By the time Sunflower Bean wanders into the storage facility I’m haphazardly attempting to pass off as a respectable interview space, they’d already sweat through their stage clothes once. It’s midday in Austin, partway through the third and final installment of Paste’s multi-day, multi-stage concert series at South by Southwest, and the stifling Texas heat is so all-consuming it seems to bake everything flat and still—except the NYC trio, who just lit up our outdoor stage (“The Sun Stage,” we’d dubbed it, although on this brutal 97° afternoon, the name had begun to feel painfully redundant). In particular, Nick Kivlen, the band’s guitarist, had fallen over backwards in his insistence to put on a good show—literally.
During one especially lively track, he accidentally tripped over a sound engineer, crouched behind him to fix the bass drum. “He claimed that he had his hand on my back,” Kivlen says, good-natured, settling now onto one of four mismatched stools I had awkwardly arranged while waiting for the band to arrive. “But I was like… I don’t know how you could have had your hand on my back? Considering you were on all fours?” He rushes to clarify: “Nothing against the sound engineer, seriously! It was a gentle fall. One of those little things that makes the show more… spontaneous! Really, whenever something goes wrong, it always makes the show better.”
“That was our first ever stage fall,” says bassist and vocalist Julia Cumming, her mock-dramatic expression exacerbated by the sharp angles of her eyeliner, somehow still intact despite the heat. “That was our stage fall virginity.” Kivlen looks over, unconvinced. “You’ve never fallen off a stage?” Cumming pauses, reconsiders: “I think I have.” “I think you have,” Kivlen agrees, then takes a beat to think. “But I can’t think of any one instance in particular.” For most of us, a mid-performance dive wouldn’t be the kind of thing to casually slip through the sieve of one’s memory. But, then again, most of us haven’t been performing in the same band alongside the same two friends for over a decade.
Sunflower Bean formed back in 2013, when all three members were still “basically children,” as Cumming (who was only 17 at the time of the band’s creation, if my math is right) puts it. With the lineup established and the name solidified, Kivlen, Cumming, and drummer Olive Faber soon moved to Brooklyn, and Sunflower Bean became an immediate fixture in the local DIY scene, in large part due to the group’s almost concerning dedication to playing live as much as humanly possible. They performed relentlessly, hopping nonstop from venue to venue, barely taking the time to sleep—and their efforts paid off, with music blogs ranking them the “#1 Hardest Working Band of 2014.” They were signed to Fat Possum Records the very next year, following a slew of shows at the 2015 iteration of SXSW (how full circle we’ve come!), and released their first full-length, Human Ceremony, the following year—all before any of the band members could legally purchase a beer.
Sunflower Bean became something of a shapeshifter in the New York rock scene, cycling through sounds and genres with ease. That’s always been a crucial part of the band’s DNA: purposefully leaving space to grow, change, and redefine. Over the years, they’ve described themselves as everything from “poser doom metal” to “neo-psychedelia for the digital age” to “pop music, but with the guts of rock” to “night music, however someone may take that”—but none of those phrases were ever meant to be taken as gospel, as some hardline declaration of the band’s permanent identity (even if the media, at times, perhaps took them as such). None of the members are at all precious with the “identity” of the band, refusing to lock themselves into any one vision or structure, no matter how fond of it they may be at the time.
As a result, the group’s discography reads almost like a bildungsroman put to a Spotify profile; you’re watching three friends become themselves in real time, precisely because they’ve never shied away from letting their band evolve and shift alongside them. “It just goes hand-in-hand with what we’re up to at that time,” Faber says of the band’s style, aesthetic, and approach. “It’s always grown with us; it’s one and the same with everything that we are in that moment.”
There are very few aspects of Sunflower Bean that have stayed intact throughout their 12 years of existence—again, they started the band as teens and are all nearing 30, so I’d argue that’s very fair. From the whiplash charm of their 2016 debut Human Ceremony to the heavier, politically edged 2018 follow-up Twentytwo in Blue to the fuzzed-out defiance of 2022’s Headful of Sugar, Sunflower Bean’s path has been less a series of left turns and more a long, spiraling loop, each album a further orbit into their shared sensibility. If there’s one thing that’s remained constant, though, it’s the band’s earnest belief in their art. Despite it all—pandemics, existential crises, political horror, personal reckonings, and the perils of adulthood at large—the trio has remained deeply dedicated to both their craft and to each other, even when that dedication’s been tested.
