“We haven’t had a fight on this tour. I mean, there’s still tomorrow…the clock is ticking,” joked Sunflower Bean vocalist and bassist Julia Cumming.
I joined Cumming and her bandmates Nick Kivlen (vocals, guitars) and Olive Faber (drums) during a hot summer day in June inside the green room at Third Man Records Cass Corridor. The trio would put on a high-energy rock show later that night inside Jack White’s record store.
This has been a big year for Sunflower Bean as they released their fourth studio album, Mortal Primetime, back in April. The New York band’s 12-year journey is expertly represented across the record’s 10 tracks — from power-pop opener “Champagne Taste” to the psychedelic vibes of “Waiting for the Rain.” My favorite song from Mortal Primetime is closer “Sunshine” with its heavy shoegaze soul.
Listen: Sunflower Bean discuss new album ‘Mortal Primetime,’ giving each other space + more
Mortal Primetime is also a very personal record for Sunflower Bean, both lyrically and production-wise. This is the first full-length Sunflower Bean album that was self-produced — a follow-up to their 2024 EP Shake — and the recording process was a back-to-basics approach of tracking each song live without the help of computer editing.
“The way we did…Mortal Primetime, was much more of a classic way of making a record where we rehearsed and demoed and then went into a studio for 15 days and banged out all the songs,” Kivlen said. “Like one after the other in the room with each other, using the same amps and the same board and just doing it more old school. It was a very different process, where Shake was made over the course of months with different parts being overdubbed at home.”
The lyrics featured on Mortal Primetime are just as raw as the blaring guitar riffs. “There’s a Part I Can’t Back” is about Cumming’s experience being groomed and the anger having to heal from that, with intense lines like “If I die before I wake, I pray the lord lets me get even first.”
“It was kind of one of those songs that you don’t…really expect to come out. I really had no intention of releasing it,” Cumming shared. “And then when the idea kind of came for what Mortal Primetime was going to sound like — and we were kind of coming together on those references of just a band and a room and the live drum sound and kind of what we can strip it back to — I sort of revisited the song because I thought that it might do really well under those circumstances that we were trying to record in.”
Not only did “There’s a Part I Can’t Get Back” make it on Mortal Primetime, but the band’s record label Lucky Number Music encouraged them to release it as a single.
“Imagine my surprise when the label said that it should be a single. It was not even a song I thought I would ever talk about,” Cumming said. “But I’m glad that they supported the song in that way and supported me in that way. I was like, ‘Are you sure this is the right kind of stuff for selling music?’ And it was like, ‘Yeah, it’s good to stand for something and it’s good to have opinions.’ I think that’s kind of the core of Mortal Primetime outside of what it sounds like.”
The fate of Sunflower Bean was uncertain after the release of their 2022 album Headful of Sugar. Cumming, Kivlen and Faber were just teenagers when they formed the band. They’ve experienced a lot of changes as they approach their 30s. Faber came out as trans during Headful of Sugar‘s album cycle and started a new project called Star’s Revenge. Kivlen decided to move to California, creating a long-distance relationship with his bandmates.
As the three friends drifted apart, it seemed Sunflower Bean’s time was coming to an end. Thankfully that didn’t happen, which led to Shake and Mortal Primetime.
“There’s been a lot of ways in the past…five, six, seven years that we’ve learned and grew together and ways to function together,” Kivlen explained. “It’s very funny to drive across the country and be together 24/7 in one hotel room with our manager and spend every single moment together, eating every meal together, making business and artistic decisions together.
“The most helpful advice that I ever got from anyone was just about not trying to change other people and just learning how you can accept people and live with them. And I think that we all practice that a lot and it’s kind of a subconscious thing to just show that kind of behavior. We don’t have serious fights for the most part on tour.”
Listen to the entire interview with Sunflower Bean using the media player above. Their latest album Mortal Primetime is available now.
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