MX LONELY Talk Queer Wrestling, Graveyard Photoshoots, and "All Monsters"

MX LONELY by Luke Ivanovich

Today, punk rock band MX LONELY released “Shape Of An Angel,” a second peek into the twisted world of their upcoming album, All Monsters. This candid track follows the angsty lead single “Big Hips,” building to the complete album’s release on February 20, 2026.

I spoke with lead vocalist Rae Haas about the band’s writing process, ethos, and evolution. Known for their unapologetically heavy sound, MX LONELY doesn’t shy away from difficult topics in their lyrics, and Haas delved even deeper with me. We discussed mental health themes in “Shape Of An Angel,” a youthful state they affectionately dub “trans silliness,” and the notoriously disproportionate emotions of middle school. Haas expressed the intentionality they bring to every part of their process – from developing cover art, to selecting songs for a project, to engaging with crowds at shows.

Alder Boutin: By the time this interview is published, you will have just released your next single, “Shape Of An Angel.” Can you walk me through some of the symbolism in the music video?

Rae Haas: I wanted to manifest the idea of addiction to stimulants. Being somebody who is diagnosed ADHD and on the autistic spectrum, having tools like Adderall, it’s amazing to feel normal and functional. But, I had a period of my life where I was battling with addiction and overreliance on substances to try to fit into a mold, and there’s something about wrestling that I felt might be able to mirror that.

I have a good friend, Tom, who runs a collective called Queer Punk Outlaws, and they have underground wrestling matches in Brooklyn. So, I found a really cool wrestler, Rosaleen Grimm, who’s in the video. They go by “Dommy Mommy,” and she’s this big powerful wrestler, and I wanted to get the shit beat out of me, but kind of be enjoying it. So, I spent a month training with Technique 2 Training, which is an academy in Brooklyn really closely connected with Queer Punk Outlaws – all really cool places to check out. I learned a lot. It was awesome to get physical.

AB: You just talked a bit about your writing process, and I’d love to hear more about your process for All Monsters. Did you approach it with the goal of telling this cohesive story about facing the difficult parts of yourself, or did that come together more organically as you wrote songs and then realized how they could relate?

RH: I didn’t set out trying to write an album about internal monsters, but it was what was going on in my life. There’s so much pain and tyranny in the world, and at the same time there was all this stuff haunting me internally and keeping me from really participating with other people in the world. I tried to remove myself from my own state and talk to people, and I realized  that we’re all there. Like, I don’t know anybody in their right mind who’s thriving at this current period of time that we’re in. I wanted to make something that felt like a release from these things. There were songs that Jake [Harms] brought in, songs that I brought in. We both are the primary songwriters. We have some stuff that we sit on the couch and write together.

The songs, at their core, feel like folk songs, like more emo things that you might think go with slower, softer music. With MX LONELY, we try to take those feelings and make them huge and explosive with the sound. But, a lot of the writing process comes from arranging the songs together. We have playlists of things that we demo out all the time as a band. It’s so fun to go back through and be like, “Oh my god, wait, we wrote this two years ago. That never fit anywhere. This is supposed to be here now.” And that’s awesome.

AB: As you’ve shared, “Big Hips,” the lead single off of All Monsters, is a candid look into how young transgender people might relate to their changing bodies. What message would you give to any young trans folks who read this interview?

RH: I would say that transness is so divine to me, and I think it’s something that I struggle with, as somebody who identifies as nonbinary and hasn’t gone through medical transition in any capacity – feeling like you still hold and embody what having gender diversity means. Just showing up in a room as who you are, and knowing that that is divine and important, is pinnacle. And I would say, “You’re so needed here.”

“Big Hips” is about trans silliness; about youthful, toxic masculinity. We’re allowed to have that, too. You’re allowed to be all the different parts of what masculinity and femininity encapsulate.

Trans people don’t always have to be inspiring. I think we almost always are, but expressing all the different parts of what’s hilarious about the human experience is cool.

AB: That’s a great message. You touched on this a little already, but is there anything else you’d like to add about what that was like – channeling the younger version of yourself to write “Big Hips” – and if there are any parts of that song that still resonate with your current experience?

