Muna has just today released their new video and single titled ‘Wannabeher’, from their upcoming album ‘Dancing On The Wall’, dropping May 8th.
‘Wannabeher’ struts in like it already knows it owns the room, and honestly, it kind of does. The track wastes no time locking into a slick, pulsing rhythm that feels equal parts dancefloor release and emotional spiral. Glossy production keeps everything shimmering on the surface, but underneath, something far more restless is clawing to get out. It is the kind of song that makes you want to move first and unpack your feelings later, which is either a gift or a trap depending on your level of self awareness.
Part of the magic comes from how MUNA lean into the chaos instead of trying to tidy it up. The song toys with the idea of wanting to become someone else, not in a poetic, distant way, but in a very immediate and slightly unhinged one. The production sparkles like confidence, while the lyrics quietly suggest that confidence might be borrowed at best. It is a clever bait and switch, and MUNA pull it off with the kind of ease that makes it seem almost unfair.
Katie Gavin delivers a vocal that walks a fine line between control and collapse, and never fully commits to either. That tension is exactly what makes it compelling. She sounds like she is in on the joke but also maybe the punchline, which gives the track an edge that keeps it from slipping into generic pop territory. It is messy in a very curated way, which feels extremely on brand for anyone trying to survive modern life with their dignity mostly intact.
Within ‘Dancing On The Wall’, ‘Wannabeher’ fits like a perfectly chosen outfit that still somehow looks a little too tight by the end of the night. The song taps into the album’s obsession with identity, connection, and the strange performance of existing in a hyper aware world. The synth pop and new wave influences shimmer throughout, but nothing feels like cosplay. It all feels lived in, like these sounds have been dragged through real experiences instead of just referenced from a playlist.
‘Wannabeher’ lands because it does not pretend to have answers. It thrives in that uncomfortable space between admiration and erasure, where wanting to be someone else starts to say a little too much about yourself. It is sharp, addictive, and just self aware enough to make you question why you are hitting repeat. MUNA have crafted something that feels both intoxicating and slightly suspect, and that tension is exactly what makes it stick.
“This song is our version of Bikini Kill’s Rebel Girl – it’s about the experience of really admiring someone and feeling confused about whether you want to be them or be with them or both. A gay canon event”
Muna
About ‘Dancing On The Wall’
MUNA’s journey has always been about bringing to light the complex, messy, ecstatic realities of life, and with their fourth album, ‘Dancing On The Wall’, they’ve never been sharper, darker, or more exhilarating. Emerging from the sparkly, confetti-strewn heights of their 2022 self-titled record, MUNA now channel the raw, anxious, and sweat-soaked energy of living in a city (Los Angeles) of unrelenting heat, a corrupted world wrought by political tension, and the quieter and more personal pressures of millennial precarity and heartache in these uncertain times. The result is a record that feels both intimate and spectacular: a fast-paced, hard-edged dance pop world built with teeth, wit, and emotional resonance—a soundtrack for hearts on fire amidst the tumult of modern life.
‘Dancing On The Wall’ is MUNA doing what they do best: capturing the cultural moment, the oversaturated, escapist spectacle of contemporary life, and bending it to their own vision. Influenced by dance, post-punk, synth-pop and new wave, the songs are drenched in a metallic sheen yet carry a brooding melancholy that undercuts the hedonistic highs. The tension between propulsive instrumentals and the band’s classically introspective and thoughtful lyricism drives the album’s restless pulse.
Across the record, MUNA explores desire, intimacy, and connection against a backdrop of a world in flux. There’s a quiet reckoning throughout the album with how to keep living, loving, and reaching for one another while living in these times. Tracks like “Wannabeher” capture the dizzying thrill of stepping fully into someone else’s fantasy. “So What” is a somber epic that muses on post-party loneliness, while “Why Do I Get A Good Feeling” lingers long after the frenetic beat ends, the swirl of strings and vocals becoming a meditation on suspended possibilities. The album closes with “Buzzkiller,” a stark reckoning with desire and its aftermath, the ache of achieving what you wanted only to realise new questions, doubts, and hungers remain.
