Brooklyn’s MX LONELY deliver a hard-hitting alt-rock catharsis with “Return to Sender,” a searing release off their upcoming debut album ‘ALL MONSTERS’ that finds power not in chasing closure, but in refusing to carry someone else’s indifference.

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Stream: “Return to Sender” – MX LONELY

Indifference can be more devastating than cruelty. It offers no shape to push against, no clear wound to tend – just the slow, destabilizing sense of being unseen, unchosen, unresolved.

MX LONELY’s “Return to Sender” lives inside that psychological freefall: The moment you realize someone feels nothing for you, and the mind spirals trying to understand what that absence means. Rather than chasing closure or pleading for clarity, the song turns inward, reckoning with the impossible task of controlling how you’re perceived – and arriving, painfully and powerfully, at the realization that other people’s detachment is not yours to carry. What follows is not resignation, but reclamation: A refusal to internalize indifference as truth.

I don’t like you and I don’t dislike you
threads unknotting in the back of your head
Fighting the feeling is useless when you’re dead
Return to sender, return to sender

Return to sender, return to sender…

Released January 7^th, “Return to Sender” is the latest, and boldest, single off MX LONELY’s upcoming debut album ALL MONSTERS, due February 20, 2026 via Julia’s War Recordings – the kind of hard-hitting fever dream that stays long after the last note fades. From Rae Haas’s visceral vocals and the sludgy, searing electric guitars, to the charged, churning drum pulse that pushes the track forever onward, the song aches, seethes, and shivers shooting down the spine – dynamic in motion, but weighted with real heft, drama, and intensity.

Active since 2020, Brooklyn-based MX LONELY make music that bruises beneath the surface – heavy, murky alt-rock streaked with beauty, built to hold big feelings at full volume. Anchored by synthesist/vocalist Rae Haas, guitarist Jake Harms, and bassist Gabriel Garman, the band’s story is rooted in both community and honesty: The trio originally met at AA meetings, bonded, and started shaping what would become MX LONELY as a place to excavate the things we carry and can’t always name.

That ethos is all over their work – songs that don’t hide behind abstraction, but turn overwhelm, anxiety, listlessness, dysphoria, addiction, and self-sabotage into something physical you can move through. Or, as Haas puts it in the band’s larger worldview, their music is about “shadow work; internal and external monsters,” and refusing to let those monsters stay in the dark.

If ALL MONSTERS is an exorcism – a record about dragging the monsters into the light and destroying the ideas that keep you trapped – then “Return to Sender” feels like one of its sharpest spells: A charged, thorny meditation on perception, projection, and the particular psychological damage of indifference.

I don’t know you and I don’t wanna know you
People crowd small places with their heat
And a quick, sharp stomping of their defeat
Cash out and spend her, I’m a scene defender

Return to sender, return to sender…
Return to sender, return to sender
Return to sender, return to sender
Return to sender, return to sender

“‘Return to Sender’ is about trying to understand the other side of someone feeling indifference towards you,” Haas tells Atwood Magazine. “When this sentiment has been expressed to me in my life, it has the capability to send me into an absolute spiral – I would much rather have an unambiguous emotion, like hatred, directed towards me. It’s easier to process. This song was written off the dome, and was me trying to write from a viewpoint outside of my own head. The repeated phrase ‘return to sender’ that makes up the chorus was an attempt to accept this outside perspective. If you know that your side of the street is clean, others’ opinions are not your burden to carry.”

What makes “Return to Sender” so brutal is how cleanly it captures that emotional paradox: Wanting anything but ambiguity, craving the clarity of conflict because indifference is a void you can’t argue with. The opening lines are deceptively plain, almost conversational, but they’re laced with dread: “I don’t like you and I don’t dislike you / threads unknotting in the back of your head / Fighting the feeling is useless when you’re dead”

That “threads unknotting” image is such a quiet gut punch – the slow, invisible unravelling of attachment, the moment you realize someone is already leaving you behind emotionally. Then MX LONELY slam the emotional thesis into the chorus by repetition alone: “Return to sender, return to sender”

It’s mantra as muscle memory – the mind trying to make acceptance physical. And the band plays it that way: That charged verse riff keeps grinding forward like it’s trying to outpace panic, while the chorus opens up into something roaring and massive, fuzzed-out and feral, the full-body release you get when the feelings finally stop negotiating and just spill.

