“Y’know, what I’ve learnt with this band is that everything happens slowly, and it’s a beautiful thing,” states Matt Lowell. It may seem like a simple line, but it means much more. In the space of just over a year and a half, Lo Moon have become a band weaved with mystery, chilling presence and an ability to shine stray lights into dark spaces. Not blazing the safety light loud and proud, but waiting for the moment to pull you out of the darkness. Time is vital, irreversible and inevitable. “It’s just the way that we operate,” Matt continues, “it’s the way the music was built.”
For Lo Moon, now feels like a moment they’ve been building towards long before they even existed as a band - pulled together from across state and country lines. Crisanta from Denver, Sam from London and Matt from New York - the chances of them running into each other’s lives may seem near-implausible, but fate had other ideas. Now they sit on the cusp of their debut album, a mesmerising collection that captures the essence of who they are and lays it out in stunning panoramic majesty, more like an (e)motion-picture soundtrack of stylish synth-pop dipped in noir sauce. A long way indeed from the lonesome nights spent in New York City that Matt spent crafting and scrapping together cuts and tracks from a passion that took over his very life.
“Growing up, there was always music playing in the house,” he recalls. “I grew up playing hockey, but then I started to play drums on the side and then picked up the guitar once I got to high school. It’s weird, music has always been a huge fabric, a massive part, of my being but it wasn’t until the junior year of high school when I decided that this was going to be the only thing I want to do for the rest of my life. It’s the only thing I think about and some days that drives me absolutely fucking mad, but that’s what you sign up for.”
The decision to move to LA was one Matt felt needed to happen, an important step out of his comfort zone in New York. “A bunch of people I knew from LA were trying to convince me that the music industry was moving out there, like all of the artists, and I saw that being from New York," he says. "Everyone was migrating, an exodus to LA almost. I had ‘Loveless’ and a bunch of songs written, and I just needed to find out what could happen if I went there. I needed to find a band and the right people to surround myself with, that had like-minded aspirations musically. I came to LA with an idea of what I wanted to accomplish, and it was to discover more about myself as an artist and to discover what I had to offer as an artist as well. To work out what it was I wanted to say.”