While ‘Dancing On The Wall’ is unafraid of its darkness, it’s also a record of exuberance, wit, and comMUNAl joy. MUNA’s songs transport listeners to dancefloors where heat is friction, where longing meets the ecstatic, and where the uncertainty of life becomes a soundtrack for living fully. “We still fall in and out of love. We reach out to one another. Perhaps it’s a call to step outside the algorithm and into the richness of our lives,” the band says, a sentiment that runs through the record’s core.
MUNA were selected by Harry Styles as the first support act he took out on his debut solo tour, and have since shared stages with Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour, Lorde, boygenius, and Phoebe Bridgers. From sold-out club shows to festival main stages, they’ve grown into pop artists who command both spectacle and intimacy with equal confidence.
Their previous work, including the viral hit “Silk Chiffon,” has earned hundreds of millions of streams and widespread acclaim, alongside TV appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, The Late Late Show with James Corden, Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Good Morning America. The band also maintains a devoted following across Instagram, Tiktok, and Spotify—but their ability to convert these followers and listeners into fans who ardently follow them across the globe for their euphoric concerts sets them apart.
The record is produced by Naomi McPherson, with their trademark attention to detail blending effortlessly with bandmate Josette Maskin’s well-honed behind-the-scenes pop technique to create living, breathing worlds for lead singer Katie Gavin’s incisive lyricism and signature voice. ‘Dancing On The Wall’ blends euphoric sonic landscapes with sharp, human storytelling. The album reflects a fiercely self-directed creative process, one shaped by instinct, trust, and total artistic control. It feels lived-in, urgent, and cinematic, a reflection of a generation navigating uncertainty while refusing to let go of joy. With this album, MUNA proves once again that pop can be daring, intimate, and socially conscious all at once: a record that doesn’t just capture the moment, but distills it into a world you want to inhabit.
About MUNA
The massively influential (yet underappreciated) poet Pat Parker opens her poem “My Lover Is A Woman” with:
my lover is a woman
& when i hold her
feel her warmth
i feel good
feel safe
The poem is sprawling, four sections long, but the narrative anchor is in its introductory lines. From that place of intimacy, Parker eye to eye with her lover and you, as distant witness, we zoom out, Parker animating all of the personal horrors and heartaches her lover’s warmth keeps her momentarily safe from. Her mother’s disappointments, her father turning in his grave, the boy who called her slurs and spat on her, the boots of the policeman, kicking her and demanding she crawl.
For most, this poem translates most clearly and directly as a love poem, but I have always appreciated it most as a poem of rage and disappointment – I love you, you keep me safe, but the safety is fleeting, and how much better could we love each other if our love for each other were not pressed up against the ongoing and accelerating horrors of the world?
MUNA’s ‘Dancing On The Wall’ is an achievement of that central question. There are people who can, it seems, go about their lives while speaking vaguely of “these times” as if the times don’t infiltrate the heart and the mind, and create the lens through which people engage with, or cling to their desires. ‘Dancing On The Wall’ is a brilliant soundtrack for a heart that is broken or enraged or otherwise on fire, but still shaped by its hungers.
To begin at the ending, the album closes with the song “Buzzkiller,” which is a perfect conclusion to an album teeming with the heat and weight of longing for that which may or may not come. It is a song that reckons with the reality of getting what you’ve desired and then realizing a new set of questions have emerged, many of them about the worthiness of the self, or if any of us should be able to love cleanly or clearly in the midst of an empire in a state of collapse. I made it to the protest / the speech made me cry / but then I came home and I still feel hopeless.
