MUNA

Three students and a Bandcamp upload

MUNA came together in 2013 at the University of Southern California, where Katie Gavin, Josette Maskin and Naomi McPherson found a common language that did not begin anywhere near pop music. Ska and progressive rock were the early reference points before the three settled on synthesisers, drum machines and Gavin's voice sitting high over the top of them. The first release, an EP called More Perfect, went up on Bandcamp and SoundCloud in the summer of 2014 with nobody behind it.

It was enough to get them signed: RCA in the United States, Columbia in the United Kingdom. The major-label debut About U followed in 2017 and Saves the World in 2019, both records that reviewers liked more than the accounting department did. In 2020, a few months into the pandemic, RCA dropped them — the explanation, as the band has described it since, came down to not making enough money. Two major-label albums in, all three members were queer, out and unsigned, at a point when most bands in that position quietly stop existing.

Saddest Factory and the record that changed the arithmetic

In May 2021 MUNA signed to Saddest Factory Records, the imprint Phoebe Bridgers runs through Dead Oceans. The first thing to come out of that arrangement was "Silk Chiffon", a duet with Bridgers released later that year, which drew year-end notice from Rolling Stone among others and has functioned ever since as the band's closing argument on stage.

The self-titled album that followed on 24 June 2022 was the one that shifted their standing. Sonically it moved in several directions at once — synth-pop with new wave, disco and hyperpop pulling at the edges, which Gavin summarised at the time as a record whose sound explodes in a lot of different directions. It scored 82 out of 100 on Metacritic across thirteen reviews; The Line of Best Fit gave it a perfect score and called it all killer, no filler, while Dork argued it was quite possibly the album of the year to that point. Commercially it was their first to chart at all: number 188 on the Billboard 200, number 61 in the United Kingdom, number two on Billboard's Heatseekers chart. Five singles came off it, including "Anything but Me", "Kind of Girl", "Home by Now" and "What I Want".

The live pedigree was built in parallel and largely in front of other people's audiences. MUNA were the first support act on Harry Styles' debut solo tour, and have since opened for Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour, for Lorde and for Bridgers — an unusual apprenticeship for a band whose own headline rooms were still measured in hundreds.

Dancing on the Wall

The fourth album was announced with its title track on 10 February 2026, followed by "So What" on 17 March and "Wannabeher" on 14 April. Dancing on the Wall arrived on 8 May 2026 through Saddest Factory and Dead Oceans, produced by McPherson, and runs to a compact thirty-nine minutes and fifty seconds. A video for "Eastside Girls" landed alongside it.

The band's own description of the record was a dark, poppy, intense, sweaty, funky dance album, and the deliberate contrast is with the self-titled record rather than against it. McPherson has framed the turn towards up-tempo dance material partly as a reaction to Gavin having just made a folk-leaning solo album; Gavin has called the resulting sound MUNA's actual DNA. The songwriting sits against the second Trump administration without becoming a pamphlet about it — desire, burnout and precarity carrying the political weight rather than slogans.

Reception was warm rather than unanimous: a Metacritic average of 73, five stars from Dork, four from DIY, a C+ from Paste, and seven out of ten from The Line of Best Fit, which read the album as an argument that the dancefloor remains a place for community and defiance and singled out "Wannabeher" for the clarity with which it handles queer desire. NME's summary — euphoric pop with a shadowy side — is about right. The charts were modest against the reviews: number 64 in the United Kingdom and number 160 on the Billboard 200, with better placings on the independent charts at number seven and number 23 respectively.

Where they stand in September 2026

Gavin's solo debut What a Relief came out on Saddest Factory in 2024 without disturbing the band, which is part of why the fourth MUNA album sounds like a deliberate correction rather than a drift. The trio spent the summer of 2026 on festival stages — Hinterland, Capitol Hill Block Party and Lollapalooza, where they opened with "It Gets So Hot" and the title track and were noted for the ease of the three-way chemistry rather than for any spectacle.

Speaking to The FADER on 17 August 2026, McPherson set out an unambiguous position on generative artificial intelligence, saying the band vehemently opposes it and the effect it has on people, their communities and the data centres built to serve it. The same conversation found them describing Dancing on the Wall as emotional synth-pop with a lot of muscle, and enthusing at length about the pop reality series Pop Star Academy — a reminder that the band's politics and their appetite for mainstream pop have never been in tension.

The Gets So Hot Tour

The touring cycle began in May 2026 with a run of small album-release shows: two nights at the Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles on 8 and 9 May, and four at the 650-capacity Music Hall of Williamsburg in New York, plus intimate dates in London. Those shows used a strict format — the new album played through in sequence, then an extended second half of older material.

The proper headline run, announced on 8 May and named the Gets So Hot Tour, opened at The Van Buren in Phoenix on 17 September 2026 and covers more than thirty dates. September took in Austin, Dallas, Nashville, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh; October adds Boston, Toronto, Detroit, Minneapolis and San Diego before finishing at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado, on 21 October. The European leg runs through November — Dublin, Glasgow, Manchester, Bristol, London's Eventim Apollo on 17 November, then Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels, Cologne, Warsaw and a close in Berlin. Hemlocke Springs supports on most of the North American dates.

What the show does

The current set runs to roughly nineteen songs. Setlist data gathered across 2026 shows a fifteen-song main set opening with "It Gets So Hot" and ending on "Buzzkiller", with "Dancing on the Wall", "Wannabeher", "On Call" and "So What" as fixtures; the four-song encore, played at most but not all shows, runs "Promise", "Anything but Me", "I Know a Place" and "Silk Chiffon", which has closed thirteen of the year's shows.

Staging is functional rather than elaborate. A screen carried Gavin's deadpan face through "So What" at the Shrine on 9 May and a countdown clock ran over the final song; an inflatable horse is sent out during "Anything but Me" to match the lyric, and at the Williamsburg shows it was passed through the crowd. Between songs the band talks, at length and without apology — at the Shrine, Gavin and McPherson thanked the room repeatedly, acknowledged how quickly people had learned unfamiliar material, and stated plainly that MUNA has always been a political band. Reviewers of both the Los Angeles and New York shows noted the same imbalance: the new songs are received well, the older ones are sung back at volume, and "Buzzkiller" reliably reduces part of the room to tears. The Williamsburg venue had no air conditioning during a heatwave, which the tour's title now appears to have anticipated.