Photo: Violet Teegardin

Lunar Vacation lose their heads in the bright and buzzing “Mold”, announce debut album

After a few years of building up steam and excitement, Atlanta band Lunar Vacation have announced their debut album: it’s called Inside Every Fig Is A Dead Wasp and comes out on October 29 through Keeled Scales.

They already shared “Shrug” from it earlier this year, and today deliver “Mold”, with vocalist and guitarist Grace Repasky revealing that the song is about “…navigating the oddities and strange tides of West Coast culture, specifically L.A., and influencer lifestyle for the first time. We played a festival out there and it felt like I was in an immersive Instagram advertisement. It kind of freaked me out. To make it all more confusing, the song also deals with having feelings for someone wrapped up in that culture and the conflicting feelings of wanting to fit in.”

Lunar Vacation have certainly captured the bright, picture-perfect sheen of Instagram culture on “Mold”, with dreamy trills of guitar, a bouncing bassline, bounding melodies – and even some conga drums later in the song. Repasky is at the centre of this, certainly a lot less confident than the bountiful instrumentation, seemingly drowning in simultaneous desire and self-doubt. “I could be anything you wanted,” she opines in the lovable chorus, “I’d still be changing with the seasons.” Her overwhelming infatuation is presented so earnestly, and amidst such delightful arrangements, that we feel our pulse quickening alongside hers – an acute feeling of simultaneous euphoria and agony.

The pastel-hued innocence is marvellously captured in the video, directed by Rach Rios Rehm, which you can watch below.

Lunar Vacation’s debut album Inside Every Fig Is A Dead Wasp arrives on October 29 through Keeled Scales (pre-order). You can find the band on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.