So, you’ve been making music as Sunflower Bean for around a decade, and your fourth album ‘Mortal Primetime’ reflects that time. How do you feel you’ve changed as individuals and musicians over the years?
Julia: I feel like the first big change was around the pandemic, because that was when our lives changed. ‘Human Ceremony’ and ‘Twentytwo In Blue’ followed the indie rock thing where you tour for a year and a half, make a record in six months, and then you go and tour that. That was the first time we got out of the schedule and realised that there was no schedule that needed to be upheld. We then went from being a band that was known mostly for our live stuff to people who became more focused on just our writing, because that’s what we were doing. It was basically all we could do. It led to writing like, a billion songs for ‘Headful of Sugar’, and that change stayed with us. Now, with ‘Mortal Primetime’, I think that we all felt like we were able to sit in ourselves a little more, be comfortable with those changes that were made and how we wanted the record to reflect that.
If you were to reintroduce yourselves at this stage, how would you define Sunflower Bean as a band and your overall sound?
Nick: Well, ‘Mortal Primetime’ was pretty much made the opposite way of ‘Headful Of Sugar’, which was done over the course of two years. We were making tons of demos and using a lot of modern music production techniques like copying and pasting choruses, sampling drum loops and lots of MIDI. That was really fun to experiment with and a lot of great stuff came out of it, but some less great stuff came out of it as well. The thing about our band that’s special is the fact that we’re three people who came together organically through a music community. We had a location and a scene, and we’ve played together for over ten years. We have this live chemistry that we’ve developed within our city and our city’s music culture. We really wanted to capture that special quality on record.
So, to make ‘Mortal Primetime’, we rented a studio and played live together in a room. We recorded almost the entire record in fourteen days. Everything was live. We treated the recording like we were going to tape, so every performance is unique. Every guitar take is full, and you can really feel the three of us in the room playing together. It’s an organic record that was made in a way that’s closer to how an album would have been made in 1965 than how albums are made today.
Julia: With all of that context, if I were to try to reintroduce us, on paper I would say that we’re an indie-alternative power pop band [Nick: Maybe not indie!]. I don’t know, people feel weird about that word. But one thing that we’re not is a post-punk band [Nick: That’s true]. Which I think is funny, because that often makes people not quite sure what to do with us in itself, as they’re so used to post-punk being the defining sound of rock at this time. But the footnote to that would be we are artists who are trying to keep the band tradition alive through our own organic experiences. What we’re fighting against is homogenous music culture and anti-creativity in production. We’re trying to fight for something real. All of our records have been trying to do that. That’s one of the most important things about our discography to me. It’s humanity, I guess.
Nick: And then record labels will say that means “hard to market”.
That’s an interesting point because you’ve been described as a band that defies definition, blending different influences and largely being “unclassifiable”. Was this your aim or a natural outcome of having a variety of tastes that contribute to your sound?
Julia: I feel like that part of the discussion is so loud, it sort of puts us in a position to have to explain ourselves. People are so used to singular artists that they aren’t used to what a band having different influences can create. The way that I describe it is that we think of songs as very individual. We have a song called ‘Champagne Taste’ on the record, and then the record ends with ‘Sunshine’. If you were to look at those genre-wise, you would say ‘Champagne Taste’ feels like an alternative rock song, but ‘Sunshine’ feels like a My Bloody Valentine shoegaze song. In my mind when we’re working with those songs, what’s interesting to me is the dissonance in both of the guitars and the fact that they feel as though they’re about to veer off the edge. It’s the tension that keeps it connected.
Perhaps what happens is we aren’t thinking in the genres. In fact, when we recorded ‘Mortal Primetime’, we made sure that we used the same group of instruments and the same mics on the drum kit. We wanted to make sure that the songs would be literally related through using all that stuff, so that there was a small amount of variation that could occur at all. It’s something that we definitely think about, though it’s not our intention to be everywhere. I hope that the things that keep the songs connected to us really come through.
Nick: Honestly, maybe I’m having an epiphany right now, but it’s just an old school band thing. If you go back and look at a lot of classic rock records or classic records in general, they are so varied in their sound. There are so many bands that have mixed heavy music with ballads and acoustic music. Every single one of our records has had a wide range of influence and a wide range of sounds, and while we’re making them it’s never even come into question for us. We love all different kinds of music. I guess the most classic album ever made is ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ – think about how varied that is. They use tubas and stuff!
From: https://www.clashmusic.com/features/i-knew-love-sunflower-bean-interviewed/
