A common question now: what happens when a much buzzed band who’ve hidden behind a cloak of anonymity finally show themselves? And how do you time it? For MS MR, releasing a brilliant debut album was all it took.
Lifting The Veil
With their debut album Secondhand Rapture flying off the shelves this month, it’s definitely time to find out about this initially mysterious band. MS MR have at last introduced themselves as Lizzy Plapinger (MS) and Max Hershenow (MR), and together they have unveiled a surprisingly colossal and atmospheric record. The pair began the project anonymously, inevitably creating buzz in the blogosphere. Although this could be seen as a clichÃd gimmick to keep people guessing (Yes, I’m talking about you Wu Lyf), MS MR actually had a legitimate reason. ‘We both wanted validation without our names being attached to the music’, Lizzy explains. ‘We wanted people to come to the music for the right reasons. I’ve had my foot in the door for a few years now on the industry side of things, and we didn’t want the music to be judged because of that name attachment. We were worried that it would become more about one of us than the other’.
Listening to the album, it’s strikingly obvious that it’s a joint effort. The production side is mainly attributed to Max, and Secondhand Rapture is an incredible feat for a debut. Similarly Lizzy’s vocals, vision, and stage presence are hard to critique for such a new yet blossoming project. ‘Everything we do is due to our partnership. When we did put ourselves in the limelight, it was important that it wasn’t about us individually but together’. MS MR initially met while studying at university, but the pair only started to grow closer after the process. They were both based in New York City, and Lizzy was running a record label called Neon Gold. ‘I had just started producing so I emailed Lizzy looking to start a project’, Max reveals. This particular email led to the pair recording a cover of Patrick Wolf’s TIme of My Life and consequently the creation of their early releases.
Listening to Secondhand Rapture, it would be difficult to argue that it’s not a cohesive record. However the pair admit that they were initially unsure of a direction to head in, and struggled to take themselves seriously. ‘When we first set out we didn’t really know what we were doing, so we were open to a lot of experimentation. Nothing was pre-meditated. We didn’t think of a direction or even as ourselves as a band, it was just that we enjoyed working together’. It wasn’t until the pair had a collection of material that they thought about making a release and recognised the defining characteristics of their sound.
MS MR’s sound has been compared to the likes of Florence & The Machine and Lana Del Rey, but it is certainly difficult to categorise their individual brand of dramatic pop. ‘I think we like to think of our sound as an accumulation of all the music that we’ve listened to throughout our lives’, Lizzy declares. The pair didn’t reference a lot of bands while writing and working in the studio. ‘It was more as we were looking back and hearing people comparing us to bands that we realised how people have influenced us’. MS MR have undoubtably delved into many different genres with the record, with Lizzy having electronic and R&B influences while Max comes from a folk and rock background. ‘It’s all over the place’ Max explains, but that’s exactly the reason why the album oozes appeal.
With a title like Secondhand Rapture, it’s also clear that the pair haven’t completely detached themselves from their ambiguous roots. Max clarifies that Secondhand represents ‘living in a hyper-mediated space, where we have the opportunity to experience our worlds through a computer screen. The word Rapture is the idea that we write our songs in wild weather or a sense of impending doom’. MS MR wrote their first EP in 2011, the week that Harold Camping predicted the rapture to occur. Similarly the track Hurricane is in reference to Hurricane Irene, and the band clearly fed off the high energy that was touching them in New York.
The band’s fascination with modern media is also taken out of their music and into the virtual world through their visual aesthetics. ‘We definitely consider ourselves musicians first, music is our drive it’s everything we do. But being a musician now you have the opportunity to create a world around the music in a way that even five years ago you couldn’t’. MS MR use Tumblr as a way to articulate their aesthetic and they are keen to denote that there has been no external label involvement. ‘We’re both very visually orientated and that’s the thing that we naturally gravitated towards. People are going to be listening to your music in the environment of their computer screen, so why not create a world around that’.
Emerging from the studio and into a live environment is not something all bands take to, but MS MR have been overwhelmed by support by fans at recent shows. ‘Our favorite thing to do is to be in the studio, because that’s something that we really love, but the live shows are such an amazing addition to the project’. Both Max and Lizzy are very much performers at heart, and have experience of being on the stage previously. ‘It’s great to see people connecting with the music and singing your lyrics back to you. It’s really crazy, we’re in Montreal right now and all of the crowd knew the words. That’s really mind blowing’.
It’s not a secret that the majority of lyrics in the charts at the moment don’t deal with particularly enlightening subject matter, but it’s a different story when listening to Secondhand Rapture. ‘I think the music is so emotive, visceral, and emotional that I hope that even if you don’t speak English you could still listen to the song and feel emotion’, Lizzy explains. ‘But the lyrics are something that I do take a lot of care and thought with. I keep an ongoing scrapbook and journal, collections of lines or phrases that appeal to me. I think that songs often mean two different things to each of us and that gives the tracks an extra dimension’.
The pair are playing an abundance of festivals this across the US, UK, Europe and Australia this summer. If you’re lucky enough to be catching any of them, Lizzy shares these motherly suggestions; ‘definitely take wellies, and a trash bag to use as a raincoat if it rains. You’ll need a water bottle otherwise you’ll have to keep buying it all day. Don’t forget to keep drinking water otherwise you’ll pass out’.
– Alice Simkins
