Hearing the opening track on Sunflower Bean’s new album Headful of Sugar, it would be understandable if you felt like you’d stepped onto the set of a high-speed crime caper, with dollar bills flying in the air after a dramatic heist. “Who Put You Up to This?,” a neon-lit single punctuated by soaring riffs, is the perfect introduction to the trio’s third record, as Julia Cumming, Nick Kivlen, and Olive Faber charge headfirst into taking risks. After all, isn’t being a musician in 2022 a risk itself?
This was part of Sunflower Bean’s mentality when the record came together, Cumming explains as she joins a video call from a hotel in London alongside bandmate Kivlen. “I think taking risks for big rewards is a theme on the record, for sure,” she says. “Even with putting out this record, I think we tried to take a lot of risks with our sound. You never know how they’re gonna pay off, but you take a chance because it’s what you believe you should do.”
The band spent the recent period of forced confinement mostly with each other, resulting in the trio not only emerging as a more confident version of themselves, but also, consequently, with their most adventurous album to date. Over the course of Headful of Sugar, Sunflower Bean embrace both rock and pop music in a much bolder fashion than before; their riffs never seem to miss a mark, and the slick, cinematic stylings match the fictional and personal narratives found throughout. Take “In Flight,” where they embrace the fleeting nature of existence: “Life is short and the cliffs are high / I don’t have to close my eyes to see us in flight,” Kivlen sings.
“Taking risks for big rewards is a theme on the record, for sure. You never know how they’re gonna pay off, but you take a chance because it’s what you believe you should do.”
— Julia Cumming
There’s also an embrace of waved-out psychedelia that only serves to bring you further into the fascinating world they create on this record. A huge part of the band veering in this direction was Faber taking the reins when engineering the album, allowing Sunflower Bean to find out more about themselves, as Kivlen explains. “We trusted ourselves completely for the first time by deciding that we were going to record everything and demo everything [ourselves]. We were just trusting that we could do it, and that’s so important. I think that helped us play our instruments better. You have to figure out how to speak your own voice to the fullest.”
For the recording of the new album, they consciously kept things small. “We wanted to create this little quarantine group,” Kivlen continues. “We tried to create a sort of energy like we were at a party when we recorded. It was very much like everyone walking around the house doing whatever you want—listening to music really loud, drinking, eating, whatever—and just trying to foster this insular environment.”
Comfortably flipping between styles of rock at will, Sunflower Bean are imbued by the their hometown of New York City's storied history rather than being intimidated by it, and this has served them well in carving out their own space. “It’s been a gift,” Cumming says. “It’s an honor to be a New York band, especially right now—there’s a really new, exciting energy in the city. I feel more proud than ever.”
“We tried to create a sort of energy like we were at a party when we recorded. It was very much like everyone walking around the house doing whatever you want, just trying to foster this insular environment.”
— Nick Kivlen
An old cliche suggests that the best art is made in times of strife, and for a long time things have felt especially polarized—it’s all too easy to become dissociated from a world that seems increasingly harder to live in. Headful of Sugar is the perfect antidote for when you feel like you’re losing control. It’s a cathartic release that dances in spite of the foreboding bullshit that may be hanging over you. “Another big theme on the record is letting go,” Cumming says. “I think because of the lack of control that we had in our lives, on our work [during the pandemic], I think it definitely gave us more of an interest in celebrating the unknown and stepping out of our past selves.” Adds Kivlen, “There are a lot of lyrics about going out and meeting people, or going to the airport and flying somewhere new. It’s about just having this sort of lust for life that we didn’t have before.”
There’s also an underlying anti-capitalist message throughout Headful of Sugar, as the band evokes this world of confusion we live in and how just getting by currently seems harder than it’s ever been. This is what makes the album’s messages of escapism and taking risks feel even more imperative. “You give your own life meaning, you can choose to focus on things that are really nourishing to you,” Kivlen says, explaining what is it that gives Sunflower Bean hope in spite of these circumstances. “Living in a time where it feels like politics don’t really exist and we don’t have any sense of power, there’s this duality of focusing on your personal life and the things around you and thinking about the future and how we can build a better place for everyone to live.”
“Living in a time where it feels like we don’t have any sense of power, there’s this duality of focusing on your personal life and the things around you and thinking about the future and how we can build a better place for everyone to live.”
— Nick Kivlen
If there was ever going to be a silver lining from the pandemic, for Sunflower Bean it must be the fact that they had time to learn and grow by themselves without any other distractions that may have previously inhibited them. “I think we grew a lot since our second record,” Kivlen continues. “We were 21 when we wrote those songs; now, personally, it’s like night and day for me. I feel like I couldn’t even write a song when I was in my early twenties. Every time I came up with anything, I got way too attached to it and hyper-fixated on it.” “On this record, we didn’t really worry about that,” adds Cumming, “we just wrote a ton of stuff and spitballed the entire time so it was actually the opposite. I do think that the time we had to grow at home as people and as writers is something that it would have [otherwise] taken us many more years to feel.”
Sunflower Bean emerged from a period of difficulty by taking full ownership over their sound and achieving their most consistent record to date. Headful of Sugar is the band’s ode to endurance. No matter how difficult things may seem in life, there are always small pleasures to fall back on—and plenty of risks that reap huge rewards. FL
