Sunflower Bean – Julia Cumming (vocals, bass), Nick Kivlen (vocals, guitar) and Olive Faber (drums) – share a new single today entitled “Nothing Romantic,” a soaring second preview of their transformative new album Mortal Primetime, out April 25th on Lucky Number.
While the album’s first single “Champagne Taste” found Cumming channeling Iggy Pop, “Nothing Romantic” features power cords that harken back to arena-ready hits of the ‘70s and ‘80s by Heart, Pat Benatar, or Joan Jett, with piano from Roger Joseph Manning Jr. (co-founder of legendary power-pop band Jellyfish).
“‘Nothing Romantic’ is about rejecting the myth of the tortured artist—realizing that the joys of creativity don’t have to come from the lows of misery,” the band explains. “The video mirrors this journey, capturing our lives as touring musicians in between nightmarish performances. From green rooms to lost highways, we travel from town to town, feeling alive only in the escape of our show. There’s tension between the connection and solitude; on stage, we’re together, sharing our music with others but later isolation and the price of our sacrifices creep in.”
Listen to the new single & watch its incredible Sophia Feuer & Tyler Macri directed music video HERE.
Sunflower Bean is known for their blistering live show, and will bring it back on the road in the U.S. starting tomorrow with a series of SXSW showcases in Austin. This Spring, their headline tour in support of Mortal Primetime begins, including a hometown show at Warsaw in Brooklyn. The band has graced the stages of countless festivals like Glastonbury and Lollapalooza, to tours with Beck, Interpol, and The Pixies, and sold-out international headline shows. They just wrapped up a massive European/UK tour with Cage the Elephant, so their shows are not to be missed. See below to find a show near you and get your tickets HERE.
Sunflower Bean return reinvigorated with the most hard-fought and vulnerable album of their career: Mortal Primetime. In the three years since their last LP Headful of Sugar, the members of Sunflower Bean drifted from one another as they pursued new projects and confronted personal challenges, tragedies and transformations. But Mortal Primetime – the band’s fourth album, but first self-produced – finds Sunflower Bean with a renewed sense of purpose after nearly losing everything they built together. “You get to decide what your prime is, and you fight for it,” bassist and vocalist Julia Cumming says. “This is ours, and that can’t be taken away by circumstance. We can’t take it away from each other. This moment, where we are now, is what we’ve always fought for.” With mixing by Caesar Edmunds (The Killers, Wet Leg) and engineering by Sarah Tudzin (Illuminati Hotties, Boygenius), Sunflower Bean were inspired by alternative rock, dreamy psychedelia, and arena-sized ambition to create a sound that’s undeniably theirs on Mortal Primetime; a record that celebrates their history while hurtling toward the future.
PRE-ORDER MORTAL PRIMETIME – OUT APRIL 25 VIA LUCKY NUMBER
Track Listing:
1. Champagne Taste
2. Nothing Romantic
3. Waiting For The Rain
4. Look What You’ve Done To Me
5. I Knew Love
6. Take Out Your Insides
7. There’s A Part I Can’t Get Back
8. Please Rewind
9. Shooting Star
10. Sunshine
Tour dates
3/12 – Austin, TX @ SXSW – Monster Children Showcase at Mohawk
3/13 – Austin, TX @ SXSW – JBL Sound Bodega at 3Ten Austin City Limits
3/13 – Austin, TX @ SXSW – Academy Fight Songs / Rough Trade Publishing at Hotel Vegas
3/14 – Austin, TX @ SXSW – Paste Magazine Showcase at High Noon
3/14 – Austin, TX @ SXSW – KROX at Inn Cahoots
4/29 – Brighton, UK @ Resident
4/30 – Kingston, UK @ Pryzm (Disco Room)
5/1 – Leeds, UK @ Belgrave Music Hall
5/2 – Liverpool, UK @ Baltic
5/3 – London, UK @ Rough Trade East
5/15 – Troy, NY @ No Fun *
5/16 – Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brendas *
5/17 – Boston, MA @ Deep Cuts *
5/22 – Brooklyn, NY @ Warsaw #
5/23 – Washington, DC @ The Atlantis #
5/24 – Raleigh, NC @ Kings #
5/25 – Asheville, NC @ Eulogy #
5/27 – Nashville, TN @ Blue Room at Third Man Records #
5/28 – Atlanta, GA @ The Earl #
5/30 – Denton, TX @ Rubber Gloves #
5/31 – Austin, TX @ The Ballroom #
6/01 – Houston, TX @ White Oak Upstairs #
6/04 – Phoenix, AZ @ Valley Bar #
6/05 – San Diego, CA @ The Casbah #
6/06 – Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room #
6/07 – San Francisco, CA @ The Chapel #
6/9 – Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios #
6/10 – Seattle, WA @ Madame Lou’s #
6/12 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court
6/13 – Fort Collins, CO @ The Coast #
6/14 – Denver, CO @ Hi-Dive
6/17 – Minneapolis, MN @ 7th St. Entry #
6/19 – Chicago, IL @ Sleeping Village #
6/20 – Detroit, MI @ Third Man Records
6/21 – Toronto, ON @ The Garrison
* with Laveda
# with Gift
More on Sunflower Bean & Mortal Primetime:
Time marches relentlessly on, but it can pass unnoticed unless you find a way to capture it. For the entirety of their remarkable career, Sunflower Bean has made monuments of fleeting moments, by turning them into art, bottling them as song. They broke onto the scene as teens wise beyond their years with Human Ceremony, captured the melancholia of nascent adulthood on Twentytwo in Blue, and confronted the alienation of life under late capitalism on Headful of Sugar. Now in their Saturn Return, the band is back with the most hard-fought and vulnerable album of their career: Mortal Primetime.
