Beloved NYC rock band Sunflower Bean return reinvigorated with Mortal Primetime, the most hard-fought and vulnerable album of their career. In the three years since their last LP Headful of Sugar, the members of Sunflower Bean - Julia Cumming, Nick Kivlen, and Olive Faber -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. 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.” Recording vocals for the album’s power-pop opener and lead single “Champagne Taste,” Cumming channelled Iggy Pop circa The Idiot, whilst later, on “Look What You’ve Done to Me,” her staggering range conjures the unsettling madness and whimsy of Kate Bush. And on “Nothing Romantic,” soaring power cords harken back to arena-ready hits of the ‘70s and ‘80s by Heart, Pat Benatar, or Joan Jett.
These songs are the most honest of Sunflower Bean’s career – unvarnished, exposed - and by embracing discordance and uncertainty, they have created the bravest album of an already storied career. When Sunflower Bean set out to make music together as teenagers, they knew they wanted to go the distance, to create something that could stand up to the unforgiving passage of time. However fleeting this existence is, with Mortal Primetime, Sunflower Bean offers up another monument that will withstand the weathering of time.
