Q&A: Anna Lunoe’s Debut Album ‘Pearl’ is a Sonic Dedication to Growth and Regeneration
A DEEP DIVE INTO MOVEMENT, EMOTION AND DANCEFLOOR INNOVATION — Anna Lunoe has unveiled her debut album, Pearl, independently released via NLV Records, marking a pivotal moment in her career as a producer and DJ. This album is a personal reflection of Lunoe's journey, showcasing her desire to push the boundaries of dance music and her own artistry.
A dedication to the nature of growth and regeneration, Pearl is indicative of the unique space Lunoe occupies in the dance music world, marrying elements of techno, garage, bass, rave and indie dance. It’s an earnest and luminous body of work, revealing Lunoe’s fascination with movement and her willingness to take listeners on unexpected detours before landing them in a place of catharsis.
In Pearl, Lunoe demonstrates a re-centering of her creative voice, emphasizing artistry over the pragmatic demands of a career in DJing. She shares her reflections on this shift, saying, “When I started out in dance music as a local DJ, my dream was to fill dance floors and pay my rent. As my career expanded and the industry changed, I always felt like my artist voice had to be secondary to my DJ needs. This album marks a colossal shift in perspective, putting my artistry at the forefront in a way I never have before.”
The title track, “Pearl,” stands as a shining example of this transformation. With mesmerizing arpeggiated synths, warm lo-fi textures, and Lunoe’s own vocal cuts layered throughout, the track captures a sleek after-hours abstraction. It’s a moment of tension and release, taking her sound into new dimensions while offering a more sincere side of her creative expression.
“To me, the sentiment in this song is about fighting for your spirit and creative force in a world that isn't really designed for us to hold on to it,” Lunoe says. “Sonically, this was an exercise in emotion and clarifying a feeling as opposed to straight-up club tune making.”
Pearl is an exploration of Lunoe’s evolution as an artist, unafraid to embrace vulnerability and authenticity. The album feels like a personal manifesto, both a celebration of the dancefloor and a deeper journey into the mind of a prolific and ever-evolving creator. For Lunoe, Pearl signifies not only a new chapter but a bold reclamation of her artistic voice.
LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with you yet, what inspires your artistic style and sound?
ANNA: I think that in life, we have really formative moments that we're aware of and that we're not aware of, and all those things really make up which sounds we feel most attracted to. I think for me, growing up, I was really attracted to an underground spirit. I remember as a kid feeling completely intoxicated by punk and rave sounds. There used to be a show called Rage, which is like a video show that was run by the National Broadcasting Network that would run all night long. When I was six, and I woke up in the middle of the night, I'd creep downstairs and I put on Rage, and I'd watch it through the night, and as it got closer to the morning, it would start going into the pop hits. It was always so inspiring to see these little snapshots of different cultural windows.
Australia is a little bit more simple on a cultural level. So to see these fashions and sounds that I'd never seen before, was incredibly powerful for me, and also to see that on album covers, that is where my first imprints of culture really solidified. I think it's still evident to this day what I'm attracted to. I'm always pushing back on mainstream sounds and wanting to find something that feels grittier and sort of more intoxicating for me. The way that's transcribed in my sound is a freedom of spirit vocally, a heavy bass sound, a curious percussion relationship. I like percussion to always be surprising and fresh and slap me around a little bit. It all makes sense to me in my head.
LUNA: What kind of atmosphere or emotional space do you aim to create for your listeners?
ANNA: I think that people gravitate towards different artists with different emotions, and I think for me, the emotion that I hope to give people is freedom. The feeling of being able to shake off whatever is on your back and feel free and empowered to move towards the most inspiring form of your existence, whatever it is you want to create, whatever it is you want to be a part of. I want you to feel free and empowered to make that decision.
LUNA: What is the ideal environment to experience your music? Is there a particular setting, mood, or time of day that enhances the listening experience?
