA's Saves the World is a record that makes a listener feel seen, and I believe that was the band's point all along. There's power in this kind of alternative pop music that touches upon the heart beating inside all of us, the one that holds more than blood. It's an emotional album that hurts, but it's one that will definitely save someone and maybe even save the world. Mission statement accomplished.