The song’s structure gives it that fever-dream quality.

Jake Harms calls it “the closest thing we have to a straight up Nirvana-style punk rock song,” and you can hear that DNA in the way the track balances immediacy with danger: A tight verse/chorus hook that still makes room for a long, diverging bridge/solo section that feels like the song slipping out of your grasp mid-sprint. That divergence matters – because the lyric is about spiraling, and the arrangement spirals too, refusing to stay contained.

One of the biggest reasons this song lands is that MX LONELY are fundamentally a live band – and they talk about the music as a whole-body, sensory event. “I’d say the best way to experience our music first is by seeing it live,” Harms shares. “Get the energy of a show, then do a deep dive on the records.”

Haas echoes that physicality – and it’s hard not to read “Return to Sender” through this lens, as something meant to be felt in the chest before it’s understood intellectually: “We love seeing people move at shows. The decibel level of the live performance becomes a part of a whole sensory experience. The sound and vibration drown all your thoughts and you’re able to be totally present with the music.”

That “drown all your thoughts” line feels like an accidental mission statement for “Return to Sender” – because the song’s core wound is overthinking someone else’s distance, someone else’s unreadable emotional math. The remedy, in MX LONELY’s world, isn’t a perfect answer – it’s presence. It’s turning the anxiety into volume until it can’t talk back.

On the making-of side, ALL MONSTERS is the band’s first entirely self-recorded release, and the way they describe the process explains why “Return to Sender” feels so immediate – big, but not polished into lifelessness.

They tracked at Goose Room (Staten Island) with Garman engineering, produced it themselves, and later mixed/mastered with Corey Coffman (Gleemer). “I knew I wanted it to be a live band,” Harms says. “I wanted it to breathe and not be so confined to the digital recording world.”

That “breathe” is key – because even at its most sludgy and intense, “Return to Sender” isn’t just a wall of noise. It’s dynamic. It moves. It has negative space and then sudden, roaring weight, like the band is letting the song’s emotional logic dictate when to constrict and when to explode. Harms also shouts out drummer Andy Rapp as a major factor in shaping the album’s final form – and specifically names “the drum riffs in Return To Sender” as “a lot of key moments.” That tracks: The percussion here doesn’t just keep time; it drives the spiral, turning the verse into a clenched jaw and the chorus into a release.

And thematically, “Return to Sender” sits right at the record’s core concept – not just as a lyric hook, but as a protective framework. Haas reframes the phrase as a boundary: “When I say ‘return to sender’ I’m saying to return the anxiety over people’s opinions to the depths of hell they came from. Trust your instincts and check for projection. Everything that is meant to reach you will reach you, and everything else will return to sender.”

Then they take it one step further – into ritual: “‘Return to Sender’ is named after a type of protection spell that sends any harm that someone may wish upon you back to its source.”

That’s what makes the song feel bigger than a breakup track or a grievance – it’s not just “I’m hurt,” it’s “I’m done carrying what isn’t mine.” It’s taking the impossibility of controlling other people’s perceptions and turning it into a practice: Return it. Release it. Don’t let it live in you.

Floating on blue moon sometimes
You get numbers confused with angel signs
Carve a martyr out of opaline
You construe the world’s apologies
Cuz that’s what you are
That’s what you are

I’ll return to sender, return to sender
Return to sender, return to sender…

“Return to Sender” matters because it names something people don’t always validate as “real hurt”: The psychic violence of being met with shrugging indifference.

The song doesn’t romanticize that spiral, but it doesn’t minimize it either. Instead, it offers a hard-earned reframe – not “fix yourself so you don’t care,” but know your side of the street is clean and stop accepting responsibility for someone else’s interior world. And sonically, MX LONELY make that message visceral. The song’s weight and heft aren’t just aesthetic – they’re the emotional payload. This is what it sounds like when your nervous system is trying to solve an unsolvable problem, and the only way out is to let the sound swallow the thought.

