MUNA’s Fourth Album Is Darker Than the One That Broke Them
MUNA’s self-titled third album made them. It charted internationally for the first time, produced “Silk Chiffon”, and put them on tour with Lorde and Taylor Swift. The follow-up is the record they describe as sweaty.
Dancing on the Wall arrived on 8 May through Saddest Factory, running thirty-nine minutes and fifty seconds across thirteen tracks, all of them produced by band member Naomi McPherson.
They Named the Thing They Were Moving Away From
Bands rarely characterise their own previous image with much precision. MUNA did: this record is “dark, poppy, intense, sweaty, funky” as opposed to the work of the “queer joy mini-skirt rollerblade” band of the album before.
That phrase is doing something specific. It is not a rejection of the earlier record so much as an acknowledgment that it produced an image — a set of expectations about tone and presentation that had begun to arrive ahead of the music.
Several publications heard the shift as a darker sonic palette, and the band have not disputed it. Following a commercial breakthrough with something deliberately less bright is a real risk, because the audience that arrived for the breakthrough arrived for a mood as much as for songs.
The counterweight is that the album is described as more consistently upbeat than their previous work, which sounds contradictory until you separate tempo from tone. A record can be faster and heavier at once, and a dance album is the obvious place for that to happen.
A Solo Folk Record Changed the Band’s Album
The reason given for the upbeat consistency is unexpected. In 2024 lead singer Katie Gavin released a debut solo album, What a Relief, in a more acoustic, folk-pop direction than anything MUNA does.
McPherson has pointed to that record as an influence on this one — not on its sound, but on its energy. With the quieter, more introspective material already placed elsewhere, the band album had no obligation to accommodate it.
That is a genuinely useful function for a side project, and one that is rarely stated so plainly. A solo record is usually framed as an artist exploring something the band cannot contain; here it appears to have worked as a release valve that let the band become more single-minded.
The credits show how collective the result is. All thirteen tracks are written by Gavin, Maskin and McPherson, with additional writers on four, and the personnel list has each member arranging and adding production across every track.
A Book About Autocracy in the Songwriting Notes
The band have said the writing was informed by the political climate in the United States under the second Trump administration, and cited M. Gessen’s book Surviving Autocracy as an influence.
Maskin has noted that while earlier MUNA albums carried political themes, “Big Stick” is the most overtly political song the band have released.
Naming a book rather than a position is a notable choice, and a more precise one. It tells a listener what the record was made against without converting the songs into argument, and it locates the influence in reading rather than in reaction.
The band also put that song to a specific use. On 31 March, ahead of the album, “Big Stick” was made available to buy for forty-eight hours through Bandcamp, with proceeds going to Pal Humanity.
A time-limited direct sale is a deliberate mechanism. It bypasses streaming entirely, converts attention into a measurable amount of money, and expires — which is the only reliable way to make a purchase feel urgent when the song will be freely available six weeks later. Our piece on why merchandise is half the business covers the wider direct-to-fan economics.
Two Interludes Under Twenty Seconds
The tracklist has an internal shape worth noticing. “Party’s Over” runs nineteen seconds and “…Unless” sixteen, sitting at positions seven and eleven.
Two fragments that short, placed at the two-thirds points of each half, are structural rather than musical. They break the record into sections and, given the titles, appear to be doing a job of commentary — a party ending, then a qualification attached to the ending.
Around them the songs are mostly compact. “It Gets So Hot” opens at 2:41, “Wannabeher” runs 2:34, “On Call” 2:35 and “Big Stick” 2:36, with only “Why Do I Get a Good Feeling” passing four and a half minutes.
Thirteen tracks in under forty minutes is disciplined for a dance record, where the temptation is to let grooves run. It suggests an album built as songs rather than as an extended mood.
The outside writers are placed carefully too. Daniel Tashian appears on the opener, Leland on “Wannabeher” and Justin Tranter on two consecutive tracks, “Mary Jane” and “Girl’s Girl” — four of thirteen, clustered rather than scattered, on a record otherwise written by the three members alone.
Bringing in outside writers on a fourth album is unremarkable in pop and slightly loaded in a band context, where collective authorship is part of the identity. Keeping it to four tracks, and keeping the band’s names on all of them, is a compromise that preserves both.
The Rollout Started on Instagram
The campaign opened without a label announcement. On 4 February the band posted video clips promoting “It Gets So Hot”, which appeared on their own website five days later, and on the same day announced that “Dancing on the Wall” would arrive on 10 February.
That single brought the album announcement with it, along with a short run of intimate release shows in small venues for May — a deliberately modest tour for a band who had just spent two years opening arenas.
“So What” followed on 17 March with a video, and “Wannabeher” on 14 April. On release day a video for “Eastside Girls” appeared alongside the announcement of a proper tour for September and October.
Small rooms first, arenas later, is the reverse of the usual order and it fits the record. An album described as sweaty is better introduced in a venue where that is literally true.
Where the Reviews Landed
The reception was solid and unusually spread. The album holds a Metacritic score of 73 from ten reviews, with five out of five from Dork, four from DIY, eight out of ten from Clash, 7.6 from Pitchfork, seven from both NME and Slant, six from Exclaim! and a C+ from Paste.
A range running from full marks to a C+ is wider than most records produce, and it is what a deliberate change of direction usually generates. Reviewers who valued the previous album’s brightness and reviewers who wanted more weight were never going to agree on this one.
The aggregate sits below the acclaim their breakthrough attracted, which is the ordinary cost of the move. Whether it was worth paying is a question the next record answers, not this one.
What the album does secure is independence from its predecessor. A band who repeat a breakthrough spend the rest of their career being measured against it; a band who deliberately do not have at least established that the sound was a choice rather than the only thing they had.
Producing it themselves is the other half of that. With McPherson at the desk on all thirteen tracks, there is no external producer to credit or blame for the change of direction — it belongs entirely to the three of them.
Dancing on the Wall is out now on Saddest Factory.
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