ANNA: I think that a 6 p.m. festival set is always pretty powerful and just watching the sunset, feeling the energy of the day, knowing you've got the night ahead. I think that's probably where I enjoy that space. I think walking and being in movement, physical movement, no matter what it is you do to physically move, I think hearing the sounds in that space is really powerful as well.
LUNA: You are about to release your debut album Pearl later this month and a huge congratulations is in order! What is the inspiration behind the project and what themes or emotions do you explore?
ANNA: The themes and emotions echo back to what I was talking about before. There's a lot of championing. I really think it's important for us all in our daily lives. We get so many messages that push down our creative spirit, that push down our hope for forging our own path in life. I really want to keep shaping people to stay connected with their kind of inner hope and inner dream. Pearl is like that, that hope, that drive, that spirit inside all of us, that I hope that we can nurture and continue to water even when it feels like we live in a world that doesn't necessarily want us to water that free spirit. I want to let whatever art I can put out into the world continuously reinforce that for people and back them up in their corner that they should listen to it and fight for it.
LUNA: What did the creative process for Pearl look like? Can you walk us through a typical writing and recording session for the album?
ANNA: There were two writing sessions. The main session started in this room in February 2023 and I made a New Year's resolution in 2023 that I wanted to make my production habit. Put the production habit at the forefront of my week. I just snapped myself into that. I made myself a goal of writing 40 songs in February. Every day I'd sit down, I just write one to two hour songs and do that all day. That was really achievable, like they weren't polished, they weren't done, but they were the spirit, the idea, the vocal, maybe a bass line, a drum concept. I just did that for the whole of February. That formed a lot of the songs that are on the album. Then the other thing I did was work with a really good friend of mine, Jack. We started working together in 2020, but we've been friends since we started making music in 2008. He's in a group called Bag Raiders, and we traveled the world together. We lived in LA together for eight years, and then we ended up back in Sydney together at the same time, and we just started writing together a lot, for the first time after 15 years of friendship, and it's been really cool for us both. We're really enjoying that process. I wrote some of the songs with him, and some of the songs I started on my own, and then I sent out for collaboration and finished them with other people like Joshua, DJ Boring and Shanique Marie.
LUNA: How was it like collaborating with so many amazing artists for this project? How was the energy in that atmosphere?
ANNA: It's different with every person, but I did not overthink this process. I think that, having been doing what I do for a long time, I could have easily over thought this project to the point where I never did it, and I wanted to make sure that I've spoken a lot about how the only way I can achieve things is if I let go of trying to make things perfect, trying to make them encompass all this stuff. This is an album that I made using all the spirit and experience and everything I've gathered for the last 15 years in this business is in this album. I put my heart into it and that's what I've become. I didn't want to overthink who was on the album, who featured, like, try and call in big favors. I didn't want to think about that. I just wanted to let the people that I felt were best for this project be a part of this project and trust my gut with new relationships I was making online. If someone was really supportive of my work, I shot them a couple of demos and was like, ‘hey, if you ever want to do anything, here's some demos.’ I just let people come to me and let this project become what it was meant to be and rusting that it would be what it was meant to be.
LUNA: Did you have any lessons or breakthroughs – whether that's personally, artistically or professionally – while creating this project, and what were they?
ANNA: There's learning in everything. I think this was a colossal shift in bringing my artistry to the front of my project. I have done a lot of things in this industry. I've been on radio for 10 years or more. I've done vocals. I've been DJing since before.I was releasing my own music. I was already DJing 200 nights a year, so I started out as a DJ, and then making music always fit into my DJ career. So the big learning here was centering my artistry and centering my artist voice and to have the guts and the courage to do that.
LUNA: What is your favorite song from Pearl and why do you love this song? Is there a certain element, lyric or message that you gravitate towards the most?
