There’s a gold and pink glittering sticker plastered on the front of my laptop that reads “MX LONELY SAVED MY LIFE”. And it’s true. I’ve been blasting their 2024 EP SPIT in my car constantly this fall. One rainy evening in October I was cruising along the west side highway, singing along to Connection, when a fuel tanker truck tried to switch lanes right into me. Instead of swerving into the barrier to possibly flip-jump off the bridge and die Final Destination style, I hit the brakes and dropped out of the way by mere inches. If some disc other than this electric MX Lonely banger had been playing, there’s not a chance my reflexes would have been quick enough. I still have so much to live for, like MX Lonely’s recently announced album ALL MONSTERS, out February 20th, 2026 on Julia’s War Recordings. Earlier this week I got together with Rae Haas and Jake Harms from the Brooklyn, NY, heavy gaze group to talk about the upcoming album, special tunings, touring, and the DIY ethic. Below are edited excerpts from our conversation.

We’re with MX Lonely at a coffee shop, someplace, somewhere. Let’s start by introducing ourselves and what noise we make in the band for anyone getting introduced to you here for the first time.

Rae: Sweet, my name is Rae. I play synth, and sing, and write a lot of the lyrics for MX Lonely.

Jake: My name is Jake, I play guitar, and I sing, and I write the rest of the lyrics for MX Lonely.

Fantastic. First off, congratulations! You have a new single out, Big Hips. A new album announcement as well, ALL MONSTERS, a new label, lots of new things. Anything you want to say about these developments and where you’re at at the moment?

Rae: Yeah, I mean I’m so excited to put the whole record out. I think it’s really against my internal nature to be dropping singles, I always want to put the whole thing out. But I think there’s something about the patience of it and also working with Julia’s War, which is sort of, I feel like, a label of misfits, is really awesome. But Doug Dulgarian, who runs that label, and is in Tagabow, is an old friend of Jake's. They’ve known each other for a long time, they did some video work for us early on. It’s cool to see them make success paving their own way. I’m hoping that everyone on that label sort of has a similar anti-massive commercial success... massive commercial success, if that makes sense.

Jake: Yeah It feels like a really good spot to be in where things are being done legitimately but I don’t feel like we’re “dealing with the man”.

Rae: 100%. People are like “Oh you have a label”. But... it’s not really like that, it’s like, we got a label, and they got our backs with it.

Jake: Yeah, it feels good, it feels real.

Rae: When completing an album you kind of have these songs ready for a while and it feels so right to have them coming out now. You spend so much time working on the art, working on everything that goes into it, that being able to release it feels amazing because it opens up this whole new channel for other artistic explorations. It’s been a minute since we put out SPIT, our previous EP, people are ready for a new thing.

Jake: The weirdest part of being a musician is that unlike other mediums like filmmaking, or writing, or painting, is that you make this thing at a time and place and then you have to go out and tour it for the rest of your life. And the better it does, the longer you have to tour it. We’re kind of a long form band, we love making records, but when we did SPIT we did it in a form that was short and concise and punchy in mind, and then have toured on it for almost two years which is kind of strange to be touring on 20 minutes of music for two years. But it was cool because the EP consistently found more people over that time. It’s nice to put out new music to show people more sides of what you do.

To give some context of my experience with MX Lonely, the first time I ever saw you perform was 2024. It was April at a headlining show you did at Gold Sounds. It was long, it was late, a five band bill...

Jake: (laughing) you stayed 'til the end of that.

Yeah it was Buff Ginger, Bloodsport, Doused, Lockstep, and MX Lonely. I did stay for the entire time because even though I hadn’t seen you before I knew for some reason it would be worth it. It was a great show, great set, during the SPIT era. I wasn’t too familiar with your catalog and I remember you played S.W.I.M. towards the end. I had been listening to a lot of Elliot Smith’s Either/Or and self-titled albums at the time and S.W.I.M. sneaks in that lyric from Christian Brothers at the very end. I remember doing a double take and thinking “Did I really just hear that?”. I wrote about it in the review but it was a nice moment for me to build a mental bridge because subconsciously I was thinking of MX Lonely as having the melodic moodiness of Elliot Smith, but delivered in a heavy, loud, wall-of-sound type of way. Then I read something later that you use some of the unique tunings that Elliot used?

Jake: Our standard guitar tuning is kind of the Clementine tuning.

What is that?

Jake: Elliot played a whole step down. So it’s D standard and then he tunes to open stuff from that, so everything is in half-open C.

And you just like the texture of it?

Jake: I was writing a lot in D standard around the time we did Cadonia, most of that record is in D standard. Then I was shifting to this other kind of open tuning. It just started to happen that more songs in the set were in that tuning and I started learning songs that were in different tunings, in this tuning. So all of ALL MONSTERS is in that open tuning. At this point I’ll probably try something else for the next record, but we’re a one-guitar band and I think there’s something about playing in an open tuning where you’re able to stack notes in the chords and make things feel bigger than just one guitar.

Rae: Totally, you’re definitely a two-guitar/one-guitarist. We’ve tried to play with another guitar and it’s just so much.

