Listen to a Milou Moon song, and it’s easy to picture Emily McGill in high school choir in her native Chicago, captivated by the lush vocal harmonies that would become one of the band’s signatures. Listen again, and you can hear the music-school kid fussing over classic-rock covers, the underage frontwoman belting out Zeppelin in bars around the Windy City. Listen to one of the band’s French songs, channelling Air and Melody’s Echo Chamber, and it’s McGill’s bilingual upbringing that’s brightest in the mix. At the same time, listen to Milou Moon’s light-soaked debut EP, Trails to Centre, from start to finish and you’re transported to Australia, where McGill has lived (in Naarm/Melbourne) since 2016. Teasing out these influences, what becomes clear is the band’s maturity as much as its youth: Milou Moon—McGill, Sam O’Neil (guitar/synth), George DeSilva (drums/synth), and Jevaan Waldron (bass)—released their first single, ‘Drawn In' in October 2023. The track is a solar flare, a psych-rock siren song, where McGill’s songwriting is both fresh and classic. Radio play, playlisting, and write-ups in music publications have followed. Milou Moon is here. With their debut EP Trails to Centre released in March 2024, an east-coast tour supporting Harmony Byrne, a string of US shows, and more new music around the corner, the group is poised in 2024 to keep arriving. - Anders Villani Photos by Ian Laidlaw