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 Julia 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.
