On the Rise
Lonnie Gunn

What is commonly seen as an ugly fungal nuisance can resemble ice crystals or as she illustrates, “a beautiful painting.” It is an observation that parallels her debut EP, 2013 horsemeat scandal, which sees Gunn approaching the complex realities of a breakup, embracing the contradictions that make people human and the beauty in them, even at their worst.

Across its seven songs, Gunn teeters between hushed and aggressive vocals, singing about baby teeth being knocked loose from their gums, torn pink butterfly wings, and swans preserved through taxidermy. “Yes, taxidermy is kind of gruesome, and if anyone did it to a human being, we’d be terrified and in shock. But when it’s this beautiful swan, there’s this weird element of distance there,” Gunn reflects. Those contrasting images are used by Gunn to explore feelings of uneasiness, grief, codependency, as well as the relationship she has with her own body that feels beyond her control. “I’m so grateful to have this body and to be able to use it to create and use it to move,” she explains. “But at the same time, day after day, I’m like, ‘Is it also betraying me? Is it also preventing me from experiencing love and life to the fullest?’”

Gunn grew up in suburban New Jersey and remembers making music instinctively. “I kind of was born making music. I guess that happens to some of us where we just come out of the womb knowing what we want, and I feel really lucky that was the case for me,” she says. Pursuing it, on the other hand, came with its emotional challenges. She describes much of her early creative life as “failing and continuing anyway,” while the search for approval and validation was a trap she often fell victim to. “I was really influenced by people around me that maybe didn't actually like who I was as a person too much,” she reflects. “I was sort of trying to get people to like me. I think my headspace was very much like, ‘If some random person that hates me doesn’t love it, then it must be bad,’ and I wasn’t really listening to my own intuition.”

Although Gunn had released a string of singles since the early 2020s, 2013 horsemeat scandal is a significant cohesive statement in her discography and marks her growing self-trust. Its foundations emerged around the release of earlier single “Kiss You,” when she met Steve Ansell of Blood Red Shoes, the producer behind much of her subsequent work. Ansell encouraged Gunn to write and play as many parts as possible herself, including instruments that she didn’t necessarily feel technically proficient in. “The sound just kind of came out of me being like, ‘Fuck it. I’m just gonna fuck around and see what happens, and do what feels right for me,” she says. With this EP, Gunn also widened her creative circle. Oscar Lang co-wrote and produced the pop-leaning single “Babytooth,” while Samia and Annie DiRusso collaborator Caleb Wright produced “Good Girls Go to Heaven”. 

Written over the course of a year, with a cloud of depression following Gunn, she felt like her life was ending. “A lot of these songs are this weird process of, “What would I say to people if this was my last day on Earth? And then realising there was actually so much to live through that.” Parts of her life are embedded within the record, opening with a voice memo from Gunn’s high school best friend on “I Miss Everything,” and bookended with a voice note of a song once sung by Gunn’s former partner. She further delves into lyrical reflections on her past relationships, tinkering with perceptions, and the expectations placed on her about who she should be. “I feel like throughout a lot of these songs, I’m talking about giving people this version of myself that they claim they want, and I’m trying to be almost this uncanny, perfect thing.”

While the album title alone demands attention for its sheer oddity, Gunn explains that as an American, she had never heard of the 2013 scandal in which DNA testing revealed horsemeat in a range of European food products labeled as beef. As the event was being described to her, another person in her circle remarked that 2013 horsemeat scandal sounded like the title of a Lonnie Gunn song. She saved the phrase on her phone and later realized that, even though “saying it out loud, it sounds fucking crazy,” she could find psychological threads in the story that tie to her own experience. “There’s so many flaws in my performance of presenting a version of myself…the one that people want me to be. It wouldn’t matter if I tried to fit into that version because people will see what they want to see anyway. Just like this scandal, people didn’t think they were eating horsemeat lasagna until someone said it to them, and suddenly they were horrified, but nothing really changed,” she explains. “They just had more knowledge than before.”

After visiting the UK in 2018, Gunn moved there a year later, leaving behind a life in America where she felt isolated and unhappy. The impulsive decision was inspired in part by a bartender making fun of her for dropping a drink. Rather than feeling insulted, Gunn found the exchange refreshing. “I liked the freedom of having people laugh at me. I loved that willingness to have a sense of humour about things.” Growing roots between London and Brighton, Gunn believes the person writing her songs has remained fundamentally the same, but the cultural contrast has sharpened her approach. British audiences, she observes, can initially appear reserved, making her determination to spill her guts out feel even more necessary. “I know that there are gonna be rooms where people are scared to dance, and I’m just gonna be yelling at them anyway about how I feel,” she says. Gunn also reflects fondly on the meaningful interactions she’s had in the UK with shy, younger women who’ve approached her after shows, sharing that her songs have given them an outlet. It’s easy to understand why, as Gunn, who lives with chronic pain, writes candidly about womanhood, the experiences they are often expected to conceal, as well as the exhaustion of appearing desirable while quietly struggling.

