The Junior League's Melancholy is Deep on "The Moon ..."

Joe Adgragna of The Junior League

The built-in good cheer of Beatlesque pop can’t stand up to the mood of the new songs by the New Orleans band.

Will someone come up with a title more bleak than The Moon Neither Noticed Nor Ignored? It’s pretty dark to think that something as beautiful and poetic as the moon no longer even merits a response, but that’s the tone of the new album from The Junior League. If you think I’m reaching, the title of the piece of art on the cover is “One is for Sorrow.”

The songs themselves are lovely, classic pop and jangly rock ’n’ roll, all so immediate and catchy that you can sing along by the second or third chorus. But what are you singing along to? “When you feel like letting go / you’ll be fine,” in “A Matter of Time.”

Joe Adragna, Mr. Junior League, sounds like he’s feeling the weight of our times throughout the album. In “Just as Long as I Have You,” he puts more emphasis on the losses and mishaps that he can withstand than the solution: “just as long as I have you around.” He’s feeling his meaninglessness when he sings, “The sun will set / the sun will rise / Regardless if I wake / Regardless if I die.”

As a result, The Moon Neither Noticed Nor Ignored has a level of drama uncommon in its form. These days, power pop and its related styles sound like a retro refuge from the 21st century as they assert the primacy of guitars, drums and harmony vocals in a time when none of the three drive chart success. It’s also, like surf, often a formal exercise with lyrics that give listeners what they expect to hear more than actual introspection.

Most of the titles on the album could accompany songs that mad lib together pop clichés, but the world is too much with Adragna for that to happen. The love songs are real, but they don’t offer much in the way of salvation or comfort. The album sounds like he tried to make a conventional Beatles pop album but the anxieties were too powerful to be suppressed under the usual musical and lyrical tropes. It’s like he wants his music to hold back whatever’s on his mind—maybe age, maybe loss, maybe life in 2025—but it can’t.

To be clear, The Moon Neither Noticed Nor Ignored isn’t depressing. Adragna’s vocals don’t sound defeated or morose, and the songs jangle with all the brightness and snappy tempos that they had in easier times. It’s fascinating to hear him reveal himself in such an unexpected forum, and that internal struggle makes the moments that break the mold really stand out. You buy that he intends to fight in “I Am Gonna Fight,” but it’s not clear to what extent it will actually happen, but the unruly, distorted garage band sound of “I Hate to Break it to You” shows genuine ferocity.

At the other end of the spectrum is the beautiful album closer, “Forget Forget-Me-Nots,” where he stops trying to put a brave face on things and embraces a gorgeous melancholy. That’s where the lyric goes, the melody goes, and the musical ornamentation goes, so Adragna throws up his hands and goes with them. For five minutes, he luxuriates in the sadness he has tried to keep at bay all album, and the absence of the grinding, low grade tension that has become as biological these days as breathing makes you glad for the song and him.

Because The Moon Neither Noticed Nor Ignored has such a defined emotional arc, it really needs to heart as a whole. Isolate tracks and they can easily sound unburdened, or no more so than usual. The whole tells the story, and to Adragna’s credit, he found a way to make a subgenre that often feels like a formal exercise into something personal.