SOLO FANTASY

In 2015, I remember watching an intense set by the Olympia punk band Vexx, a band that Mary Jane Dunphe fronted with a middle ground between dancing, flailing her arms about, and emitting vein-bulging screams. During the set, she got a nasty bump on the head—I can only assume from some overzealous mosh monster, falsely egged on by her wild style. After the show, I remember seeing her slumped down, still sweating in the back of the van. CC Dust, and then CCFX, were bands that followed, gaining international attention for their poignant post-punk melancholy and danceable rhythms, rather than fast guitars. While the projects have changed, one thing has stayed the same: Dunphe commands the full attention of any room she steps in.

It’s a skill that has its downsides.

“I think in the past, especially with Vexx, I really used to put everything I had into the performances and then at the end I would feel so empty, and it would cause weird depressive spells,” she tells me. “It’s been such a good growing experience to perform by myself and temper my vulnerability and try to make contact with the people I’m performing in front of in a way that doesn’t drain me but gives me more energy.”

Dunphe relocated to New York City in 2017 and in the past few years has been carefully developing a solo project, culminating now in the release of a debut album, Stage of Love. It’s Dunphe’s first release that is singularly her own—so much so that she usually performs the songs accompanied only by a backing track. “[When I] moved to New York, CCFX broke up,” Dunphe says. “And that part of my trajectory paused. But that’s kind of what the goal [of making music alone] was: learning how I write songs rather than how to write songs, and building up my confidence.”

The songs themselves echo the title. “I went through a pretty hard time the past few years and kind of had to force myself to be alone,” she says. “A lot of the songs are about figuring out how to love without the need for return. That’s what ‘Just Like Air’ is about. Stage of Love is based on a quote by Jacques Lacan, that to love is to give something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” She repeats the title track’s chorus to me:‘“On the stage of love, we give what we don’t have.”

Despite her claim of tempering it live, the album itself feels pretty vulnerable. Synths and drum machines are layered carefully to revolve around a central instrument: Dunphe’s voice. In a low, Robert Smith-style delivery, she tends to emphasize syllables rather than words, occasionally veering into a nearwail or an emphatic whisper. Somewhere between dance and experimental pop, she tells me she would make up assignments for each song, like thinking about drums melodically in their syncopation, or creating lyrical parameters. “Opening of a Field,” one of the most enticingly weird songs on the album, was written to be “shaped like an open field,” she says. “There’s no real ‘verse, chorus, verse’ in that song. You just make up a rule, which is a poetic device for writing, and the made-up rule is used as the parameter for crafting the song.”

While working on Stage of Love, Dunphe had been performing the material live, taking advantage of her background in dance. “I feel like when I write music and then perform it live by myself, I’m like my own marionette doll or something,” she says. “Because I’m trying to embody the sounds that I’m making through movement and through singing.”

The album is being released by Pop Wig, a small label of love run by Justice Tripp of Angel Du$t and Turnstile’s Brendan Yates and Daniel Fang. Dunphe says she met Tripp while recording in L.A. in April 2021; they hit it off immediately, and he started coming by the studio while she was writing and recording. “Flash forward to May 2022,” she says. “I go to see Turnstile and meet Brendan, and we find out we’re mutual fans and become friends. I saw them again when they came through in September of last year, and he asked if I would want to put the record out with them.” Within days, Tripp asked her the same thing.

Since agreeing on the collab, Dunphe has done an opening slot for Turnstile and is slated to go on tour in support of Angel Du$t in November. Having seen her perform numerous times, I bring up how a project that elevates dance feels unusual in the current “rock” landscape. “I feel like it shouldn’t be unique,” she says. “Like who the fuck decided that you have to stand still at a show with high-energy music? It’s crazy.”

“I think a big reason why I’ve always needed to move is because I don’t feel inside of my body a lot of the time, and performance is what helps me reattach my head to the rest of me.”