On her solo debut album What A Relief, MUNA’s lead vocalist Katie Gavin lays it all out on the table. As queer, sapphic pop dominates the modern zeitgeist—with Gen-Z artists like Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan and Renee Rapp at the forefront—Gavin provides storytelling for the elder queers; those who have been out for years, but are still reckoning with the choices they made in their 20s. And while Gavin has gotten by with a little help from her friends over the past decade, What A Relief finds her grappling with the things weighing on her heart alone.
What A Relief features Gavin delivering silky, comforting vocals across a variety of genres: rock, country, folk, pop and more. As Gavin comes into her own as a solo artist, she finally shares her stories of her own accord, and on her own sonic terms. The album opens with the soft, vulnerable “I Want It All,” which features Gavin laying out her complicated desires. “I want you to fuck me when we’re not touching / I want you to judge me like the second coming,” she sings over lightly-tinged guitar strings, inviting in the good and the bad.
What A Relief feeds the demographic to which it feels catered: thirtysomethings seeking comfort in queer pop. One of the most therapeutic tracks is “The Baton,” a letter to Gavin’s future daughter and a callback to the lessons her mother taught her. “Go on girl, it’s out of my hands / I can’t come, where you’re goin’ / Time unfurls and you’ll understand / The baton, it will be passed again,” sings Gavin on the track’s chorus. On this particular song, Gavin arrives with the fortitude of an older woman, as the electronic Postal Service-esque sounds take us back to the early DIY days of MUNA, and fiddles recall Gavin’s Midwest upbringing.
Though many of What A Relief’s songs were written years ago, they also feel timeless—as if ready to mark symbolic moments in a queer person’s life. Take the hopeful “Casual Drug Use,” which Gavin wrote in March 2020. On this particular song, Gavin recognizes her vices, opting to move forward and not fall into old ways. “It’s a little unnerving how fast I’ll fall back into fixing my issues with casual drug use / But I’m not gonna lose it ’cause we’re not going to get wherever we’re going, right this moment,” she sings over a breezy guitar-and-drum-driven track.
Perhaps the most painfully relatable song is the Mitski-assisted “As Good As It Gets,” on which the two recognize that the love they once sought out doesn’t live up to the fantasy. Gavin opens the song asking, “Do I disappoint you? / Am I not what I seemed?” and admitting, “I get disappointed too / When love is not what I dreamed.” Throughout the song, both Gavin and Mitski reckon with the fact that the love they share with their respective partners is imperfect, but there’s no one else they’d rather experience the mundanity with.
Part of queer adulthood is choosing those you call family, and going through both the good and the bad moments by their side. A notable song called “Sweet Abby Girl” is a bare-bones ballad about Gavin’s late dog, but upon first listen, one may believe the forlorn anecdote could be about a human baby.
The penultimate track “Keep Walking” feels like a continuation of the song “Home By Now” from MUNA’s 2022 self-titled third album. On “Home By Now,” Gavin finds herself exploring the possibilities of how things could’ve turned out if she had stayed with an ex of hers and waited for things to turn around. But “Keep Walking” finds Gavin happy for her ex, and finally at peace with the relationship’s end.
By the end of What A Relief, listeners will find themselves having let out harrowing emotions through tears, perhaps even anger, but ultimately achieving a sense of relief. As the younger pop girlies detail their trials and tribulations with puppy love and reckon with notoriety they didn’t ask for, Gavin sings from a place of having been there before. Though navigating queer life as a thirtysomething poses its own unique challenges, Gavin puts into words the things we, as queer adults, are afraid to say, while fulfilling her creative needs in the process.
The modern pop landscape is dominated by sapphic sounds, and decades from now, when we recall the 2020s, queer women and femme artists will be the ones that endure in our memories. Though Gavin—and her MUNA bandmates Josette Maskin and Naomi McPherson—have never sought fame within the realm of pop, What A Relief feels more timely than ever in this particularly fluid era of music.
Read our interview with Katie Gavin here.
