MOURN

MOURN’s Self-Worth is a commitment to cutting toxicity

Article by Alex Free // Photos by Cristian Colomer Cavallari

The group’s fourth album meets the chaos of 2020 head-on with an avowal of trust in their own growth.

When MOURN emerged in 2014 with their self-titled debut, they quickly won hearts with their self-disclosing songwriting, sincere and full of an unquestioned sense of emotional urgency. It was just the voices of Carla Pérez Vas and Jazz Rodríguez Bueno, two high school friends from El Maresme, Catalonia, housed in simple instrumental elements — their guitars, bass from Leia Rodríguez, drums from Antonio Postius. All rhythmically and harmonically precise, emphatically noisy, unrefined and unrelenting. It was an album of self-proving, an angry and captivating shout against a social world glued together by unfairness.

Two albums in, less a sense of unfocused anger and self-discovery, MOURN came out with 2018’s Sopresa Familia, a noted turn in their sound. The production was cleaner and more refined; there was a new vocal emphasis on melodic clarity, permitting soft moments. With Self-Worth, this shift has become more pronounced, and continues to take shape. Backed by the drumming of Víctor Pelusa, MOURN has found a more exploratory space, and while their stance retains the emotional necessity of their first album, their fourth allows for more reflection, nuance, variation.

‘The Tree’ has the underlying structure of a waltz, while ‘It’s A Frog’s World’ is a clever exercise of irony: the title is an evasion tactic for avoiding conflict, but lyrically the song is perhaps the most straightforward, alternating between shouting, “it’s a mess,” and “there’s a problem.” It’s noisy, but the punk trappings retain the delicate melodic structure of ballads. MOURN has long known the value of having a genuine voice, and that knowledge has translated to a generous allowance for their own: an unrestricted sense of musicality combined with powerful, emotive voices of dissent.

Self-Worth meets chaos with chaos, taking the aggressions of 2020 head-on with a well-justified anger and assertive self-knowledge. Its answer to living against the backdrop of anxieties particular to this year is to vocalize, vent—honestly airing emotions without reserve.

The sung and frequently shouted harmonic lines address feelings of isolation, social ills, raise cries against the stupidity that our reality is still plagued by bigotry, sexism, unfairness— that our personal lives have to be played on defense and the practice of kindness is still not routine. Like all MOURN records, it's a shedding of skin, of past toxicity, a demonstration of growth in a noisy and chaotic world that meets these forces in kind. Self-Worth continues the exploration of complexity and change in context that has shifted from living to surviving.

The record is a litmus test of independence and self-claiming in the youthful navigation of relationships, social pressures. And something as intangible as it is important: the defiant holding-onto of self in a time when everything we thought was stable is so easily shattered. It’s raw, explosive in a style that almost feels of a bygone era. Nonetheless hummable, and definitely identifiable.

Self-Worth is out now on Captured Tracks @ohmourn.

We talk with Carla Pérez Vas about anxiety, cutting out toxicity, and direct emotional expression.

Hi, Carla. How are you?

I had just had a panic attack, actually. Now I’m fine, but I was just crying in a heavy way.

What happened? What was going on? I have anxiety, and it just happens. I sat down in a terrace with my boyfriend and his friends, and I just started sobbing like crazy. It happens to me sometimes. I don’t know, life is weird.

So true. There’s a lot going on right now. It’s too much. I used to have anxiety, but it was under control and had kind of faded. But then with the pandemic it came in a heavy way; this week has been crazy. I just have to learn to deal with it I guess.

This is a crazy time for everyone. It’s already hard enough to survive in the world.

Exactly. I’m not going to ask more of myself. We’re alive, at least.

Listening to your latest album, Self-Worth, I’ve been thinking about it as looking at the world as chaotic, and meeting chaos with chaos. Emphasis on a direct, uninhibited emotional response, and giving precedence to your emotions in light of the current state of the world.

I feel like every album we’ve done is a response to an issue. Before starting to write an album, we talk extensively. Jazz is my best friend, so we always know what’s going on in each other’s lives. Sometimes what we end up writing about is something that effects us both, sometimes it’s something that just effects one person, but because we are so connected the response in terms of songwriting or music is always unified.