That confidence is earned, because Mortal Primetime almost didn’t happen. In the years since Headful of Sugar, the members of Sunflower Bean drifted from one another as they pursued new projects and confronted personal challenges, tragedies and transformations. Synonymous with New York, the band lost guitarist/vocalist Nick Kivlen to California, leaving vocalist/bassist Cumming to write songs alone for the first time in the band’s history. Soon after, she separated from her long-time partner, informing much of her songwriting. Additionally, drummer Olive Faber birthed a new project, Stars Revenge, after coming out as transgender around the last album cycle. Despite the wealth of success they’d experienced together as a band, Sunflower Bean struggled to tend to their collective fire and tensions rose. The three friends grew up together and spent their twenties in the spotlight, but away from it, they struggled to make sense of who they were outside of Sunflower Bean. The future seemed finite – it felt like time was up.
“Coming close to losing something you fought for, for over a decade, is a really good way to get close to your heart as an artist,” Cumming says. “Every long-term relationship, experiences challenges – you either stop or you go deeper. What is a band but a relationship with a body of work?”
Reinvigorated, Sunflower Bean chose to keep the faith and go deeper. “Faith is just another word for a healthy dose of delusion,” Faber says. “We make good music together – how could we walk away from that?” All three original band members convened in Los Angeles, encouraged by the team that’s uplifted them from the very beginning. They doubled down by choosing to self-produce the album, tracking it live to ensure that the immediacy of the performances so essential to Sunflower Bean’s mystique shined through. “It’s such a rare and special thing for a band to have played together this long, so we wanted to lean into the skills we’ve built and take an old-school approach to the recording—which is maybe the most subversive thing we could do at a time when it’s so easy to copy and paste,” says Kivlen. With mixing by Caesar Edmunds (The Killers, Wet Leg) and engineering by Sarah Tudzin (Illuminati Hotties, Boygenius), Sunflower Bean were inspired by alternative rock, dreamy psychedelia, and arena-sized ambition to create a sound that’s undeniably theirs on Mortal Primetime; a record that celebrates their history while hurtling toward the future.
Sunflower Bean has never fit neatly into a scene, and Mortal Primetime will remind listeners why. They draw from a wide swath of influences most bands wouldn’t dare namecheck together in a sentence, and that daringness has made them undefinable. “Sometimes I think of this record as Belle and Sebastian meets Alice in Chains,” Cumming says. “In the past, we’ve been told to tone down who we are, and this album is our refusal to be anything but ourselves,” Faber says. “It’s the purest expression of who we are.” These songs are the most honest of Sunflower Bean’s career – unvarnished, exposed.
On Mortal Primetime, the members of Sunflower Bean carry each other’s pain in all of its complexity, even when the band itself is the source. By embracing discordance and uncertainty, they created the bravest album of an already storied career. When Sunflower Bean set out to make music together as kids, they knew they wanted to go the distance, to create something that could stand up to the unforgiving passage of time. “The further you move through life, the more you realize how precious every moment is,” says Cumming. “This album is about choosing the present as our prime, but also being in touch with the transient and fleeting nature of this existence.” However fleeting this existence is, with Mortal Primetime Sunflower Bean offers up another monument that will withstand the weathering of time.
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