We first brought Mona to your attention back in October, when the band were making their first forays on this side of the pond. The Nashville-based quartet arrived fully loaded with bold ambitions of world domination, and a verbal blitz to match.
Frontman Nick Brown is responsible for the extra-assertive quotes emerging in the media, but behind the bravado, he’s clearly someone that is taking this all seriously.
“We’re definitely going for it,” Brown says of his band’s determination, “and we want to win over everyone – the media, the people, ourselves – but at the end of the day we just have to continue doing what we’re doing for the honest reasons that we started doing it: we love music. I think rock ‘n’ roll still matters and I want to get it out there.”
The band’s tenacity dates back to Brown and drummer Vince Gard’s musical origins in Dayton, Ohio, where their success breached the small city’s limits of success, and resulted in them spreading their wings and heading to Nashville in search of the big time.
Recruiting bassist Zach Lindsey and guitarist Jordan Young, the group retreated into their own creative bubble, letting the Mona phenomenon emanate organically. “I like things to be natural,” Nick says. “You want people to have this genuine affection. It’s the same thing in a romantic relationship: you don’t want to call the girl a thousand times – there has to be some mystery about it. We wanted people to savour it. We just want it to be special, so we took our time with it and really thought about it, and hopefully people that were enjoying it and listening to it and discovering it kinda got that same sense of worth out of it.”
Mona’s debut album is due around March. Expect balls-to-the-wall guitars and heartening lyrics designed to stimulate your mind and, Nick hopes, inspire you to release your inhibitions. “I hope that people get that sense of that dream or mentality,” he says. “We need some more John Lennons – we need more people that go, ‘I don’t care if this is what society says or if this is where we’re at. Fuck it, let’s create our own reality’.”
Words by Simon Harper
Where: Nashville
What: Epic hearty rock ‘n’ roll
Unique Fact: Mona are drinking buddies of Kings Of Leon.
Get 3 songs: ‘Listen To Your Love’, ‘Trouble On The Way’, ‘Teenager’
