One evening he returned In May, Sunflower Bean found herself in the woods of upstate New York, covered in 200 pounds of mud. They were shooting shake, A short film to accompany their EP of the same name, their goal was to sound as muddy as possible – a direct reference to Nine Inch Nails' famous Woodstock 1994 performance.
In the backyard of their Airbnb, the rock trio stood on a tarp, performing the title song while being routinely doused with water to make them look authentically muddy. “You have the idea, and then you have to execute it,” says singer and guitarist Julia Cumming. “Then you say, 'I have no one to blame for this.' “I did this, and now I'm falling and sliding in the mud.”
Cleaning was far from easy. The band — Cumming, singer-guitarist Nick Kivlin, and drummer Olive Faber — shook, stripped off their clothes and ran home. “Airbnb had a bunch of ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ signs everywhere,” Kivlin says with a laugh. “So it was a funny, crazy thing we were doing in this poor person’s backyard.”
Now, on a recent September afternoon, Sunflower Bean sits inside Marlow & Sons, a charming, dimly lit restaurant in Williamsburg. It's located near Baby's All Right, a venue where they spent years performing, cutting their teeth and earning a reputation for being an amazing live band. (They have since graduated to larger venues, but come back often, and will start a series of… shake It appears there on October 2.)
shakeboth the Isaac Roberts-directed short film and EP were released today. The latter marks the first project that Sunflower Bean wrote, recorded, produced and engineered entirely themselves, in the Faber family's Long Island basement. “Even though recording is easier than ever, I think there's still a feeling that you need a producer who cares about you — they hold the keys,” Cumming says. “It was our way of taking control and being able to take that responsibility.”
The five tracks harken back to the band's early DIY years, including the brief death metal phase they went through after forming in 2013. (“The DIY spirit of the songs we wrote at the time,” Cumming notes, “is what brought us To here.” .) Gems like “Shake” and “Lucky Number” may be as turbulent and brutal as a muddy jungle scene, but they're backed by stunning melodies — resulting in what can only be described as a 2024 Brooklyn version of a Black Sabbath song. “Sweet paper.”
As Kivlin says, “The taste that the three of us have is very different from a lot of other people who make proper music. We were wondering, 'What's the most abrasive thing we can make that's still very beautiful?'”
It's a far cry from the 2022 LP A head of sugarthe trio's previous release, which veered into highly glossy psychedelic pop-rock. “upside down “In times of quarantine, we've been trying to connect with the world,” notes Kivlin. “A lot of it was an experiment – we wanted to push ourselves and make something that felt completely new. We spent a lot of time at home, and we were writing about current events. It was about America and being in society, with this EP being pre-community. It's that thing “Very primitive. We are in the land before it was made or settled.”
The band took this idea one step further, linking each of the five tracks with a natural element, as seen in the 14-minute film. If the dirt-filled scene of “Shake” symbolizes earth, “Lucky Number” is wind, “Teach Me to Be Bad” is fire, and “Serial Killer” represents water (it was filmed in an upstate pond that Cumming described as “mysterious (with most people). Possibly 'foreign parasites'), and mineral angelica.
“The elements are kind of hackneyed, but the stripped-down production and going back to basics brought us back to our own elements, and it made us think about the natural world,” says Cumming.
This week's movie shake It premiered at the Roxy Cinema in New York City, ahead of Dario Argento's 1975 classic giallo. Deep red. It's a fitting atmosphere for the vinyl release of the EP, which will be pressed in the shadow of the tape and I can't quite put my finger on it. Cumming sits at the wooden table and examines a copy of the record in her hands: “I call them all kinds of wine colors. Merlot…purple blood red.
Italian horror films and their scores had another influence on the band's latest project. “The influence of the goblin on a literal level was direct,” Faber says. “This is where it all started.” Kivlin adds: “We're not from the metal world making this metal-adjacent thing. That's kind of the spirit of Argento. I'm Italian-American making rock and horror music with horror-related music videos. I think there's something cool about that happening.”
the shake The highlight is “Serial Killer,” a slow rocker featuring Cumming on lead vocals, which is not actually about a killer, but the idea of a killer. “It's about being afraid of something that may not be real,” Faber says. It also addresses the disappointment you feel when you realize that your childish fears are just fantasies. “It's fear, but it's also when you can't look away from a car accident,” Cumming says. “That kind of curiosity and voyeurism and wanting to feel moved, and actually feeling disappointed because you can't find a physical thing that you attribute to the fear that you're feeling.”
Cumming says she especially feels this when performing the song live: “I feel like Sting when we play it, which makes me feel awesome — but when I sing it, I feel like Michael Stipe. That also makes me feel awesome.”
And that's not all. Italian horror films and true crime aside, every member of Bean would like to point out that “metal” isn't necessarily the best term to describe it. shake.
Kevlin: A lot of hard rock is very corny. We were like: “You know what? Really heavy stuff can be just as cool and innovative as ambient or soft stuff. Someone's gotta make some great rock music.”
Faber: The metal is very dangerous. When we do this, it means we are not serious.
cumming: If there's one thing about the worldwide plight of the Sunflower Bean, it's seriousness. For better or worse, it's our superpower. We're trying to hit that part of anyone that wants to rock it without judgment.
But then I read a quote the band made Rolling Stone In 2016, during their first interview with the magazine: “The metal world is a very elitist world, and we were definitely the poseurs of metal.” Upon hearing that, Cumming smiles. “Poser doom metal is actually a really cool label. Can we still be that?”
More than a decade into their career and signing with a new label, Lucky Number, Sunflower Bean feels like they're just getting started. “Bean’s world is always moving forward,” says Cumming. “shake It could have been an album, but it's not. So what comes next? Who will we rebel next? Who will we be angry with next, including ourselves? We'll just have to wait and find out.
