Luna Luna Releases “Talk Too Much”
By Jeff McCord
“Commitment”, the 2019 song that changed everything for the Austin-based band Luna Luna, unspools like a Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes slow cooker. It’s a soul ballad that takes its time. So it’s ironic that it blew up on TikTok, the app engineered for short attention spans.
Vocalist Kevin “Kavvi” González remembers the day it happened. “I was recording songs with Danny [keyboardist/vocalist Danny Bonilla] for our new album, Flower Moon. It was during the pandemic. I think it was one of the first sessions that I actually got to have with another person in a long time. We were new to TikTok. I started looking through our old music videos. It was kind of cool because we got to look through things we had already published on other platforms like Instagram or Twitter or Facebook.”
Thinking no one on TikTok had seen the video for “Commitment”, he posted it, and got back to work recording.
“I guess I didn’t check my phone for a few hours. I opened Instagram and it said that we had a bunch of new followers and I was like, ‘Wow, what happened?’ So I went to the TikTok app and I saw what was going on.”
The viral detonation eventually led to over 10 million streams on streaming platforms, and a lot more bodies at the shows.
“Since that video,” says Kavvi, “Our streams are double what they used to be. And when we started getting back on the road, fans would come up and mention TikTok. We already had like a pretty solid fan base before TikTok blew up, so this added fire to that. We saw real life results from it.”
Change has been a constant for Luna Luna. Kavvi and his sister were both born in Colombia, but when his mother became a missionary for a church in the Dallas Oak Hill neighborhood, she was able to bring them along. Kavvi was just six at the time, but much later, after writing songs on his iPhone, he began releasing them. Eventually, he began getting requests for Luna Luna to perform. But there was no band. That’s when Bonilla, drummer Kaylin Martínez, and bassist Ryan “Gordo” Gordon came into the fold.
Though Dallas-based, in fact the members were spread around the surrounding areas.
“Being so spread out,” Kaylin explains, “It was getting really frustrating to have to drive to Dallas multiple times a week, which is about an hour drive. The commute was just getting to be too much. And, you know, Dallas, we just kind of played everywhere we wanted to play.”
So the band made a unanimous decision. “Austin was probably going to be the best move for us as far as more opportunities and music,” says Kaylin. “We decided to move down here and got here in August 2021. It’s been great ever since.”
In just a couple of years, Luna Luna has become a fixture on the Austin scene, and the band just wrapped up performances at ACL Fest. Now comes thier new single, “Talk Too Much”.
It’s a spright and snyth-y pop mover, full of hooks. And something else: It’s bilingual.
Kavvi describes how it came about. “We don’t do it that often, honestly. It’s just coming natural now to when we perform. We we do covers sometimes and they’re usually like Spanish covers. We’ve started to listen to more Spanish music together as a band over the past year, just gotten more in touch with that. Spanish music in general is starting to boom here in America in general. So it just it just came out natural. The cool thing about the song is it has a lot of influence from different eras, ninties style pop in there. I think that comes from what we listen to as well. Like Ryan did the bassline, Kaylin helped out with the drums, it really has a mesh of like a lot of different styles. And I don’t think there’s another song that sounds like it.”
Beyond that, Kavvi says, “We’re trying to just get out as far and wide as possible. You know, get in front of as many eyeballs as possible, in front of, you know, many ears as possible and just keep doing what we’re doing. And yeah, the more festivals, the better. The more shows, the better. We just really want to give back to our fans, too, because they’ve been they’ve been waiting for some new music for some time now.”
“Talk Too Much” releases November 4th.
