Muna evade a run-in with an old lover in the glittery new video for “Stayaway.” The track is the third single off the group’s upcoming sophomore album Saves the World, out September 6th via RCA.
The video features vocalist Katie Gavin exiting a shower and wiping steam from her bathroom mirror to stare at her reflection. “Leaving you was easy, now I gotta do what’s hard,” she announces over a pulsating dance beat. “I gotta stay away.”
Gavin and her bandmates — guitarist Josette Maskin and keyboardist Naomi McPherson — perform in a bar and encounter a former lover, only to reverse their steps and return home. “I don’t do most things I used to do,” Gavin sings, “‘Cause every moment is a fork in the road and all my roads lead back to you.”
“‘Stayaway’ is a song about trying to rid yourself of a negative pattern and realizing that it requires you to make a whole network of other changes, like pulling at a small weed to reveal a dense and mighty root system,” the trio said in a statement. “If we try to just rip the pattern out on its own, maybe it will stay gone for a little while, but soon enough it will grow back because it’s supported by all the other things we do and how we do them — by our way of life.”
“Staying away for good requires a careful dismantling and reconstruction of the whole root system, down to the way we think,” the band continues. “For us, today, this song is a reminder of how hard it once was. We listen to it and feel free, proud, and grateful.”
On September 16th, Muna will kick off a fall headlining tour at Portland’s Wonder Ballroom. They’ll play back-to-back nights at Los Angeles’ Lodge Room on September 25th and 26th, followed by a pair of performances at Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg on October 10th and 11th. The trek wraps up on October 18th at the Fine Line in Minnesota.