ANNA: That's really hard to answer. I love so many of the songs on the album. I'm really proud of it. I listened back when I was shooting a video the other day. We had the album playing in the background and I was feeling particularly raw and emotional that day, and I genuinely got peace from listening to the album, which is not something that I can say that I've experienced listening to my own music very much. I actually felt a lot of relief listening to the album on a spiritual level, which was really eye opening for me. I think that I'm going to say “The Seed,” which is going to be the song that comes out with the album. I think the reason is because it's got this purity and this clarity that revealed my hopes and dreams for the album. It was one of those little demos that I wrote that day in February, and it encapsulated this beautiful early 2000s honesty and rave euphoria that I love about my musical history, but it is my own love for nature and garden and growth and renewal and I knew that I could make it into a really great club tune as well. It found its way there slowly, and I'm really proud of that.
LUNA: How have you matured as an artist with Pearl since your previous releases?
ANNA: Being able to fully explore ideas. I've probably only released like 5% of the music that I've written over the last 10 years, and the reason for that was that a lot of the sounds weren't instant club or obvious club songs. They required more depth, they required more inquiry, they required more production finesse to go deeper into that. Because my life has been at 100 kilometers per hour for 20 years, doing this touring constantly, I've never stopped touring. I've had two kids along the way. I've lived in three different countries. To be able to do that and keep up with the level of touring that I was doing, I never took the time to fully flesh out how I could complete these musical ideas.
There's a combination of dance music becoming more widely understood on a DSP level, on a listening level. There's a lot more nuance for artists right now to an entry point for them to find a place than 15 years ago, during the EDM boom. If your song wasn't 128 BPM and had big spots for the big air noise, air cannons to go on every drop, and to find that community was beyond my reach. I just filed those ideas away until I could get to them spiritually and emotionally. This has been a huge learning curve for me to fully flesh out those concepts. The song “Pearl,” is one of those songs that I write more instinctively, which is more of a sonic bomb. It's more of a sonic bomb than a banger with big drops and big hooks. It's like an earworm that washes over you and makes you want to dance and feel everything like that. I could do a whole album of these songs very easily, because that's my genuine expression of electronic music, and then, of course, the other moments are me as well, but they're a different part of my brain.
LUNA: You are going on a headline tour later this fall. What are you most excited for fans to experience during this tour?
ANNA: I want to complete the Pearl world a little bit and make sure that it's built into the live space in a really beautiful way. I've been experimenting with doing my vocals live for a while now. I did The Chemical Brothers tour last year, and on that, I performed a lot of these songs live, just because I wanted to challenge myself to do it. I thought that that would be a good way to do it, which it was. I'm going to try and bring live vocals into the club set in a way that makes sense to me.
LUNA: Do you have any pre-show or post-show rituals or regimens that help ensure you play your best performance?
ANNA: I prepare really heavily and make sure that I feel really solid about what my plan is before I go into a gig, and the reason that I do that is because you can always pivot on the spot if you think it's necessary, but feeling really strong about what your intention is going into the show, what fans, what type of fans you're hoping to appeal to with the set that you've created, and really thinking about what you want people to feel in that set by virtue of you can't be everything to everyone, right? So you can't appeal to everyone on every level. You have to pick some. And for me, it's been really clarifying to come up with my own angle, and then if it feels like the crowd doesn't connect with everything, or if it feels like you know this isn't that crowd for that music. I feel much more settled knowing I did what I felt was the right thing to do and what I wanted to do, and it was intentional than to be on stage pulling at straws, trying different things. To me personally, I feel more resolute in that experience.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like that you would like to share with Luna?
ANNA: I'm feeling really fortunate to be having these conversations and to be having this moment in my career, doing my debut album. This is not a moment that I for sure thought that I would ever have. This isn't something that I let myself dream for. So I feel really proud of the fact that I've actually done it, and the album is delivered, and it's there, it's finished, and that I'm able to talk about it and live this moment and just see where things go. It always makes me feel good when I know what my next six months look like. There are lots of times where I do not have any clue what's around the corner for me over the last 15 years. There's been many times where I literally have had a blank calendar ahead of me, and I've just had to trust that things will fill in. I always like the feeling of knowing what the next six months look like, and then that lets me plan to pat it out the way that I need to pad it out, and that, I think, is the most aspirational version of my next six months.
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