By the band’s own admission, Sunflower Bean was at a crossroads in the months leading up to the recording of its brilliant new LP, Mortal Primetime (Lucky Number). Native New Yorkers Julia Cumming, Nick Kivlin and Olive Faber were teenagers when they released their 2016 debut, Human Ceremony, laying out a garagey indie-pop template that would evolve even further on 2020’s Twentytwo In Blue. Two years later, Headful Of Sugar—an exhilarating foray into a gritty, danceable urban headspace—left fans wondering where the trio would go next. Turns out the band wasn’t sure either.
The members of Sunflower Bean have emerged from their recent bout of soul-searching as a streamlined, arena-ready unit with enough self-confidence to produce themselves—and to know when the monster riffs that consumed 2024’s Shake EP weren’t sustainable for a whole album. Mortal Primetime proves that subtlety and restraint can rock just as hard.
MAGNET’s Hobart Rowland reached out to Cumming for details on Sunflower Bean’s transformation. Find out more on the latest MAGNET Classics Podcast.
It’s been three years between albums for Sunflower Bean. Give us a rundown of what’s been going on in everyone’s lives over that time?
Everything and nothing at all. Isn’t it weird how that happens? I think we all grew up … a lot. Nick moved to Los Angeles, Olive started her own band, and I went on some pretty intense journeys as a writer and a person. We’d all been in Sunflower Bean since we were late teenagers and never knew anything else besides our lives in the band. We’d reached an impasse of creative confusion, and we had to let go for a while. Getting some space gave us the chance to find our synergy again, and the ideas for this record started to appear—something natural, something tangible, something that sounded like how we felt in the room together, letting our instruments find chemistry together again. We knew that would set us free from any of our fears, because it would be so authentic to us.
Headful Of Sugar dabbled in an array of styles, but Mortal Primetime takes a pretty firm rock stance. What’s behind this more retro-focused sound?
We’ve always loved music from the past, especially riffs that evoke the feeling of arena rock. As fans of rock from so many different eras, it felt really good to just enjoy the “big” experience of the sound. It’s also been cool to be on this journey together. We’ve always been really artistically free and created work that excited us at that time—like when we wrote Headful Of Sugar. It showed us how to explore while also leading us back home.
Why did the band decide to self-produce the new album?
We’d started self-producing on Shake, which gave us a huge chance to grow as artists and stand behind our ideas. We wanted to build that trust with ourselves and to face our fears of asking others in the room for validation. The work is also very personal, and I think self-producing helped us get closer to our ideas and protect them. None of this means we don’t want to work with producers again. We’re extremely grateful for the experiences we’ve had. We learned so much from the producers we’ve worked with, and it’s a very intense experience you go on together. We just had our own synergy around this record, and that gave us the confidence to try it.
What was the songwriting process like for Mortal Primetime?
During Headful, we were inspired by the music happening at that moment—and COVID-era production, which had to be done remotely. For Mortal Primetime, we were able to focus more on how the songs made us feel in the room together, rather than what the songs should mean in a cultural sense.
Sunflower Bean has been through so many evolutions over the past 10 years. Is there any new territory left unexplored?
Always. I can’t tell you what the way forward sounds like, but I know it will be built brick by brick, filled with every detail we’ve learned on this journey. It will only get deeper. I can’t wait for the new territories we can visit and the journeys we create together—because I know they’ll be real.
See Sunflower Bean live.
