Sunflower Bean tell us about elemental new EP ‘Shake’: “We wanted to just keep it simple, stupid”
Sunflower Bean have returned with new single ‘Shake’ – the title-track of an upcoming EP. Check out the mud-covered video below now, alongside NME’s exclusive chat with the band.
The ‘Shake’ EP will be released via Lucky Number on September 27. Its five tracks will each be accompanied by a 14-minute performance-based video that sees each song represent a natural element: earth, wind, water, fire and metal.
Each video was directed by rising Toronto director Isaac Roberts over the course of one weekend in upstate New York. The first, for ‘Shake’, puts the band in a dark, dingy wood, where they perform with their bodies and their instruments slathered in mud.
“When we told a lot of people, ‘This is what we want to do – five videos in one weekend and just go fucking crazy’, a lot of them were scared,” singer and bassist Julia Cumming told NME. “You need someone with DIY ethos who is ready to do what it takes to get the shot and sometimes that means building a mud pit in the forest and spraying yourself with a hose over and over again.”
“When you make an EP and it’s inspired by raw elements, you’re gonna get exposed to the elements,” guitarist Nick Kivlen noted.
“All of the videos are very performance-based and live-based, which we thought would speak to the music best,” Cumming continued. “Getting back into that live spirit after feeling like a writing band and a studio band in the past few years was really cool. It feels good to put your body on the line – not that it was on the line, but our performance in that video and all the videos shows what matters to us, which is just giving ourselves to the song.”
“There are a few more videos that have crazy setups, like a lot of Julia singing underwater,” Kivlen added.
The “elemental thing”, as the band like to refer to it, sprung from “a little bit of wordplay”, Cumming said. “A lot of the songs were written in drop C, which is what [Black Sabbath guitarist] Tony Iommi popularised when he lost his fingertips in a sheet metal factory, so there’s this industrial spirit that is embedded into how the songs were made. Even the word ‘shake’ is very tangible…”
“And like raw material,” Kivlen chimed in. “It felt very stone, slab… like a structure that’s unrefined.”
“With it being elemental, we wanted to think about how they work together,” Cumming continued. “Rather than it being fire, we were thinking about magma and that being the visual through-line of a fiery song like ‘Teach Me To Be Bad’. The mud in our video is mud, but it’s also granite-coloured – it’s not concrete, but it’s like if mud was concrete.
“We’re playing with how inspired we can be by the rawness of nature with the fact that we’re city people and a New York City band, and how we can interpret that into and respect the industrial-ness of the more metal or rock ideas. You start playing with the silliness of the word ‘rock’ and how far you can take that and what it means to you.”
The song ‘Shake’ was inspired by drummer Olive Faber and the band’s manager watching the 1997 horror movie I Know What You Did Last Summer and, in particular, the cover of Seals & Crofts’ ‘Summer Breeze’ that Type O Negative contributed to the soundtrack. “It was the fall and every fall I get into heavy music again,” Faber explained. “I showed it to Nick, and he sat down on the ground [in the studio], and he just played the ‘Shake’ riff.”
“The best part of the Type O Negative song is when the riff’s playing and there’s this breath sound,” Kivlen said. “We were like, ‘What if the entire song just had that energy and never became more of a ballad?’”
“‘Shake’ is as much about commitment to a riff as it is about what it says, and it was the first step in defining us wanting to make something more experimental,” Cumming added. “The whispery ‘shake’ on the song became almost like our pseudo DJ tag for the whole EP because it’s on every single song.”
The EP’s title track opens with that tag whispered through the crunching, uncompromising riff before Kivlen and Cumming take the reins vocally. “Happy couples make me sick,” they sneer in unison on the chorus, “I’m just shaking for the hell of it.”
“It’s a song that’s against convention, whether that’s monogamy or rigid social structures,” Kivlen said. “It talks about who you are when the world can’t see you and just having fun. The ‘Happy couples make me sick’ line is just funny to me because there’s so many songs about being in love.
“I think the song is kind of sexy in a scary way, like the way bands in the ‘90s were – Billy Corgan was hot, but he also looked like a vampire. Alice In Chains were sexy, but they were really dirty and all their album covers looked like mud. Kurt [Cobain], obviously, was really hot, but not conventionally. So, I think it’s a sexy, ugly song.”
The ‘Shake’ EP marks the New York trio’s first new material since the release of their 2022 album ‘Headful Of Sugar’ and also forms the band’s first fully self-produced record.
“On ‘Headful…’, we did a bunch of that, but it was sent back and forth between us and [producer] Jacob Portrait,” Cumming explained. “But this is our first self-recorded, self-produced piece of work completely, so that’s very special for us.
“We’ve all spent a lot of time thinking about production and working in that area, especially Olive – she was the one who, in the pandemic, taught herself the most and has now been engineering and producing so many sessions for other artists, too.”
Cumming continued to describe taking charge of the technical process behind the record as “exciting and vulnerable in a different way”. Kivlen added: “It was nice to feel confident to know what you want to do and not have anyone telling you what to do, or anyone helping you do it either. It was very matter-of-fact, it was very natural and it just made sense.”
The ‘Shake’ EP was inspired by the band’s early years in the DIY scene. It also captures the heavier side of the trio that has always existed within their DNA, but has not always been at the forefront of their sound as they’ve explored new ways of expressing themselves. “When you’re in the arts, you’re constantly reflecting on, ‘What do I have to offer? Why am I here?’” Cumming said.
“There were heavier parts of ‘Headful…’, but we would always notice when we played those songs live that was where the three of us felt at home and it felt like we hadn’t made a piece of work that reflected that since maybe [2015 EP] ‘Show Me Your Seven Secrets’.
“Even in [2016 debut album] ‘Human Ceremony’, there’s strings and all this different stuff. So it was a bit of soul-searching and there’s a lot within the EP that is about the love of being a rock trip and letting that stand as it is.”
“When you’re an artist, after you do one thing, it’s nice to do the other thing,” Faber said. “‘Headful…’ and even [2018 second album] ‘Twentytwo [In Blue]’ took shape over the course of a couple of years and, with each of them, we were really into getting into the studio and trying everything and, with ‘Shake’, it just felt like the natural progression to move forward and do it [in a way] that’s not piecemeal production, but just live takes of us playing the songs. We made a couple of albums that were produced to the nines and, on this one, we wanted to just keep it simple, stupid.”
The ‘Shake’ EP is out September 27 via Lucky Number. Check out the full tracklist below.
1. ‘Shake’
2. ‘Lucky Number’
3. ‘Teach Me To Be Bad’
4. ‘Serial Killer’
5. ‘Angelica’
Sunflower Bean will also mark its release with a series of club shows across the US – see the full dates below and purchase tickets here.
October 2024
2 – Brooklyn, NY – Baby’s All Right
9 – Los Angeles, CA – Zebulon
12 – Chicago, IL – The Empty Bottle
November 2024
16 – Austin, TX – Empire Control Room
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Rhian Daly
NME
