Best of What's Next: Sleepy Sun

Hometown: San Francisco
Album: Embrace
Band Members: Matt Holiman (guitar), Brian Tice (drums), Jack Allen (bass), Rachel Williams (vocals), Bret Constantino (vocals and harmonica), Evan Reiss (guitars)
For Fans Of: Black Moth Super Rainbow, Black Sabbath, Black Mountain

“I always thought ‘psychedelic’ just meant an altered state of consciousness. It’s a personal thing, not one thing or one genre,” says Sleepy Sun drummer Brian Tice of the term most often thrown at his band. “Now anything with reverb and guitar delay is psychedelic.”

Sleepy Sun has both in spades, but that's not the only reason they're frequently slapped with the “psychedelia” descriptor. The band now calls home the same city that spawned the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, and they do play long, winding tunes dripping with guitar effects, endlessly echoing harmonies and enough jarring right turns and mood shifts to replicate a mind-altering experience. Their approach is of another time, their 2009 debut Embrace a collection of eight tunes that range from two minutes to nearly 10, split in two sides because, Tice says, “we were conscious that people would listen to it on vinyl, all the way through.”

Embrace was recorded in Vancouver, but soon enough the bandmates―most graduates from the University of  California at Santa Cruz―dropped anchor in San Francisco, rehearsing at a big old house ideal for spinning Neil Young records and ordering early-morning pizza after each night's unscheduled jam session. “No joke,” says Tice. “Every night, by default, we’d all meet at the practice space.”

Listening to Embrace is nearly as engulfing as actually being in the band itself. Album centerpiece “White Dove” plays through an entire record’s worth of sounds: A dirty blues groove that erupts into a Zeppelin-y guitar assault before devolving into a whirlwind of hellish noise, but just before the trip gets too spooky, the clouds clear and a sunny, acoustic melody emerges. Though Sleepy Sun ditched the old house in 2009 to tour for seven months and record another album (coming this summer), that tightness hasn’t gone anywhere: “If you have an idea, a riff, a drum part,” says Tice, “you can find someone [to play it with] really easily―anytime, 24/7.”