T
he story goes something like this: Emily Moales was at a post office in Philadelphia, waiting to buy some stamps for a letter she had to mail. Maybe it was a thank-you card, she’s not sure. It might not sound like much of a moment, but in Moales’ hands, it became a song called “Real Magic,” in which she invests that tiny incident with a strange, ominous energy. She imagines herself feuding with Benjamin Franklin, the long-dead founder of this nation’s mail system, and the repercussions that might follow: “You just messed with the postmaster general,” she sings over slowly rolling piano notes. “The four-star postmaster general/And neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night can save you now…. He knows where you live…”
It gets even weirder from there. With its sneakily witty turns of phrase and its daring melodic leaps, “Real Magic” is a stellar example of the qualities that have made Star Moles, as she calls herself on record, a must-follow indie phenom to those in the know. “I sometimes think that boredom is when your brain gets the most creative,” says Moales, 27. “What I’m drawn to is creating a big something out of nothing.”
That’s one way of describing what she’s done with her career since it began nearly a decade ago in her parents’ New Hampshire basement. Highway to Hell, the album on which “Real Magic” appears, is full of skewed daydreams where Moales turns the ups and downs of life in a big city into something almost psychedelic. Originally released earlier this year through Historic New Jersey, the DIY label/studio/artistic collective she’s part of, Highway to Hell has drawn remarkable word-of-mouth buzz. That’s only going to increase now that she’s signed to the indie powerhouse Dead Oceans, which is putting the album in record stores for the first time on Dec. 4. “It’s definitely been, to use a cliché, a whirlwind,” Moales says — funny, since she’s one of the least cliché-prone writers in music right now. “It’s been a lot all at once. But it’s been awesome.”
Growing up in a suburban area about 20 minutes from the Vermont border, Moales enjoyed getting lost in imaginary worlds. “I’ve always been pretty bookish,” she says over lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant in South Philly a few weeks before announcing the label signing. “I was a play-pretend-on-the-playground kid.” Her parents read The Hobbit to her when she was very young; by 12, she was devouring The Lord of the Rings on her own, lugging a hardcover edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterwork around her middle school. “People would be like, ‘Is that the Bible?’” (Asked now about her favorite character, she answers instantly: “I mean, always a fan of Éowyn, Shieldmaiden of Rohan.”)
She acted in her school’s theater classes and tried writing short stories, but her real creative awakening came when she got a keyboard that let her bring the scenes in her head to life. “Songwriting was a way for me to still write stories, but the thing with stories is I could never finish them — I would never know where they’d go,” she says. “And with a song, that’s fine. It can be three minutes and you can just get an idea of something. So it was kind of me cheating at writing a story.”
Music was generally a solitary pursuit for her, since there was no scene to speak of in her town. But the summer she was 14, she went to a rock camp in Connecticut where she met a friend named Charley whose wider knowledge proved pivotal. “We became huge Beatles fans together, and the Velvet Underground,” Moales recalls. “We would dive so deep into all the discographies. She also showed me Tame Impala and Foxygen, who sparked the interest in recording my own music.”
After high school, Moales took a gap year and got more serious about what was becoming her number one way of escaping the mundanity of life here on earth. “I basically moved into my parents’ basement and would just stay up all night recording on my laptop,” she says. “Eventually I stopped caring about being quiet.”
The songs she wrote in those days were often connected to the fantasy and science fiction she loved to read. “I wanted that shiny, shivery, magical energy,” she says. She chose the name Star Moles for her early Bandcamp releases because she liked the way it evoked some of nature’s oddest-looking fuzzballs, and it stuck. “I always thought my full name didn’t have much of a ring to it for showbiz. So I was like, ‘Maybe I’ll lean into the imagery of the creature.’”
In 2018, she traveled to New Jersey to meet Kevin Basko, a prolific home-recording artist under the name Rubber Band Gun. Together they made a Star Moles album called Camelot, which is nominally about Arthurian legend but whose highly hummable pop sound has more to do with Stevie Nicks. Moales was also starting college at University of New Hampshire around this time, but she quickly found that studying English lit couldn’t compare to the musical life that was beginning to come together for her. “Recording with Kevin, I was like, ‘This is the best thing ever and I want to do this forever,’” she says.
And that’s more or less what she’s done. In the spring of 2020, she and Basko moved fulltime to Philly, where they write and record with a cast of characters that also includes sibling pop duo Sam and Louise Sullivan. “They started coming to our house to record in the studio, and we eventually all started playing in each other’s bands,” she says. For anyone who remembers the collaborative chaos of the Elephant 6 circle in the late Nineties, what’s happening at Historic New Jersey isn’t far off — there’s always someone making something in that house.
Early last year, Moales sat down at the upright piano to write the songs that became Highway to Hell. Though she’d tripped to some far-out places on fantasy-tinged releases like Camelot, 2024’s Three Chimes, at Silent Palace!, and 2025’s Snack Monster, she found herself more interested this time in bringing it all back home. “This album was almost like you take the person who wrote those [earlier] records and put that voice in real life, in social situations, at work, commuting,” she says. At the same time, she can’t help adding a hint of drama to most of her lyrics: “I never want to write a sad song that’s just sad. I want there to be some sort of arc to it. It’s just my brain when I’m bored, making up enemies on a walk.”
With the re-release of Highway to Hell on Dead Oceans, Star Moles is joining a roster that includes Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski, and Japanese Breakfast — all highly individual songwriters who have found much wider audiences without compromising their visions. She’s accompanying the announcement with a new song called “Born Again” that reflects her recent interest in ’70s Stones, plus some vintage Star Moles lyrics about existential ennui (“We dressed you up real nice/We kissed you on your head/So you could send your emails/Every day until you’re dead”).
“Honestly, I feel so happy to have these songs reaching as many people as they are, because I never thought that would happen,” Moales says. “For a long time it was kind of just a one-way thing. I was making music and nothing was being reflected back — and that has its own value, to be totally free in that way. But I do want to know how my music is heard. I want to know what it is to other people.”