Mentioning Parker’s poem is a way of saying that this album is an extension of it, and that its architects are also poets who are, like Parker, concerned with the filters thrown over a burning world. You open your eyes and you are encased in a factory of horrors, you are watching them be manufactured, and by your presence, you are complicit in their manufacturing, and there are fewer tangible modes of escapism than there used to be, and so you invent a fantasy, a fever dream. You take a moment, not unlike the moment of Pat Parker reaching for her lover’s hand, and you make that moment the doorway, the momentary exit, even if you cannot ever fully run away.
‘Dancing On The Wall’ is also specific in its shape and sound and world-building, an ode to the wanderings of the millennial heart and mind through a Los Angeles that feels simultaneously hyper-present but also distant. The songs are more new wave and post-punk than MUNA’s previous, more opulent pop adventures, and the songs are also painting a sharp picture, stitching together feelings that capture a scene. For example: A dancefloor, crowded with people where you dance alone, looking out of a window, trying to shake off a sense of unshakeable dread. It is an album that clearly articulates the feeling of Knowing Too Much about the world you are trying desperately to make worth living and loving in,
These songs also summon the imagery, or, rather, the feeling – of heat, which is actually friction, which, of course, is the patch of soil from which heat grows, but, in this case, it is vital to honor the soil and not only its product. By that I mean, there’s a delightfully frantic uncertainty that hovers over the relentless wanting that propels these songs, like when you wake up from the haze of a fever dream and, for a few moments, you are dancing between worlds, trying to remember what belongs to your actual life and what belongs to the you who, moments ago, was limitless. “Wannabeher” pulses and ponders the escape fantasy of fully embodying someone else who is not you, which is be one of the greatest manifestations of the album’s broader project of almost absurdist (complimentary) desire: I want to step into becoming someone else, just to see if they are actually surviving any better than I am, or if they’re just performing it as well as I am. And I adore “Why Do I Get A Good Feeling,” not only for how it hinges on an internal uncertainty that is never resolved – there’s no good reason to feel this good in times like these, and yet! It turns out I have no choice! – but I also adore the song for how long it lingers, beyond language, for well over a minute, as if the song itself is uncertain about the exit from a such a vibrant revelation, or as if the architects of the song would prefer you, for a little while longer, to dance within the good possibilities, to dance within the daydream.
Everyone I love is trying to feel less guilty about seeking pleasure, and I am no different. I have landed upon a new conclusion: it is, perhaps, also selfish to center only that which renders you immovable, to center yourself in the grand miseries of the world, which is another way of saying there is pleasure in reaching for someone beyond yourself, and sometimes you find another hand reaching for a brick, or a barrier worth tearing down, and that is also pleasure. I adore this album for how it attempts to translate the urgency of seeking, even when there is no concrete knowledge of what exists at the end of the seeking.
The Pat Parker poem works for me because the entirety of it is about the consideration of distance. What Parker is telling the reader is that the distance between her and her lover, for a little while, is shorter than the distance between Parker and the evils of the world. And this doesn’t diminish or lessen the evils of the world, she can, from just beyond her lover’s touch, still see them with enough clarity to describe them to us. But for now, there is a border, and the very nature of its implied and understood impermanence makes it worth cherishing. And the tension in the poem, the actual engine of the poem, which I also believe is the actual engine of this album, is all about surrender. Can you trust yourself enough to surrender to the possibility that in order to survive well, your heart may require being tied up with at least one other heart, but probably many other hearts. You have to surrender yourself to the possibility that your rage is a descendent of your capacity to love. Your grief is a descendent of your capacity to love. This album is within a lineage of work that asks the listener, how much better could we love the world and each other, if we weren’t so often placed in opposition to it?
And there may be no direct answer to be found, in my lifetime or yours. The world will betray your heart. That’s the bad news. The good news is that you can always hold on to desire, and sometimes the results carry your heart from one moment to a different, perhaps better one.
Featured image by Dean Bradshaw.
SOURCE: Official Bio
LINKS:
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