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When Austin McKee photographed Lucia Luna performing onstage at a Courtney Love drag night in 2018, he was struck by their voice instantly, but it wasn’t until they kept running into each other at concerts and club nights that they knew they were fated to make music together.
“I’d been making stuff on my own, and I had something I knew I had to have Lucia’s vocals on,” McKee says. “When we finally got into the studio, we really hit it off, and I was like, maybe we should just make new stuff together.”
Their duo, Human Hollow, released its debut EP, Static, last Friday, Nov. 22. Inspired by the darkest and mascara-streaked corners of ’80s New Wave and synth pop—and by latter-day bearers of the torch like Boy Harsher and TR/ST—Static reflects both the duo’s camaraderie and their roots in the Portland queer nightlife scene, which predate their collaboration by many years.
McKee was born in Ashland and moved to Portland as a young child. Initially pursuing a career as a filmmaker, he had a “period of queer self-discovery” in his mid-20s that led to him “falling back into photography” and shooting nightlife events in Portland while releasing his own music under the name Nomenclature.
“There wasn’t really a nightlife photographer scene in the community around here, so I became the one for five years or so,” McKee says. “In doing all of that, it helped me learn who I am but also to meet a lot of friends and creative people and put me in the right spaces at the right time.”
Luna moved to Portland from Missouri in 2011 and has been involved in several music projects since then, including the electro-rock band We Are Like the Spider and the dark synth-pop band Unicorn Domination, while maintaining a prolific solo career under their own name.
“My bandmates all ended up in different directions and locations, so I found myself more involved in nightlife, which was a really good experience for me in understanding more about myself as a person,” Luna says. “But then I kind of lacked the live music aspect of it.”
After Luna contributed vocals to a few Nomenclature tracks in 2023, the two started the band in earnest in 2024 and released their first song, “Medic,” this August. Both artists co-write and produce Human Hollow’s songs, and both contribute vocals, with McKee’s exuberant Sprechgesang contrasting with Luna’s dusky croon.
Though Human Hollow continues the stylistic arc of their earlier work, which generally orbits the “darkwave” synth music you might find black-clad crowds dancing to at Coffin Club, there are a few crucial differences in the new duo’s approach. The first is heavy use of analog synths, especially Luna’s Moog Voyager, which is crucial to the sound on Static.
“We’ll have Lucia like twisting knobs, and what we’ll do is, we sample a lot of the sounds that we’re literally fiddling with on the Moog and incorporate that into the tracks, which just completely transforms the sound,” McKee says.
Another idiosyncrasy of the duo’s approach is that they make all their music on a timer, recording a large number of tracks in a few hours and selecting the best of the batch to release later. This approach is inspired by Fact magazine’s YouTube series Against the Clock, in which artists make a track in under 10 minutes; the duo saw one of their favorite bands, the neo-darkwave duo Boy Harsher, appear on the show and were instantly inspired.
“We do 18 or 19 minutes,” McKee says. “I’m the one who builds the beats and plays live bass and things like that, then Lucia will have the mic and free flow and hum, and we just go back and forth.”
The duo believes this time-sensitive method allows for a more spontaneous approach not often associated with a genre where a cold, mechanical sheen is the norm.
“We’re not like drum-and-bass kind of players, so this is our version of jamming,” McKee says. “What makes it so special is that when things are like locked in, we can sense when something is right because there’s this weird little magic that happens when everything is going really well.”