Luna Shadows Is Learning to Let It All Gutspill

Words by Kasia Krawczyk

For Luna Shadows, keeping things bottled up has never exactly been the problem. It’s what happens when everything starts threatening to spill over.

“I’ve always had a lot of feelings,” she says, “but I’m more on the shy and introverted side.” For years, the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter has been the type to rehearse conversations before they happen, running through every possible outcome in her head. Now, she’s turning that instinct inside out.

Her latest single, gutspill, is the sound of someone finally deciding that maybe overthinking everything is exhausting. Built from shimmering synths, organic drums, Midwest-emo guitars and layered vocals, the track finds Shadows stepping into a brighter, more playful corner of her songwriting — without abandoning the melancholy that has always lived underneath it.

“I wrote ‘ethereal emo’ in my notepad,” she explains, defining the new sonic blueprint as “open tunings, midwest riffs, synths, reflective lyrics, electronic + organic drums, vocal layers, and overall a combination of alternative, indie pop, rock, grunge, emo, and folk.”

Then she took that idea into the studio. On the first day of writing, gutspill was born.

“I think we stuck to the prompt!”

There’s a sense of freedom running through the song. gutspill is about feelings that are threatening to “fall out like confetti” — the things you want to say but can’t quite bring yourself to deliver face-to-face. For Shadows, songwriting has always offered a loophole.

“Songwriting has always been a place where I can neatly organize my thoughts,” she says. “I think art in general is empowering to create in the sense that you do get to deliver the perfect punchline, exactly as intended. Real life is a little messier.”

It’s a particularly Luna Shadows contradiction: someone who can turn complicated emotions into precise, beautifully constructed songs, while admitting that real-life communication is considerably less tidy.

“That said, I’m still known to gutspill IRL sometimes.”

The track’s title might suggest chaos, but musically there’s an impressive amount of intention behind it. The song pulls from the early-2000s alternative and pop-punk records Shadows grew up loving, while folding those influences into something distinctly her own.

At the time she was writing gutspill, Green Day’s American Idiot was on heavy rotation. The influence becomes particularly obvious during the song’s dramatic outro, where the track suddenly seems to explode out of itself.

“I love American Idiot and it’s full of these sudden shifts,” she says, pointing specifically to “Jesus of Suburbia”. The musical switch mirrors the song’s emotional one: earlier, its narrator is hesitant and melancholic; by the end, they’ve decided that following their impulses might be better than keeping everything locked away.

“The outro reflects that change of heart,” Shadows explains, “with the unhinged shouty layered vocals, change of drum groove, and just overall bombasticness.”

Paramore is another obvious reference point. “Miss Williams” — as Shadows affectionately calls Hayley Williams — has been “a huge influence,” with echoes of the band’s early records running through the track.

But the references go deeper than nostalgia. Clairo’s Bags provided a more contemporary touchstone, while American Football’s Never Meant helped shape the song’s guitar work. Shadows and her collaborators even used a similar tuning to capture some of that instantly recognisable midwest-emo texture.

The result is something that feels familiar without becoming a throwback. It’s nostalgic, but not trapped in nostalgia.

That balance was helped along by Chris Freeman of Hot Mulligan, who co-wrote and co-produced the track. Shadows approached him with a fairly straightforward brief: bring the energy he already brings to his own band.

“He wrote the opening guitar riff and all those beautiful midwest emo guitars in the pre-chorus,” she says. “I told him emotionally I wanted something upbeat and full of yearning, and he knew exactly what to do.”

The collaboration also solved a problem Shadows had been trying to crack herself.

“I struggle to write upbeat songs on my own, so he brought a ton of energy right off the bat.”

There’s an interesting meeting point between the two artists on gutspill. The instrumental could comfortably sit somewhere within Hot Mulligan’s world, but Shadows’ vocals pull it somewhere dreamier — sweeter, more delicate and deliberately melancholic.

“I think the prettiness on top of the gritty track made for an interesting combo,” she says. “I would say listen to a Hot Mulligan song and listen to a Luna Shadows song — I think gutspill specifically is probably the exact intersection.”

Underneath all those guitars and shouty vocals, though, the song remains fundamentally about saying what you mean.

Shadows has been writing songs since she was eight, when she composed her first piece on piano. Even then, she was already drawn to the tension between opposing emotions. The piece moved between C major and A minor — hopeful and sombre — a musical push and pull she still recognises in her work today.

“That same pull between hope and doubt is something we hear in gutspill!”

More than a decade into her career, that duality still seems to be one of the things driving her. She doesn’t necessarily think about “reinventing” herself. Instead, she follows whatever feels interesting, even if that means jumping from one genre to another.

“I don’t really set out to re-invent myself; it’s more that I follow my heart, as cliché as that might sound.”

There’s also a competitive streak to that freedom. Once she’s proved to herself that she can do something, she immediately wants to see what else she can tackle.

“Now that I have gutspill out, I feel like ‘okay, I’ve proven that I can do an upbeat rock leaning track – quick, now I need to demonstrate that I can write a sad, slow indie folk song.’”

It’s less reinvention than experimentation — and perhaps a little bit of refusing to be predictable.

“I don’t like being put in a box!”

That attitude extends to the music she has coming next. While gutspill is the first glimpse into this new chapter, Shadows is careful not to suggest that the rest of the material will simply follow the same formula.

In fact, it won’t.

Instead, she has been thinking about how different songs can exist alongside each other without losing their sense of identity. Her reference point is Avril Lavigne’s Let Go, an album she admires for its ability to move between pop, country-leaning songwriting and heavier rock while still feeling like one complete world.

“I love how she seamlessly jumps from pop/country leaning songs like I’m With You to heavier records like Losing Grip,” Shadows says. “It all feels cohesive — it’s like she is moving between moods and days, like real diary entry vibes.”

That diary-like quality feels important to the next phase of Luna Shadows. Rather than presenting one polished version of herself, she wants the music to reflect the messier reality of having several moods, influences and impulses at once.

And she’s thinking about the listener while she does it.

“If someone likes gutspill, there needs to be at least one other song in that style on the horizon,” she says. “I applied this across the board — so I had the freedom to jump between genres a little while making sure that listeners who are enjoying something can find a sister song.”

It’s an approach that makes gutspill feel less like a one-off experiment and more like an invitation into a bigger, stranger world.

And perhaps that’s the real point of the song. The feelings don’t have to stay neatly contained. They can be messy. They can be loud. They can arrive as synths, midwest-emo riffs, layered screams or a line typed into the Notes app at two in the morning.

Shadows admits she’s still doing plenty of that herself.

“Like today, right now, in this moment, I have something on my mind that I wish I could say to someone,” she says. “But I think for now it best lives in my notes app. Maybe there is a future song there.”

After all, sometimes saying everything means turning it into a song first.

And when asked the most important question of all — is she a Star, a Freak, or something in between?

“Starfreak for sure,” she says. “Will not be elaborating further!”

Photo by Frances Carter