Lonnie Gunn releases debut EP "2013 horsemeat scandal"

New Jersey-born, Brighton-based singer-songwriter Lonnie Gunn released her debut EP, 2013 horsemeat scandal, on August 6. The seven-track record's title comes from an old joke: a friend once told her that a real 2013 news story, about horse meat found mislabeled as beef across the UK and Ireland, sounded like one of her song titles, even though Gunn was not even in the country when it happened. "I can definitely derive deeper meanings from it and kind of wrap it around what was going on in the songs," she told Under the Radar, describing how the phrase grew to fit the EP's preoccupations with the body, decay and vulnerability.

Gunn wrote the EP over roughly a year, and only recognized its throughline once she sequenced the tracks: grief, both for people she had lost and for earlier versions of herself. Two voice memos frame the record from opposite ends, a clip of her best friend from high school near the start and, near the close, a snippet of a song an ex-partner once sang to her. "Taxidermy Swan," one of its standout tracks, grew out of imagery from Peter Greenaway's film A Zed & Two Noughts and the poetry of Richard Siken, while "Babytooth" marked her first session with an outside producer, Oscar Lang, after years of working primarily with Steve Ansell of Blood Red Shoes.

The EP arrives after a year that saw Gunn open for Kim Gordon at London's O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire in April, a show she has called one of the best nights of her life. She marked the EP's release with a sold out show at The Rossi Bar in Brighton, and its lead single "Pink Butterfly Wing" is its own turn on the record's themes of endings. She has more dates through the fall, including Brighton Psych Fest in September and the Dark Arts Alldayer in Leeds on October 31.

Music first came through her father, a former new wave club DJ who "opened my mind to being more playful with what I was taking in," she said, not all of it strictly age-appropriate listening for a kid. Before landing in Brighton, Gunn was cutting hair in New York and living at her dad's house; a planned-temporary trip to London turned permanent after she applied to a UK university "with days to spare before the deadline," drawn in part, she said, by how English people "made fun of each other."

Gunn grew up in New Jersey before moving to England nearly seven years ago, and her sister now fronts the Leeds noise rock band Skintern. Asked what she expects to feel once the EP was finally out, Gunn laughed off the idea of a big emotional moment, saying it would probably feel like any other day. The record itself argues otherwise: seven songs built from voice notes and hard years, now out in the release calendar alongside the rest of the week's new indie arrivals.