Entitled To A View

Late in 2012, before their Laneway Festival visit at the start of this year, MS MR issued their first EP, Candy Bar Creep Show track-by-track, week-by-week on their Tumblr, a choice equal parts online mythmaking and sly marketing. For the band – Lizzy Plapinger and Max Hershenow –  it was less about setting up some elaborate Iamamiwhoami-styled ruse, but just for the simple goal of getting the music our their first, with no bio to colour expectations.

“When you're making pop music, it often gets distorted by celebrity, and ego, and image, and those aren't things that interest us,” says Hershenow. “It was really important for us to put the music out without having our faces or who we were associated with it. But, even though our faces weren't on it, we were making this music that was really personal. Because we were doing it just for ourselves, we could create music that was really true to us. We didn't have any external forces giving us advice or critique; we didn't even play music for our friends and have them give us feedback. Even doing that can change the way you make music.”

Part of that desire for anonymity came out of Plapinger's own shyness at making music, which came from existing at the centre of a music scene in New York City, running the record-label Neon Gold and being friends almost entirely with people populating a musical community. But she'd never made music before, and was even “embarrassed” to admit to Hershenow that she wanted to, and was hoping to collaborate with him. “So,” Plapinger says, “we started out recording in total isolation, and told no one that we were doing it. And everything came from there.”

The first song the band wrote was Bones, a dark, dramatic synth-pop song that proved important “because we realised we were on the same page,” says Hershenow. “Once we started collecting a body of songs, that idea grew into us starting to think of what we were doing more as a band than a project; like, we weren't just gathering these things together, we were this entity that had an identity.”

And part of that identity came when they settled on their handle. “It's such a weird thing trying to chose a band name, because it has to be your everything and your nothing,” offers Plapinger. “We liked the fact that it was so formal yet so utterly mundane at the same time; we liked the idea that these titles were anonymous of themselves, yet they clearly alluded to the members of the band, and that this was a boy/girl duo. For us, it's not that clear-cut, though; we like to embrace either side of that duality. It feels like Max can be the MS and I can be the MR.”

MS MR, as a name, feels as much like a visual presentation as something to be said aloud, and from their anonymous Tumblr beginnings the duo were fastidious about the imagery – be it static or video – that would go with the music. Their long gestation was, obviously, hugely influential on the music – “working in isolation, if we finished a song and we really loved it, that was good enough for us,” Plapinger adds – but it also meant that by the time the world knew who they were, they were a finished package.

“We didn't play our songs for anyone until we had this really solid body-of-work, and really had spent the time to develop a visual and a musical aesthetic that felt really true to us,” Hershenow explains. “And that has, in turn, allowed us a lot of control over every element of the project. It gave us a lot of confidence in who we were, so by the time that we signed to a label and started making videos and touring, we could be really assertive about what we wanted, because we had that core identity fully fleshed out.”

MS MR ended up signing with Columbia, whom Plapinger had a relationship with from Neon Gold, and would thus become a pop band recording for Sony Music. But, their assertiveness led them coming through the major-label-artist process essentially unscathed; their debut LP, Secondhand Rapture, feeling like the extension of their debut EP. “For a band in our genre, we've been given more control than I think I've ever seen anyone of our stature been given, it's really wild,” says Plapinger.

That wildness comes from the fact that the duo see Secondhand Rapture as being, essentially, a personal project. Given much of the music was written and record when they were still in their anonymous gestation period, MS MR see their LP as something they made solely for themselves, not shareholders. “It's such an accurate reflection of who we are at this point in time. It's empowering to feel like you've made something that's an accurate representation of self,” says Hershenow.

How accurate? How much 'self' is there on Secondhand Rapture? “As with any person, there's always more than meets the eye, something beyond what you initially think you know about them at that first instant,” Plapinger replies. “So, whether you just listen to the music or you hear us in person, there's always something beyond whatever you think you know about us. But that doesn't mean the record isn't reflective of who we are. Like, to me, what's interesting is that both Max and I in person are quite bubbly, normal, practical. But the music is this very sincere, darker side to us that I never bring to the surface with other people, and for some reason we brought that out in each other. So, in some ways, the music is the most intimate reading of ourselves that we could provide. Not in being this candid kind of disclosure, but in a much more abstract, emotional, unspoken way.”

In an era of constant disclosure and overshare, MS MR's anonymous beginnings meant they've well and truly subverted the normal tropes of pop-music debuts; which are big on selling the artists' faces, their stories, their image. Instead, they exist at that interesting intersection between indie sensibility and upward mobility; an idea that the duo are keen on exploring further.

“For us, it's going to always be about toeing the line between the DIY ethos of what we do, and more conventional ways of making and engineering and presenting music,” offers Plapinger. “We'll always be interested in the blending of worlds, because I think more and more they're not so separate and unique from one another. In this day and age, you really have the opportunity to play with those expectations more, of what a pop record can be.”