BIOGRAPHY

MOON KISSED

Written by: Alexandra Farina

NYC’s Moon Kissed is that once-in-a-blue-moon band that creates their own community as they rise in the musical ranks. They are much more than a band; with every show they play they are ushering in a new era of gritty and provocative New York City partying—one where anyone is free to be themselves, gender isn’t real, and the person you’re dancing next to is your best friend but also could be your next makeout partner. With Emily Sgouros on synth, Leah Scarpati on drums, and Khaya Cohen on vocals, Moon Kissed creates an energy, an infectious aura, that, if you are lucky enough to enter it, feels like a secret and an escape, powerful and precious to behold.

Moon Kissed writes about the complexity of our deepest desires: heartbreak and the way it consumes us; the way we change ourselves to satisfy the ones we crave. Their second self-released album, I’d Like To Tell You Something Important, negotiates these themes. The band carefully drowns the listener in a kaleidoscope of raw feeling before rescuing them with pearls of raw wisdom. The album’s message conveys an exciting brand of authenticity that is difficult to find and impossible to fake.

Moon Kissed released their 2019 debut album, I Met My Band At A New Years Party, as a young, unknown band playing small gigs in NYC venues. They had no team, no booking agents or PR personnel and yet, in the two years since then, Moon Kissed has put together two tours and played over a hundred shows. They’ve produced ten music videos together and fans have voted them Deli Mag’s Artists of the Month in 2019 and 2020. Moon Kissed has made a name for themselves by building a loyal fan base in the old-school way: no gimmicks, no social media gags. Moon Kissed has grown quickly because they’re just that good.

Khaya, who graduated from NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music and Emily, a New School graduate, were longtime friends and musical partners. They happened to meet Leah at a New Years Eve party. Since then they’ve written, produced, and gigged together non-stop. Khaya is a self-taught, talented, writer and experimental producer, but the band is adamant about the egalitarian nature of their songwriting process. “I wrote the majority of I Met My Band At A New Years Party before we were a band. I feel like that is what we used to introduce ourselves to each other, those songs. But now that we are a group, I’d Like To Tell You Something Important is definitely more collaborative,” Khaya explains. “I feel that is really important and I am really grateful for that because I know in other bands ego gets involved and everyone has to touch everything. I think it’s really special that we help bring things to the table and just really zoom out and see them as a work of art or a song and just be excited about them no matter who wrote them.”

Moon Kissed released “Shake//Those Feelings” last fall. It is an upbeat, dance-y groove with a melancholic story. It’s a song that disguises the pain of yearning for someone with three minutes of lively, sparkling fun before descending into a softer, wistful melody that tells the harsher truth. “‘Shake' is a song about longing – missing the feeling of intense excitement that someone used to give you,” Moon Kissed said. “It’s a song sung from the numb of being in the ‘here’ when you want it to be in the deep of back when.”

“Bubblegum,” the album’s second single is punky, raucous, and fun with an undertone of barely suppressed rage: an in-your-face manifesto addressed to the men who deign to project insecurity on powerful women. Moon Kissed’s range is clear when they’re able to go from songs that interrogate the complexities of coping with heartache to a boot-stomping anthem -- “I know your tiny ego’s bruised/Don’t try to blame me…Chew you up you’re just like bubble gum/I’ll spit you out when I’m done.”

“Strange Satisfaction” is a moody ode to the way that love can be radioactive in all of its consuming qualities. Moon Kissed pushes past cliché to get to a more specific truth intrinsic to the experience of heartbreak. With drums that read melodically like a heartbeat, the song explores the masochistic pleasure, the strange satisfaction, of a heart throbbing with the pain of being broken into pieces. Moon Kissed’s final planned single off the album is a dance anthem that encapsulates the particular energy the band creates in a room called “Saturday Night”. It’s a perfect post-pandemic song that asks for inhibitions to be discarded and bodies to begin moving: not a tall order for anyone who has ever seen Moon Kissed live. The album manages to toe the line between honest melancholia and a pure party atmosphere with a campy edge.

I’d Like To Tell You Something Important is saturated with the paradox of being just as addicted to the low feelings as the high ones. Moon Kissed’s unique talent lies in their ability to produce music that glitters on the surface, driven by synth lines that sparkle, drum melodies that get your heart racing, and hooks that take your mind hostage all while interrogating the more complicated, painful parts of reality.