As ALL MONSTERS approaches, the band’s hopes are beautifully simple and deeply human: They want people to spend time with the record, live in it, unpack it, return to it. “I hope people spend some time with it,” Harms shares. We put everything into this record and made something that feels like a complete idea of what this band is, and I hope that people get to find it and live in its world for a bit. I hope it fills people up with as much emotion as we put into it, and I hope people re-listen to it over time. There’s a lot of stuff to unpack, thematically and sonically.”

Haas’ takeaway is both a blessing and a battle cry – and it perfectly frames “Return to Sender” as a tool, not just a song: “I hope people feel free and I hope you use that freedom to kill more monsters. I hope the same for me.” Truth be told, “Return to Sender” hits so hard because it doesn’t just describe the spiral – it sounds like one: Feverish, heavy, brilliant, and loud enough to drown out the part of your brain that keeps begging for answers it’ll never get. It’s a song that turns indifference into intensity, turns anxiety into armor, and turns a single repeated phrase into a release valve you can actually use. The riff churns, the drums churn, the whole thing churns – until, somewhere in that cacophony, you feel the boundary click into place.

MX LONELY recently sat down with Atwood Magazine to talk about indifference, boundaries, and the emotional reckoning behind “Return to Sender” – and how those ideas thread through their upcoming debut album ALL MONSTERS. Read our conversation below, and spend some time with both this band and the world they open up on their cathartic, unflinching songs.

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:: stream/purchase ALL MONSTERS here ::

:: connect with MX LONELY here ::

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Stream: “Return to Sender” – MX LONELY

A CONVERSATION WITH MX LONELY

Jake Harms: I’d say the best way to experience our music first is by seeing it live. Get the energy of a show, then do a deep dive on the records.

Rae Haas: We love seeing people move at shows. The decibel level of the live performance becomes a part of a whole sensory experience. The sound and vibration drown all your thoughts and you’re able to be totally present with the music.

Jake Harms: The v0id b0ys record was made within a few months of Rae and I meeting one another. We just starting writing songs and it came out. I had been working on projects before that that were more post-punk / electro-noise leaning, often created within a DAW, and v0id b0ys had a heavy emphasis on the origin of the song being written outside the computer, on an acoustic guitar with the 2 of us singing. Rae brought in all these lyrics and feelings that they had been sitting on and it opened up a lot of stuff creatively.

MX is sort of a magnified version of that first project. I knew I wanted it to be a live band, I wanted it to breathe and not be so confined to the digital recording world. Gabe, Rae and I started the project just jamming and writing for a year or so before writing and recording a record called Cadonia at the end of 2021. The band started playing live in 2022, touring in 2023, and playing all of those shows, meeting and touring with other bands has had a huge impact on our sound.

As far as influences go, Elliott is a big one for us, but we love heavier stuff too, lots of old grunge, Chat Pile, all of the midwest/south heavier shoegaze bands like Downward. I’m proud of our ability to create a recorded sound that translates live, that feels bigger in person and is meant to be experienced that way.

Rae Haas: My North Star in music has always been the ethos of DIY music spaces. Having a place to collectively release anger, feel joy, and organize community is the heart of it for me. I never want to forget that. I’m constantly inspired by song writing that not only tells a story but creates a world: Mannequin Pussy, Die Spitz, Shower Curtain, Blood Sports, Prewn, Total Wife, Her New Knife, Public Circuit, Wiring, Shallow Water, and Caroline Rose are some of my favorites doing it right now.

Jake Harms: ALL MONSTERS was written and expanded on from a collection of songs that we started back in 2022, some of which became the SPIT EP. Our current drummer, Andy Rapp joined the band in late 2023 and began helping us shape the songs on ALL MONSTERS into their final form – a lot of key moments, the drum riffs in “Return to Sender,” the conscious use of Nevermind-esque drum hooks in “Big Hips” are a key element to the construction of the album. I feel like prior to him joining, Gabe, Rae, and I had a really solid idea of how the band was supposed to sound tonally an vocally, but Andy brought a power and a lift to the feeling of it.

