Lunadira

There’s almost a punk rock spirit in the way Lunadira approaches her music.

It seems ridiculous when you consider just how far her music is from the messy and inconsiderate cacophony of The Sex Pistols. But the spirit feels similar. And it’s not because she casually drops an F-bomb in a song that doesn’t sound like it should have one. Mostly it’s because like the forefathers of anarchic music, she seems to have an infectious lack of self-consciousness in her songwriting and how it’s portrayed.

That quality is sometimes rare in these parts, given there are imbued societal standards on appropriation, religion, politics and morality that often makes it taboo for a lot of musicians to write about what they are truly feeling. There is an almost secular aura about an artiste that writes from the bleeding heart on her sleeves, but it’s precisely that which is often missing in so much music here and most certainly worth her weight in gold.

And we have not even gotten to just how delectable the track truly is. Beginning with a bluesy guitar riff that almost sounds like it could’ve been lifted off any track on MTV in the grunge-loving mid-90s, sign-posted by saturated colors and flannel shirts, the track then takes an unexpected turn into soul balladry.

There is not a lot going on, just a twinkling piano leading the way for a repetitive programmed beat. But that aforementioned riff hangs around for the ride in the background. Like an undercoat of paint, it doesn’t jostle for attention but it’s so necessary to the complete picture that is the track, giving it an organic reference point at its core. The track is so gorgeous that you are almost distracted from the painful and vivid descriptions of a dysfunctional relationship in the lyrics

There was a time when musicians in these parts obsessed about not wanting to sound local, but more like their Western counterparts. ‘Stuck With You’ achieves that with spades but the irony is that Lunadira is probably unconcerned about that at all. She’s making music the only way she knows how and it was going to come out feeling that way anyway, no matter if it sounded like it was made in a Hollywood basement or the backstreets of Jalan Alor.

Between this and her ukulele-driven single last year “Forever’s Not Our Thing“, there is a lot of sonic cavern in between to fill. There is a genuine excitement on how she may fill it going forward but make no mistake, Lunadira is a genuinely exciting artiste that we are proud to call our own.

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