So the first gig I saw you at was 2024 and the next one wasn’t until a year later, April of 2025. It was at Baby’s, you opened for Cryogeyser . You played Big Hips there and I happened to get the breakdown on video. I watched it over and over and over again because it was so good and wasn’t anywhere in your discography, I kept thinking “Where can I find this song?!”. Then you released Big Hips a few weeks ago and I happened to be back at Baby’s that weekend. I was with some friends and kept talking about you, “you got to listen to this song Big Hips”, to anybody that would listen. Then the next morning I woke up to an email from your publicist with an early preview of ALL MONSTERS and was STOKED. So I’ve heard the new album, it’s great, it’s fantastic, I’m excited for more people to hear it. That being said, how do you think ALL MONSTERS relates to your last album?

Jake: It’s like Cadonia and SPIT were two opposites of the same coin. Cadonia is really cerebral and SPIT is really punchy, intense...

Rae: Visceral.

Jake: and also SPIT is a lot of Rae singing and Cadonia is a lot of me singing and we kind of wanted to make a record that bridged those two worlds with ALL MONSTERS. And it was informed a lot by how much we’ve toured and played live. When we recorded SPIT we hadn’t even toured yet. We tracked it mid-SPIT touring cycle and worked on it all this year as we were touring.

I was wondering about that. It seemed like 2024/2025 you were on the road. So you were on the road, and also writing this album, and also recording this album all at the same time?

Rae: Totally.

Jake: And working jobs.

Rae: We played a lot of stuff off of ALL MONSTERS on the road, too. It was kind of like we were testing and workshopping things a little bit.

Jake: It’s funny because Big Hips didn’t enter into the world of playing live until fall of last year. We did two tours and were trying out all this new material from ALL MONSTERS. I felt like we were missing a song that hits people in the face so we went back and found this demo we did for Big Hips. I wouldn’t say we did it as a joke but we kind of didn’t take it that seriously and thought “why don’t we just try this”, but make the chorus hit like Deftones Back To School. Then it was one of those songs where as soon as we started playing it live we thought “This song really works”. It’s a nice entree to the rest of the record which is full of songs that are, quite frankly, harder to play.

So did touring really influence how the record was constructed? It sounds like you were able to get a lot of in-person live feedback in the moment of these new songs.

Jake: I think so... I don’t know how much the arrangements changed but it definitely showed us how they affected the audiences.

Rae: We have this little recording studio that we built out of a basement in Crown Heights. Gabe, our bassist, went to school for recording engineering so it’s really easy for us to demo stuff. We love demo-ing stuff out and having a private playlist with a catalog of songs.

Do you have any reflections at this point in your career?

Rae: I’m always trying to dig deeper and explore more. Before music I had gone to school for theatre, I did a lot of dance stuff, all sorts of different rabbit holes of performance and interaction with live people. Most of the stuff I did in theatre was immersive theatre which is dealing with people and dealing with crowds. And I’m always trying to get deeper into the craft of songwriting. When meeting Jake I had initially just planned to do some overdubs on some of their solo stuff. I had all these journals of lyrics and ideas. Meeting Jake was an awesome moment of working with a multi-instrumentalist who’s so good at arranging. We have a really good balance of skillsets.

Jake: It was really fun to work with Rae because they’d never really recorded music before and you were excited about it. I’ve always been the lead singer of bands and it was nice when I met Rae where I could be in a band where I could write songs and have a lot of influence over the sound, but I love just being able to play guitar and have Rae front the band. Seeing what they do with people and how they can run the crowd like that, it's something that I don’t have in the same way and I love being in a band with someone who’s fearless like that. I’ve never been in a band with people who’ve enjoyed touring as much, who’ve been willing and down to put in the work. There’s so much more day to day work being in a band that I think people realize. Overall, I’ve never been in a group that was as unified on all the different fronts of what it is to be a band.

Speaking of touring, do you have anything you can say about how you want to or how you’re going to tour to support ALL MONSTERS?

Jake: Unfortunately not quite yet. There is a lot of stuff in the works...

Rae: We will be touring

Jake: It’s going to get announced early next year, but we’re playing Market Hotel December 10th with Tagabow and Winter.

What would you say to a band that has aspirations to tour a lot? Or aspirations to put out a full album, or get on a label that they really appreciate, but is a band that isn’t quite there yet. What would you say to an artist that’s in that position?

Rae: I think finding other musicians and bands that are in the same place as you and putting together really awesome DIY stuff is sort of a first step. Talking to people about who they know in other cities, like if you know other bands that are touring.

Jake: The big way that we started out with MX in 2022 is that we were booking a lot of shows. We didn’t start out having a million friends and getting asked to play a lot of stuff. We were booking a lot of our own shows. Which makes you in it for more than just yourself, which is a huge part of being in a band and in a community. Try to work a job where you can be honest about the fact that you’re a musician and want to tour. It’s very hard if you’re working somewhere and you’re not telling your employer for one reason or another. People ask us a lot how we’re able to tour so much and we’ve been luckily able to carve out a way to work freelance and have been doing that for a number of years. I feel like if we weren’t doing that, we wouldn’t be touring as much as we do.

Rae: Just get out and do it. Go to shows, talk to strangers, figure out where the DIY shows are in your area. Figure out how you can be of service to people in your own community.

We’re getting towards the end here. Anything else you want to mention, talk about, hype up?

Jake: We got a new single dropping December 10th, Shape Of An Angel. For the video, Rae trained with a wrestler, and they get suplexed in the video.

Rae: Shoutout to the Queer Punk Outlaws if you’re in New York and looking for underground & DIY, and to Technique to Training Wrestling Academy in Brooklyn. If you want to go learn how to wrestle. Very fun, highly recommend it.