We also worked on this record at a studio called Goose Room (Staten Island, NY). Gabe engineered all the tracking and we produced everything ourselves. I think going from a home-recording background this felt like the most honest way to make a big studio-level rock record. It allowed us to feel free to make mistakes and try stuff in the tracking process. We mixed/mastered the album with Corey Coffman (of the band Gleemer, who runs a studio in CO called Deep Down). Knowing that Corey was going to be working on it at the end of the tracking process made us feel really confident about the final sound of the record.

We are always trying to hit an emotion that is raw and honest and a little uncomfortable. We all met in the rooms, and I think that background of brutal honesty that’s often mixed with biting humor is a big part of how MX feels.

Rae Haas: ALL MONSTERS is kind of like an exorcism. The album is an ode to releasing collective despair. All monsters go to heaven means all monsters must die, and we aim to kill those monsters. When I felt utter hopelessness these melodies came to me and set a part of my soul free. I hope this album makes you dance and maybe inspires you to set a part of your soul free, too.

Jake Harms: “Big Hips” was a late add to the record – it was an old demo that we learned quickly at a practice and recorded a month later during basic tracking at Goose Room. When we heard the playback from the initial tracking we knew it had to be single 1. It didn’t feel as labored over as some of the other more intricately arranged album tracks, but it provided this condensed spark of the sound of the rest of the record. Lyrically it also felt like a wakeup call, a declaration that this wasn’t gonna be another shoegaze record with ambient lyrics that you can’t hear & don’t really matter.

“Shape Of An Angel” wasn’t immediately obvious as single 2, but when we heard the mix/master, we felt like it seemed like a great follow-up track to Hips, sort of a counterpart. It still has a ton of groove/underlying funk, but where Hips gets dirgey and heavy without any reverb or space in the song, Angel is a giant, beautiful haze. The two tracks kind of exemplify the balance of the record to me. They are also next to each other in the tracklisting for that reason.

“Return to Sender” was the first demo we tracked as a full band for ALL MONSTERS – we chose it as single 3 because it felt like a step outside of other MX material. It’s lyrically super personal for Rae, and it’s the closest thing we have to a straight up Nirvana-style punk rock song. I went back and forth a lot over whether it would work as a single because the track is so long, and the bridge/solo section is such a big divergence from the short/contained verse/chorus hook, but as I showed the record to people they kept highlighting it. Now I love it, and it’s been a mainstay in our set during the last 2 tours.

Rae Haas: “Big Hips” was always the first single. Equal parts angst and jest- it brought the sort of heavy levity that felt like the right entry way to the record. I found the video location working over the summer repainting a classroom in Harlem. Owen Lehman and I both imagined doing a video kind of based off of “Back to School” by Deftones and the opportunity to use a school presented itself right after that, which felt affirming and synchronic.

“Shape of an Angel” and “Return to Sender” just felt right in the alignment of it all.

Rae Haas: When I say “return to sender,” I’m saying to return the anxiety over people’s opinions to the depths of hell they came from. Trust your instincts and check for projection. Everything that is meant to reach you will reach you, and everything else will return to sender.

Rae Haas: “Return to Sender” is named after a type of protection spell that sends any harm that someone may wish upon you back to its source. It was a song that was simply always meant to- be on the album; it’s a reflection of its core.

Jake Harms: I hope people spend some time with it. We put everything into this record and made something that feels like a complete idea of what this band is, and I hope that people get to find it and live in its world for a bit. I hope it fills people up with as much emotion as we put into it, and I hope people re-listen to it over time. There’s a lot of stuff to unpack, thematically and sonically.

Rae Haas: I hope people feel free and I hope you use that freedom to kill more monsters. I hope the same for me.

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:: stream/purchase ALL MONSTERS here ::

:: connect with MX LONELY here ::

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Stream: “Return to Sender” – MX LONELY

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 © Luke Ivanovich

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