Friendship Shines Through Moontype's Masterful Indie Rock Debut

Most of the songs on the album, out April 2 via Born Yesterday Records, mention water in some form, whether it's as a vessel to communicate self-doubt as on "Anti-Divinity," personal change ("Am I the ocean with no salt / Hiding out between the party boats" on "Blue Michigan") or navigating new relationships ("Got sucked into the whirlpool of imagining your signs" on "Stuck On You"). "I like to compare myself to a rock. It seeps into my writing because I think about myself as a changing person and people around me changing," McCarthy says over Zoom. She explains that she majored in geology at Oberlin and in her lab classes would go on field trips to study how water, over time, eroded and shaped surrounding rock formations. If you know where to look, the shape, texture, and seams of these rock formations explain their histories of rising and falling sea levels, past marshes around the land that no longer exist. "Continual change and moving over time has become something I think is inside of me," says McCarthy. 

Like her then-future bandmates, McCarthy also studied at Oberlin's Conservatory of Music. While Cruz and Emerson majored in jazz performance, she took a more unconventional route majoring in technology in music and related arts, which Cruz and Hunton joke was the "synth dungeon" at the college. McCarthy says the program fostered " "weirdos making weird art." "To give you a very extreme example," says McCarthy, "Somebody who graduated right before I entered the program skinned a rabbit on stage." Her bandmates laugh over the Zoom call and mention another recital which involved "a ritualistic burial of a boombox in the woods." 

While McCarthy never fully embraced her program's artistic excesses, she used the environment to write about a third of the songs that would later appear on Bodies of Water. Her earliest material as Moontype were completely solo affairs, self-recorded with just her electric bass and her voice. Songs like "Lush" honed in on the small moments, like feeling depressed at a house party and "Crying all your makeup off / Melting like a glacier in the salty ocean." Others, like "Alpha," celebrate the triumph of seeing a friend play their first house show and absolutely kill it. McCarthy sings, "When she sings she is a wolf, wild and alone / We are the pack, we follow wherever you go." The latter track ended up on the four-song 2018 solo EP Bass Tunes, Year 5, which McCarthy quietly self-released right before graduating and moving to Chicago. 

Though she had barely known Cruz and Hunton while at Oberlin, she started to become close to them after she moved. "I just didn't know what I was doing after I graduated," McCarthy says. "I moved in with my friend Nora [Catlin], who actually later designed the album cover and she introduced me to her friend group, which included Ben and Emerson." She says her first summer in Chicago hanging outside on her new friends' back porch, singing country songs with them. "After a while, I just started singing harmonies along with them," she says. "We really got to know each other from us all hanging out playing music," says Hunton. (Their casual outdoor jam sessions have since evolved to full-fledged country power-pop band called The Deals, which recently released the excellent 2021 album Clear and Severe). 

After seeing McCarthy play a solo show with just her singing and playing bass at a small Chicago venue, Cruz immediately asked if she needed a guitarist.  "I loved the music, which was why I wanted to play it," says Cruz. "The songs had such clarity by themselves and her songwriting is so strong, I didn't want my playing to muddy it up." Hunton soon joined Moontype on drums. Their budding friendship led to a very intuitive and improvisational approach to fleshing out McCarthy's songs. "Because it had just been me playing them alone my songs felt small, not in a bad way, but they become more themselves when Emerson and Ben make parts for them," says McCarthy. "We have this shared language that we're developing together. I'm no longer thinking of it as just me and my bass: these were now unfinished songs." With now a full band, McCarthy wrote a handful of new songs about how quickly her life was changing. 

Take "Ferry," the lead single on Bodies of Water, which practically explodes in the chorus. McCarthy says it's about friendships fading away. She sings, "I wanna take the ferry to Michigan" over a wall of fuzz-laden guitars. "Growing up outside of Boston, the Atlantic Ocean was such an important part of my childhood," says McCarthy. "When I moved to Chicago and I became so close to the lake. I was just trying to figure out how to make this place feel like home, which it really didn't for a long time." Other songs, like the gentle, folky "3 Weeks" tackle her insecurity navigating a new city and new crushes. She sings, "I want to tell you that I love you but it’s not the time / I wear velvet so you’ll touch me on the back tonight /  I don’t mean to throw my feelings in your open eyes." The track is earnest, vulnerable, and anchored with acoustic guitars that marks a departure from the band's typically frenetic indie rock.  

Moontype quickly developed a sizable repertoire of McCarthy's songs. Their live debut was at a small, converted church on the South Side opening for Ohmme's Macie Stewart and when they played "Ferry" they saw McCarthy's roomate in the audience crying. "We realized this band could really be a thing," says McCarthy. "That show really felt amazing, which is rare for a first gig," says Hunton. "Because it was so small, in such a weird little location in a church where we had to play really quietly to all of our friends, the whole thing felt special."

From there, the band continued to play around Chicago, booked a national tour where the three packed all of their gear in Hunton's Prius, and slowly saw their audience grow. "Just spending good quality time with Margaret and Emerson playing really good shows was crucial," says Cruz. "Even if the shows were small, and some of them definitely were, it didn't matter. Every night was good with my friends.” Born Yesterday co-founder Greg Obis, a Chicago indie rock mainstay who worked with McCarthy at Chicago venue Sleeping Village, mixed one of their gigs at Chicago's Hideout. "It was very obvious that people were vibing on it so hard," he says. "I had been bugging them about releasing music on the label and seeing them live proved that people were packing the house for them and genuinely excited about what they were doing." 

In Born Yesterday Records, Moontype has an advocate. Co-founded by Obis and Kevin Fairbairn of Deeper and Clearance, Fairbairn explains that the label started as a scrappy way to help "bands we know that were in a corner of independent music that was just underrepresented or not even looked at at all." With Moontype, both Obis and Fairbairn remember being stunned by pressing play on Bodies of Water, which was recorded right before the pandemic at Chicago's Jamdek Studios. "This record is so much about friendship, and its content, and is such a group-focused thing," says Obis. "I think it kind of reflects a certain vibe we aspire to as a label: working with friends who make things we really believe in." 

Part of Moontype's immediate appeal is how they studiously follow the tradition of Chicago musicians gleefully blending genres from Tortoise to Ohmme, NNAMDÏ, and Sen Morimoto, taking as much from improvisational jazz as indie rock. "It's rare to have something that's like, so fully thought out at the outset from such a new band," says Obis. Cruz and Emerson, when they're not in Moontype, perform jazz together in multiple groups. Before Moontype, McCarthy performed synth-based electronic pop music. "While we all have completely different musical backgrounds, we never really talk about references and just play the songs," says McCarthy. "There's a basic language there." 

“Ferry” was released in December to acclaim from NPR and the New York Times. "The process of putting out the album in a pandemic is a way it felt like a way to stay connected to the fact that we're in this band, and we love it and want to keep doing it," says McCarthy. Cruz agrees, saying, "We all believe in this thing that we made together but it feels cool that people are sharing in the emotions and the excitement."