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Melem(2,6,10-triamino-s-heptazine) is the building block of melon,a carbon nitride (CN) polymer that is proven to produce H-2 from water under visible illumination. With the aim of bringingadditional insight into the electronic structure of CN materials,we performed a spectroscopic characterization of gas-phase melem andof a melem-based self-assembled 2D H-bonded layer on Au(111) by meansof ultraviolet and X-ray photoemission spectroscopy (UPS, XPS) andnear-edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) spectroscopy. Inparallel, we performed density functional theory (DFT) simulationsof the same systems to unravel the molecular charge density redistributioncaused by the in-plane H-bonds. Comparing the experimental resultswith the spectroscopic DFT simulations, we can correlate the inducedcharge accumulation on the N-amino atoms to the red-shiftof the corresponding N 1s binding energy (BE) and of the N-amino 1s -> LUMO+n transitions. Moreover, when introducing a supportingAu(111) surface in the computational simulations, we observe a molecule-substrateinteraction that almost exclusively involves the out-of-plane molecularorbitals, leaving those engaged in the in-plane H-bonded network ratherunperturbed.