Music Q&A: MS MR

This New York-based duo featuring Lizzy Plapinger on vocals and guitarist Max Hershenow channel their love of Fleetwood Mac and American prairie-style fashion into their debut album Secondhand Rapture.

How exciting is it to hear your track on the radio? Is there a part of you that can’t help but be thrilled?

To be quite honest, we’ve only ever heard our music on the radio twice and both times were in Germany. We’re not interested in being pop “stars,” but would love for our music to be known all over the world and as a result be recognized as real artists. The celebrity aspect of this job is something that makes us uncomfortable; we just want to make beautiful and impactful art.

When you’re writing songs, do you find you have to hold back so that the subtleties sit well with the big cathartic moments?

The drama of this first record was definitely a priority for us – we really wanted the music to be as epic, dramatic and emotive as possible. But we also recognised that you need contrast to create that drama, and songs like Dark Doo Wop or This Isn’t Control were chances for us to play with the more subtle elements of Lizzy’s voice and orchestration. But we still have a lot to learn and explore in that area.

How self-critical are you?

We are outrageously self-critical, probably to a fault. We are our own toughest critics and while we try not to agonise too much over the details of every show, we can’t help it to some degree.

Do you have very different musical influences?

Yeah, we sort of fall all over the map in terms of the music we were raised on – and for each of us that spans a number of genres. Lizzy was born and raised in London and Max spent high school in Ecuador and Honduras, so we definitely  feel at home in the melting pot of the New York music scene. We were united by an openness to incorporate these seemingly dissimilar influences and by our deep love of pop music.

A lot of the lyrics are quite nightmarish, with blood and pain, churches and bones.

There is certainly a lot of darkness. Lyrically Lizzy was influenced by a lot of gothic literature, and while we’re quite bubbly upbeat people on the surface, we both have a strong dark side. The music became a place for us to become the most dramatic versions of ourselves.

Lianne Steinberg