Moon City Masters finally stopped caring and made their best record yet
The Brooklyn-based twins on building Plastic Palace, finding their footing online, and the grooves they grew up on.
The name Moon City Masters was never supposed to make sense. For Brooklyn-based twins Jordan and Talor Steinberg, that was kind of the point. “Our older brother just randomly decided on it,” says Talor, the group's guitar player and vocalist. “He said, imagine you go to a club, and you see that these twins called the Moon City Masters are playing, you think it sounds hilarious. So you stay. And then, oh my god, they're actually pretty good.”
It’s an accurate description of a group unashamed of its reverent nostalgia — equal parts time capsule and reinvention. “Sometimes, I think we're built for a different era. Our music is straightforward, but it's not algorithmically straightforward,” Talor explains. “I think it would have been better to go to a bar and check out this band.”
Pulling from influences like Rush and Earth, Wind & Fire, the pair’s sonic spectrum runs the gamut from classic and progressive rock to soulful funk; a harmony-rich playground surrounded by a bevy of cascading grooves and a heavy bassline.
“Our dad was in bands in the early 70s, so we grew up on the Beatles, The Stones, The Who, Zeppelin, all those bands. But when we started playing, it was a natural evolution to Deep Purple, Van Halen, then all the progressive rock from the '70s, a jazz-fusion phase,” Jordan, singer and bassist, says of their early beginnings. “Then Talor started learning Parliament-Funkadelic and Tower of Power, so it just bled into our sound.”
On their latest album Plastic Palace, they push deeper into funk-forward territory, leaning on their twin-linked creative instincts across its nine songs. Tracks like “Equal Access” owe as much of its musical DNA to funk greats like The Gap Band as it does Rush or Van Halen, while “Mingo,” an instrumental cut, shows off the kind of perfectly in-sync musicianship that comes from a pair of siblings who have been playing together since they were twelve.
Previous records, the duo says, had them overthinking about what they were supposed to be doing. “When you're hyperthinking about other people, sometimes you make really bland music. Or when you're trying to be the most original band in the world, you sometimes make really self-indulgent music,” Jordan explains about trying to strike that perfect balance. But with this project, the directive was different. “This album was no fucks given anymore, let's just fully embrace everything we're about.”
For an act that’s toured Europe three times and played dozens of music festivals, platforms like ReverbNation have given them, as Talor puts it, a fighting chance that wouldn't have existed 20 years ago. “Dudes playing rock music in their 30s, 20 years ago, would have been dead in the water,” he says. “There were labels and gatekeepers, and that was the only way to get any traction. So things like BandLab, ReverbNation, and the other social media apps help.”
And for a duo that's always done things on their own terms, that fighting chance is all they needed. The goal is just more of this: more music, more shows, more people in the room. “If this can make us a good living, that's cool,” Talor says. “But if we're surviving other ways while doing this, that's fine too.”