Since the release of their third album “Headful of Sugar,” the three members of Sunflower Bean went through changes in their lives that could have brought the band to an end. Frontwoman and bassist Julia Cumming and her longtime partner split up. Drummer Olive Faber came out as transgender and started a new band. And guitarist/vocalist Nick Kivlen moved to Los Angeles, meaning one-third of the New York City band was no longer at home.
“I wouldn’t say it was close to us breaking up, but it definitely was a lot,” Kivlen says on a Zoom call from LA. “I would say that it was not for certain that we would work together for a really long time on a new album.”
He was right about one thing: the trio spent just 15 days recording its new album, “Mortal Primetime.” But the process of almost losing what the three had built since 2013 galvanized them, and the record is a celebration rather than a farewell — Sunflower Bean is very much still together and as vital as ever.
“It made us work in a way where we didn’t have a lot of career consideration in a good way, I think,” he says. “I think we all felt lucky to be even given another chance to make an album together, and we wanted to take the opportunity to just play by our own rules and not think about career stuff, or the algorithm or trends, or what we need to do in order to advance our careers. We just wanted to make something that artistically felt important to make like an important document of like everything that we’ve done together, you know?”
“Mortal Primetime” is Sunflower Bean at its best, part hard rock bombast, part introspective, wispy shoegaze or jangle pop. There are anthemic rockers, power ballads and alt-rock bangers.
The title of the album comes from the sleazy, guitar riff-laden opening track, “Champagne Taste.”
“‘Mortal Primetime,’ it sort of encapsulates the whole circumstances of this record where the band almost died, like we were dealing with the potential mortality of the thing that we have been working on for 10 years,” says Kivlen. “And I think we all sort of realized, oh, life is fragile, this isn’t like infinite, this could end. And when we got together and started making the record, we had grown so much in a year and a half, two years, that we had not been working together and doing our own thing, that all of a sudden we were like, wow, it feels like we were so close to the end, but now we’re having this rebirth and this renaissance. And it actually feels like maybe we’re in the prime.
“And maybe even when you’re in your prime, there’s still that element of mortality there. And it’s kind of, you know, what makes life special and fleeting is the fact that it is eventually going to end for every single person.”
Another notable single from the album is “Nothing Romantic,” where Cumming embraces full ’70s and ’80s rock star bombast a la Pat Benatar or Heart on the soaring chorus. The song had been around for about two years and the band kept trying different versions before nailing it for “Mortal Primetime.”
“It’s gone through a lot, and for whatever reason, it always stuck around,” he says. “To me that song is cool because it feels like every single part of it kind of has a different influence to it, where I thought that the main riff sounded a lot like a psychedelic rock song, like it sounded like something maybe from the first Tame Impala record or like Queens of the Stone Age. And then the verse had this sort of Radiohead feel in that the chords that we were using were like augmented nine, and then the song switches into this power pop song. That was sort of the thing that stayed through the whole thing was the chorus and that stacked vocal melody that we all really loved.”
Sunflower Bean formed in 2013 and its roots go further back, when Cumming and Faber jammed together in high school. Early on the band gigged incessantly and buzz began to spread as it landed slots on major festivals Glastonbury, Leeds and Bonnaroo, as well as touring opportunities with The Killers, Interpol and Wolf Alice. The band was starting to taste some of the success achieved by previous NYC heavies like The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But it wasn’t a club the cool kids at the time were hoping to join.
“Honestly, all those bands were considered the most uncool bands in the world when we were coming up in Brooklyn,” Kivlen says. “Because when we first started gigging around Brooklyn in like 2011, 2012 before Sunflower Bean, all three of us were in DIY bands. It was about understated, anti-rock star, anti-fame, anti-anything that had to do with classic rock, whether it was Neon Indian and the electronic music scene with Grimes, Neon Indian, Pictureplane, Com Truise, Teengirl Fantasy, Vaporwave. All that stuff was like a big part of the Brooklyn music scene. And then you kind of had the slacker-y, beach rock vibe that was going on with a lot of the Captured Tracks bands. And then there was like this very strong like Stone Roses, Manchester, jangle guitar influence kind of thing, shoegaze, and like The Strokes or the Arctic Monkeys or anything like that was just considered so unbelievably uncool that if you ever saw a band that looked like The Strokes, they were just a laughingstock. And that’s kind of what we, in a way, were going against the grain of when we first started, because we were like, no, we love classic rock and we want to have guitar solos and write big melodies.”
The band is touring the US until late June, with a hometown album release on Thursday, May 22 at Warsaw in Brooklyn.
“They’re always crazy,” Kivlen says of NYC shows. “Honestly, playing New York is nothing like playing anywhere else because especially after when you’re first starting and you can play all the time — I think we played 80 shows in New York the first year we were a band — and then once you get signed and everything, you can’t do that. So whenever we do play New York, it always feels like this giant event. And so many people come from all different walks of life. And we like to have a party in the green room during the New York shows, but it is also pretty overwhelming. It definitely feels momentous, like you can kind of almost, like Christmas or something, mark your life by the New York shows. They definitely feel like yearly events or something in my life.”
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