The members of Ava Luna operate in a unique musical universe of their own creation. The Brooklyn band puts its own distinctly slanted spin on progressive, experimental Pop and the results are often mesmerizing, frequently beautiful and consistently exhilarating. The quintet’s diverse influences are distilled into a singularly dynamic, dream-like sound, which draws from Funk, Indie Rock, Post Punk, Dance and Soul music. Perhaps their closest contemporary (and most frequent “RIYL” companion) is Dirty Projectors, of which Ava Luna’s keyboardist/singer Felicia Douglass is a touring member. But the band has grown to translate those core building blocks in a less disjointed, more fluid manner (though the music has long been jubilantly loaded with unanticipated twists).
Ava Luna began as a bedroom-recording project, for which musician Carlos Hernandez (then in high school) used the name Ava. It grew into a band when Hernandez was joined by collegemates Julian Fader (drums) and since-departed keyboardist Nathan Tompkins.
The project continued to mutate and evolve (which has become something of a trademark Ava Luna characteristic) in the lead-up to its first non-self-released album, Ice Level, in 2012. After hooking up with Western Vinyl Records, the band released 2014’s Electric Balloon and 2015’s Infinite House. Since then, the members of Ava Luna concentrated on their own projects — Hernandez is a noted producer (he worked on Frankie Cosmos and Speedy Ortiz’s latest LPs) and Douglass and Becca Kauffman were busy with their solo projects (Gemma and Jennifer Vanilla, respectively).
Ava Luna’s sound has been called “Dance Punk,” meant as a callback to the NYC No Wave jams of the late ’70s concocted by artists like ESG and Liquid Liquid. And while that kind of reconstituted Funk offers a fair comparison, the dancing one imagines doing to the group’s spacey music is what one might find in a discotheque on the moon. That makes the title of Ava Luna’s stellar new (and best yet) album, Moon 2, all the more fitting. The outside work each member indulged on their break from Ava Luna reportedly affected the more collaborative spirit of the album, with the other members writing and singing more.
Hernandez recently told Noisey he opened up to deeper contributions from the others as the result of “a kind of ego death” he experienced since the last album. “The magical alchemy of Ava Luna became really self-evident with (Moon 2),” he said.
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This article appears in Sep 5-12, 2018.