The videos for “I Miss Everything” and “Babytooth” find Gunn in a sickly-sweet party setting filled with pink balloons, a cake with toy horses as a topper, and delicate decorations. In “I Miss Everything,” flagged by Gunn as the prequel out of the two videos, she appears alone at the celebration, and eventually trashes the room around her leading to the aftermath in “Babytooth.” The grungy undertones feel like a callback to Hole’s “Doll Parts,” where Gunn, like Courtney Love, refuses to remain composed and acknowledges how trying to fit into a box of what makes a “good girl” can make women feel emotionally and physically volatile. 

It also explains why horror feels so natural in Gunn’s work, with body horror in particular being a fascination of hers since high school. Her relationships with it has grown more personal after spending years in and out of doctors’ offices, confronting fatigue and the vulnerability of her own body. She points out the uncanniness of medical environments: sterile spaces in which people are asked to discuss the most intimate parts of the body, despite it feeling dissociative to the human experience. “Sometimes it can feel like this separate entity that you can’t control,” she says. “Horror can sometimes just be a dramatic version of that anyway. So in the songs, I guess I’m just pushing those ideas a bit further.”

Horror also provides a frame for the ways women are taught to alter, over-examine, and discipline their bodies, often enduring discomfort in pursuit of an acceptable version of femininity, as seen in The Substance and Black Swan. “We are taught to do that from birth,” Gunn says. “Do this disgusting, awful thing, and at the end of it you might find that you’re more beautiful, more perfect in some way.’ Especially nowadays when we’re all being pushed cosmetic surgery and these things that are really graphic and having it be advertised to us in these ultra-feminine ways.” Gunn’s obsession with femininity, while having an attraction to morbidity, may seem dichotomous, but she embraces the way they are complementary. “Every beautiful thing I’ve ever loved is also so gross. It’s just that those always coexist.”

It is fitting that Gunn recently found herself moved by Jane Schoenbrun’s film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The queer slasher follows a young filmmaker attempting to reboot a cult horror franchise, later revealing themes of dissociation and the difficulty of feeling at home in one’s body. “I was really emotionally moved by it and then realised that all of my friends thought it was a comedy,” Gunn laughs. It is clear that cinema and literature has long offered Gunn another route into processing her emotions. Richard Siken’s Crush, first given to her by her best friend in high school, is referenced in “Taxidermy Swan,” where “Sorry for the blood / I wish that it was mine” closely echoes a line from his poem “Little Beast”. 

She mentions how deeply inspired she is by 2024’s Cecilia by K-Ming Chang, “an incredibly perverted book about a woman who works at a chiropractor’s office and is obsessed with her childhood best friend,” Gunn shares. On the music side, she has found herself leaning toward electronic that converges emo and pop-punk sensibilities, like Underscores and Jane Remover. She also gives love to feeble little horse’s new record bitknot and Slow Pulp’s Yard, whom she dreams of one day touring with. “I would cry,” she says, before reconsidering: “I mean, more than cry.” After a brief shared attempt to manifest a Slow Pulp tour into existence, she adds, “In the end, the songs always end up being about my personal life, but I think sometimes having external media really helps unblock that.” As someone who otherwise avoids dwelling on painful thoughts, she finds that art helps her “poke the bear”. 

When discussing some of Gunn’s other heroes, we look back to April, when she and her band opened for Kim Gordon, a formative inspiration, during her Play Me tour at London’s O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire. “I felt like I was handing my band a winning lottery ticket,” she says. “I felt so bonded to everyone on my team that day, because it felt like ‘Oh, this is the first real thing.” 

While Gordon offered Gunn external proof that her work was finding its place, 2013 horsemeat scandal is Gunn’s internal mindset that shifted and pushed her to get there. “I knew that if I listened to [the songs], and I felt something, that had to matter. I’m not that special – there was going to inevitably be somebody else out there that agreed with me and felt this way too.” It became something Gunn could hold onto during one of the darkest periods of her life and introduces an artist who is no longer waiting to become perfectly composed before allowing herself to be seen. “It’s like my baby,” she says, “and I think it saved me.”