Interview: LUNA AURA Makes Music For The Girls

Over SXSW, Afterglow got the chance to speak with powerhouse femme rocker LUNA AURA about her roots in music, the stories behind her cover art, and making music for the girls.

Written by Lauren Stephens

Photo courtesy of LUNA AURA

As an L.A. native by way of Phoenix, LUNA AURA is paving the way for women in alternative, one headbangable song at a time. The rock star has toured with icons like The Killers, Muse, Weezer, and P!nk, and been featured on festival lineups for KAABOO, Lost Lake, So What, and AFTERSHOCK. From her carefully crafted visuals to her powerful performances, LUNA AURA is a force to be reckoned with. She sat down with Photo Co-Director Lauren Stephens for an illuminating look into her process.

Afterglow: Thank you for taking the time to talk with me. To start things off from the beginning, I saw that you started music pretty young — around 14. What drew you to making music in the first place?

Luna: I honestly have always had an affinity for music. I started singing when I was like six years old. I got my parents to get me a shitty Walmart guitar when I was 12, and I started writing songs. I don’t know, it’s just always been something that has called me, you know what I mean? I've always loved music, so making it just felt like a natural thing for me to do.

Was your goal always to do it [music] full-time or did you have other aspirations before, and then it just kind of evolved into that?

No. I 100% have just been fully delusional…

I mean it worked out, though!

Exactly, 100%. Yeah, I’ve been pretty delusional about it my whole life, and like you said, it’s been working out, and I feel really good about my decision. It’s a lot of hard work — it's not as easy as people might think it is. But it's so worth it because you just get to do what you love every single day. Even sometimes if I wake up and I'm not in the mood or I just wanna be a normal person, I remember that I'm lucky that I get to do what I love every single day.

Yeah, and I feel like if you wanna do music full-time, you really have to be committed to it.

Yes, and there’s a lot of sacrifice. You sacrifice a normal schedule. Sometimes if I'm on tour, I'm missing important dates in my family's life or my friends' lives. But, it's all for the end result, which is that you're doing something that you really love to do, and you're not sacrificing your own happiness for anything.

Since you've been doing music for so long, how do you feel your music has evolved overtime?

I try my best to beat myself every single time I'm in the studio. So I'll write an EP or a project, and then I'll think it's like the greatest thing in the world.Then, when I get into the studio I just want to beat myself and do something that’s better than anything I've ever done before.

And whatever way I feel in that moment is going to be beating myself. So I don't like to compare myself to other people or the music or anything. I'm just constantly in a competition with myself and trying to do better and be better. So, I think that over the years my music has sonically become more in tune with who I am as a person, even, and that's really exciting for me.

It’s great to have that self motivation, but you also don't wanna be too hard on yourself.

I know! I am very critical of myself; I think a lot of people are. You know it comes off in some of the songs that I write too, and I think people can relate to that.

No, I understand completely. I was going through your discography and I love how all the singles and EPs are very cohesive like cover-wise. How did you decide to do that and how do you conceptualize all those covers whenever you're making music?

So, when I do a project — a project in my eyes is an album or an EP — when I do a new project, I want to create a world around it that listeners can get into while they're listening to the music. I love visual art as much as I love music, so it's been fun to be able to exercise that muscle. But with my first EP, THREE CHEERS [FOR THE AMERICAN BEAUTY], I did the whole beauty queen thing. I wanted that to be really creepy and cool. Then, SWEET SENSATION was during the pandemic when everything was pretty doom and gloom, so I wanted to do this kind of pop art with bright colors. The songs were really talking about sort of negative topics, but the visuals were the complete opposite, and I love the juxtaposition of that. Then, for this new EP that I just released, THE FICTION, I wanted to create this really cool witchy white world that you could get into with the music.

That’s very well thought out. I've also found your music to be women-empowering. Is that something that's super important to you to convey in your music or has it just kinda happened naturally?

Absolutely. I think that's the number one thing for me, is to really vocalize female empowerment. Just because I feel like, especially [since] rock music is such a male-dominated genre, that growing up I only had a few people I could really look up to in that space. So, getting into the space really made me want to put the girlies first.

Yeah that’s awesome! Like you said, it is a more limited space.

It is, and it’s getting so much better now than it used to be, but yeah, it’s taking time. But being a woman is fucking awesome, and I'm super proud of it, and I just wanna make music for the girlies — but the boys like it too. [Laughs].

You can follow LUNA AURA on Instagram and TikTok and stream her music on Spotify and Apple Music.

This interview has been minimally edited for clarity and length.