Lunar Vacation

As one would expect of any historic city, the houses in Decatur, GA are old, and while many have been renovated to suit the needs of the 21st-century family, the one Lunar Vacation calls home has not. The porch is quaint and crumbly, the roof leaks, and there is a single bathroom shared by the band’s five members who insist that this is not, actually, a bad thing. “We go on tour and share a hotel room for a month and then all come back to the same house,” guitarist/vocalist Maggie Geeslin says cheerily, aware that to most, this scenario sounds maddening. “We’ve become homemakers together.” Just beyond the porch, the small vegetable garden produces enough to be proud of; in the cramped living room, there is always enough room for a house show, or a jam session. For ten months out of last year, engineer/bassist Ben Wulkan transformed the room into the ad-hoc studio wherein Lunar Vacation wrote and demoed their fearless sophomore album, Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire. “I used to be so protective of the songs when I gave them over to the band,” lyricist/vocalist/guitarist Gep Repasky says. “There’s so much trust involved, but this house helped us grow as best friends, as musicians, as a band.”

That newfound sense of trust is apparent on Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire, whose title, taken from the concluding track “You Shouldn’t Be,” is a thesis statement. While Lunar Vacation’s last album, 2021’s Inside Every Fig is a Dead Wasp, happily bathed in the waters of indie pop, their latest effort is exploratory, a product of many hours shared experimenting in a living room together. Inspired by prolific shapeshifters like Yo La Tengo and Björk, Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire adopts an ethos that every idea has the potential to be a good one. “Our last album was super produced, manicured,” Maggie says. “This one’s organic. We embraced mistakes; it made the work even better.” In other words: everything matters, everything’s fire.

Once billed as a band of high school friends, Lunar Vacation have transcended the cloying designation of “just kids” and have confronted the sink-or-swim mentality that overtakes you the minute you’re out of your parents’ basement. “Stop being so bitter,” Gep self-admonishes on the chorus of “Bitter” over a plodding, bony arrangement anchored by Connor Dowd’s drumming that summons Television. When they wrote the song, there was a lot to be bitter about; Gep had undergone a year of emotional tumult that led to a psychiatric hospitalization, which was both traumatic and transformative. Most of Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire documents that period, which the rest of the band witnessed as Gep’s closest friends. “When it happened, everyone was there. They brought me a note in the hospital, they brought me clothes, they brought me books.”

For a while after, the songs Gep wrote were lovelorn, angry, hopeless, but with Maggie’s encouragement, they began to see the duality in every lyric they penned, the cracks that let the light in. Now, Gep describes “Just for Today” as a song about both suicide and sex, as heavy as it is featherlight. When Lunar Vacation decamped to Athens, GA to record with Drew Vandenberg, Gep was mortified that “Set the Stage,” a song they’d written after a humiliating rejection, was the producer’s favorite. “It went from a super emo love song to, like, My Bloody Valentine,” Gep says, their astonishment still palpable a few months later. With Vandenberg behind the board and their bandmates’ unrelenting encouragement, Gep’s shame became a towering wall of sound.

After their hospitalization, Gep sought a sense of stillness they’d long been deprived of, which required letting go of the frenetic, elliptical thought patterns that had led them to rock bottom. In ways, the recording process mirrored the therapeutic, as the band made choices in the studio that, as Maggie puts it, “prioritized performance over perfection.” Mistakes started sounding like happy accidents that grew the band’s confidence and pushed them in unexpected directions. “Fantasy” begins muted and confessional, a smoke screen for the potent, psychedelic chorus that hits with the oomph of Portishead’s “Glory Box” when it drops. Opening track “Sick” is a bass-driven punk song, simple on its surface, but punctuated by Matteo DeLurgio’s rototoms, woodblock, and jaw harp, it offers an unsettling introduction to the album as Gep beckons a coming apocalypse. “The Earth is finally taking back her children,” they sing over the seasick arrangement, voice clear and unguarded, a beacon.

When Lunar Vacation started writing Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire, they returned to a song Gep started writing years ago called “Tom,” initially named for Vanderpump Rules cast member Tom Schwartz, whose maddening, happy-go-lucky approach to even the direst situations now modeled the cartoonish ease Gep was trying to enact in their own life. Abandoning the original premise, the band reconfigured the song in their living room while the sky dimmed to dusk outside. “We went through so many versions of it before finally settling,” Maggie says. The product of those many hours of work and laughter is sublime; just as “Set the Stage”  became an empowering epic, “Tom” is a blinding pop song, filled with the possibilities that a crush engenders. Nothing about it sounds vulnerable until the bridge, when the instrumentation falls away save for a sputtering drum machine that accompanies Gep’s isolated, reverbed vocals. “I want you to be my friend,” they sing. “Let me out or let me in! Let me in! Let me in!” And as those words repeat, Lunar Vacation crashes back in, just in time to catch their bandmate as they sing, “As lonely as it seems—”

In that single, isolated moment, surrounded by friends, loneliness seems impossible.