RH: The song, and a lot of MX – specifically All Monsters – is about feeling outsider. Again, “Big Hips” is a little silly in this way that I feel like people might not see me as. As somebody who’s sometimes fem-presenting, it’s feeling like a creep, like you’re on the outskirts watching in. But it felt very freeing and funny to channel the younger parts of myself.

At the time, when you’re in middle school, everything feels severe. You can remember people breaking up or having a crush, and it was this huge feeling of emotions being so heightened. You look back and you’re like, “God, that was so silly. What were we all on?” I still have those feelings sometimes. I feel a lot. I’m an emo person. This was a way for me to make fun of myself, make fun of those emotions, but also honor them. The repeating chorus feels so good to do live, the “big hips for a boy.” It’s me reclaiming how you never get to say, “Oh, yeah I have a big dick,” but almost in a mocking way. It’s got this libido and it’s got this power in it from a place of insecurity. And that still resonates with me. More than anything, it’s just a good time.

AB: I have another question about how you relate to your younger self. In one of the lyric explanations, you write that, as a high schooler, you “felt like the innocence & vulnerability of [your song] wasn’t cool.” These days, you seem to have made peace with being quite open in your music. So, what do you feel like your vulnerability brings to your work today?

RH: I think the vulnerability allows people to truly connect. There’s music that just rocks, and it doesn’t necessarily have a point of view that’s larger than “let’s dance” or “let’s party.” And that’s very cool, it’s valid, but I’ve always been somebody who, when writing or approaching music, I need it to have something that I’m releasing with it. Like, it makes me want to move. It makes me want to bob my head. It makes me want to get outside of my own head and into a primal form.

When Jake Harms and I met, we had a total conversion of songwriting where we both had this point of view that really made sense to one another. Jake and I both had intersecting experiences in high school, middle school: me feeling like I’m not masc enough or not a tough guy enough to fit in with the boys, and Jake wanting to express a femininity and it being judged.

That’s what’s really cool about MX Lonely – a lot of our nonbinary themes are coming from different perspectives of the nonbinary spectrum. I think of it like yin yang, but it’s two different shades of marbling gray.

AB: Speaking of visuals, I’m always interested in the inspiration behind cover art that doesn’t feature the band members. Is the All Monsters cover inspired by any particular location, and are there any details on there that you’d like to highlight?

RH: The photo used for the cover art was taken at Mount Zion Cemetery by Andy Nappi, who’s a very talented film photographer and multimedia artist based in Queens. They pitched this location to me – and it just felt so right for the album art.

Mount Zion is huge, crowded with graves, but mostly empty from the living all the times we went. There are a lot of older graves there, people that died at the turn of the century where I'm not sure if there are relatives still visiting... something about that felt powerful. There are these giant smokestacks that kind of looked like a monster to me. So I drew in a little hidden monster that it might take a second for people to see. I’m in the image too – which is a little like Where’s Waldo. I’m in there running through this field toward this monster.

We had different versions of this cover art and labored and thought about it a lot, but we settled on this, because it felt more subtle. The initial cover was a giant drawing of a monster coming from behind the smokestacks and reaching out, and me reaching out, and it felt a little too on the nose. There are a lot of other really cool photos from the shoot that are edited and laid out masterfully by graphic designer and photographer Elyza Reinhart – who makes a lot of our tour posters – in the lyric books and CDs and tapes and vinyl. So, if you’re into physical media, that’s cool. It was so fun collaborating with Andy and Elyza on this in particular.

All Monsters cover

AB: In more recent history, you released your last full-length album, Cadonia, in 2022. How would you say you’ve evolved as a band since that project?

RH: I love that record. Putting out singles is so hard, because I think of the album as a full piece. It’s so hard for me to not just put the whole thing out. But it’s been good being patient. We’re trying to draw more people to the band. Cadonia feels like a complete story, but it also was focused a lot on the recording. Gabe [Garman], our bassist, is a recording engineer. He recorded All Monsters, but he also recorded Cadonia, where we’re layering over synth and layering over guitar, and it’s big and atmospheric and it feels intentional in that way, but it doesn’t really sound like the live band. Spit (MX LONELY’s 2024 EP) was a divergence into that, where we started performing a lot more.