With this album, through talking to each other, we realized that a lot of relationships we had with different people, and what we were experiencing as female-identifying or non-binary in this patriarchal society, was super toxic, and the response was just: cut it off. Let’s listen to ourselves, and listen to what we value and want, and then act on it.

With the other albums I think it was more like, ‘here’s this problem, and we’re going to talk about the problem; we’re going to talk about the rage that we have, and how we feel.’ I think Self-Worth is more how we are managing all of that anger and chaos.

I get a strong feminist, anti-patriarchal perspective and response from the album; can you talk about what having that perspective looks like in 2020? Especially as a musician.

We live in Spain, and the music industry here is years behind. It’s not as open-minded as maybe Europe or the States. In the States you can be a musician as a job. In Spain there’s this mentality of, ‘okay, you’re a musician, but what do you do when you come back home? What’s your job?’ Even if you’ve toured everywhere, and have albums. Especially for women, there’s this attitude of dismissal, that you need to be taught what you’re doing. Someone’s constantly trying to teach you your own job, that you’ve been doing since you were 17.

Though media is writing about it, and festivals are having more women in their line-ups, it doesn’t mean we can stop reclaiming our places in this industry. I feel like this attention to equality could be a trend for four years, and then everyone keeps doing what they did before.

We also have to look at not only women and non-binary people on-stage, which I think is super important, but those doing the sound, the press, all the work that is behind the music.

And it’s not only about people that identify as women. The name is tricky because it’s not only about the feminine, really, but feminism is a need, and a change, and society has to change.

You were talking about a rage response towards the injustice that we see around us, and the pressures that we feel in our day-to-day lives. It strikes me in your lyrics that it’s not only sweeping societal interactions we’re concerned with, but the unkindness that we experience in our daily lives, that being kind to one another is not normalized. People are unfair to one another, and manipulative, and take advantage, and that’s the normal. Can you talk about processing that through the music— your albums being vehicles for rage?

Our lyrics, especially in this album, talk about a lot of what you are saying— about the daily, little-by-little manipulations, and toxicity within friendships, and our relationships with our dads, our moms. Getting used to destructive habits, pressure being put on you.

I also think we write in a funny way. How a song can be titled, ‘This Feeling is Disgusting;’ it’s just making fun of this gross feeling of being treated badly. Or with ‘Frog’s World,’ the title says it’s a frog’s world, but that’s just to avoid the point of having a problem with someone that you don’t want to face. You just look the other way and make fun of something. You just say something to forget that there’s issues between us.

How was the process for writing this album?

Jazz and I found a cheap AirBnb in France, and ended up going to this town called Lalan, which is similar to LaLa Land. We slept in this little house in front of a huge street, and we had the Pyrenees behind us, it was so crazy. There we wrote the first songs, with our guitars and a few drums. We met up with Leah and Victor back in Barcelona, and over the summer we recorded the whole album.

Listening back through your past records, you really came into a different version of your sound in Sopresa Familia that feels like the MOURN we have now, for Self-Worth. There’s a lot of punk, explosive, raw energy and yelling; but you also have a ballad structure contained in that, with really beautiful harmonies and a very identifiable lyric message. Can you share some thoughts on the music side of your songwriting?

When we started recording all the songs, we realized the pop songs were more pop than before, and the punk, loud songs more powerful. I think that comes in part from having a new drummer, honestly, because Victor plays really loud [laughs]. But we always said, ‘let’s just play and see what happens.’ With the other records it was more just, ‘now let’s do a loud song.’ It became more free, in a way. We also have a really fun and cool friendship with all of us, now. I feel more relaxed just to jam, be less noisy, enjoy it, and focus on the message. I can listen to different songs off the album and enjoy them in different ways. We have a song that’s a kind of waltz called ‘The Tree,’ and that song is so beautiful in a way that I feel like cleans everything. Having that in an album that is reminding you, ‘Just listen to yourself. Just calm down..’ I don’t know, it’s really healing.

Keep up with MOURN on Instagram @ohmourn + stream Self Worth now!