What’s interesting about Cadonia is we wrote it and released it before we had started playing live shows a lot. So, the live element wasn’t really a factor in making the record. For All Monsters and Spit, that is a huge factor. In Cadonia, it’s such a different vibe. There’s an album before that, DOG, which is a record that we had under a project called v0id b0ys, which was Jake and I. It was right before the pandemic. We met; I was supposed to do some tracking on some of their solo stuff. (They have a project called HARMS. Another plug: Are You Coming Home – amazing album to check out if you’re a fan of Jake and Jake’s guitar writing in any way.) [DOG] is another one where it’s once again more focused on songwriting and less focused on full band performance and experience.

AB: I’m going to come back to the live aspect in a couple moments here, but you write in your first lyric explanation that “the main character of All Monsters is an anti-hero.” How do you see that character appearing throughout the rest of the album?

RH: When I think of that character, it’s a spirit or a ghost or a demon. I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s this haunting presence throughout everything. It shifts and it shapes. And I think it’s something that everyone has. I see that antihero as the monster that’s in the cover art – this looming thing that’s over you. It’s maybe coming from inside you, but it’s coming from some deeper place. It’s when your dark thoughts start to take more of a driver’s seat rather than a passenger seat. It’s something leading you or guiding you that’s outside of you. I’ve historically had really bad sleep and grew up having a lot of sleep paralysis. MX LONELY, as a title, is named after my sleep paralysis demon. I think of that as something that’s divine, but not necessarily good or evil. It’s feeding off the chaos of the world and the evil of the world.

AB: This might be a tricky one, given how nuanced these songs are. But if you had to describe All Monsters in three words, what would they be?

RH: I would say… tension, release, and light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel.

MX LONELY by Luke Ivanovich

AB: We’re going to circle back to live shows for this last question. You’ve talked about live shows being this core component of MX LONELY. Which All Monsters songs are you most excited to perform, and is there anything you’re looking forward to incorporating into your shows with these new songs?

RH: For me personally, there are so many really cool synth parts. I love to continue to figure out how to get audiences to move. There are a lot of elements of drag performance that I take from, like creating an alleyway that I go down, trying to get people to – once again, with the tension and the release – make space for each other to come together, to mosh, but not in this way where you’re just stuck there. I love challenging what people are able to do in spaces. We’ve taken a lot of these songs on the road already, which has been awesome, but I am excited to have more of All Monsters be focused and be able to put some of the Spit songs to bed.

AB: I like that you think about the crowd so much, because I think DIY shows and smaller crowds have this really unique opportunity to be able to move around.

RH: I’ve been in so many shows – even bands that we’ve been on tour with – where people are like, “I really hope that there’s this mosh pit” or “I really hope that people move around,” and I think it just takes one or two people to open up. If people want to do this, then it should happen. It’s just, nobody wants to put themselves out there and have nobody else follow and then feel awkward or uncomfortable. I try to make myself that person that can take on whatever awkwardness or uncomfortableness.

Shows are about people’s experience with the music. The music is the music, but you can listen to it in headphones, and it’s got its recorded form that you can have your solitary experience with. But if you’re seeing it live, it’s got to be about the whole room and everyone that’s there. It’s always been important to me to have a space to do that. That’s my medicine. My favorite thing in the world is playing music at a decibel that your brain stops thinking, and being able to really move your body. I get so stuck, I get so anxious and depressed, and I’m hoping that somebody feels the same way and needs the same things.

I find that the more I honor what I need, I find more and more people that need the same thing.

AB: It’s such a cathartic environment to be in. It’s a completely different experience than just listening to music.

RH: That’s what I mean to say. If we can do that, let us do that. Sometimes, it’s a small show, and you’re on tour, and you’re in a city where you’ve never been, and everyone’s cross-armed. But I find more than anywhere else in America that we’ve been, it’s New York City where I think people are really wound up. I’m like, “Come on, guys. We’re this epicenter of fucking art and music and culture. Let’s celebrate that.”

I want to allow people to feel silly again and feel connected to a community where they’re able to feel comfortable and safe with one another, and you don’t have to be cool. I feel like we’re anti-cool heroes. None of us are, by any means, hot and famous or something. Or, we’re not trying to be.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.