“I think bands are kind of like a gang,” Cumming says at one point, nearly apropos of nothing. Kivlen and Faber laugh into their hands. I suppose she’s not wrong; gangs are hard to gain membership in but even harder to leave—and, well, so are bands. That’s not to say members don’t consider escaping, they typically do at some point, but the follow-through leaves something to be desired (although I’d argue, as an enjoyer of bands, that’s a good thing). Case in point: Sunflower Bean almost considered calling it quits after their third record, the poppier, loop-heavy Headful of Sugar, with the group becoming concerned they’d grown too far apart to ever really come back together, the ever-widening gap between their varying tastes and trajectories feeling suddenly like an uncrossable chasm.
Evidently, and thankfully, they realized that was not quite the case. Much like my high school sweetheart parents, these longtime friends and bandmates just needed some time on their own to realize they still made sense together—that it wasn’t just a childhood fluke but something very real and something worth keeping, even though they were no longer the people they were at the start. And they weren’t: Even just over the past five or so years, Faber came out as trans and launched a new project (Stars Revenge), Cumming ended a long-term relationship and started writing alone for the first time, and Kivlen moved to California, officially ending the band’s shared NYC reign.
“There’s a lot of acceptance involved,” Cumming explains. “I mean, we’ve been doing this since we were children! So I feel like the challenges of the past few years have really been about figuring out how everyone has the space to grow as individuals. Since we all write and all contribute to the project, that also means that, as much stuff as there is that we want to share, there’s also so much that we need to nurture in our own way.”
Even without the personal transformations, the past decade certainly gave the group a lot to reckon with between social media’s newfound chokehold over the music industry, America’s descent into alt-right fascism, and, of course, COVID-19. The pandemic in particular threw Sunflower Bean into a tailspin due to the group’s years-long devotion to playing live as frequently as possible—suddenly, the whirlwind that defined the band’s formative years halted to a complete and total standstill. The rhythms that had shaped their early 20s, that constant cycle of write-release-tour-repeat, vanished.
The band, long shaped by motion, came to a stop—the forced pause leading Sunflower Bean to consider songwriting and production in ways they hadn’t before, with nearly all of their focus having been previously directed towards live shows. “There were a lot of rules that existed within the culture of [the industry],” Cumming says. “And then after the pandemic, that was just really different, and it gave us the chance to become more of a recording project.” Similarly, the members of the band—especially Faber, it seems—started learning to self-produce, which ended up being a pivotal aspect of Sunflower Bean’s future trajectory.
Although elements of their newfound production abilities can be heard on Headful of Sugar, it wasn’t until their gritty, nervy 2024 EP Shake that the band finally released a project produced entirely by themselves. Those sessions then gave them the confidence to self-produce their next full-length, Mortal Primetime. “Being in control for us was really good,” Kivlen says. “Self-producing was actually way easier than having outside…,” he trails off, then grins: “…meddlers?”
“I think we were just at the point where we could execute it exactly the way we wanted to,” he elaborates. “We have been playing together for over 10 years now, and that is such a rare and special thing, especially because being a band for a living is already kind of rare. And I feel like our greatest asset is the way the three of us can make music together—in a room, live, wherever, but together—and that’s what we were trying to capture with Mortal Primetime.”
Mortal Primetime, Sunflower Bean’s fourth and most mature LP to date, is the culmination of all this history. Releasing April 25th with Lucky Number Music, the record demonstrates not just growth, but solidity; a fresh certainty in the band’s still-purposefully-mercurial identity. After the friction and fragmentation that followed Headful of Sugar, Sunflower Bean stripped everything back. Shake marked the first full taste of that shift: rougher, freer, unmediated. But if Shake was a statement of independence, then Mortal Primetime is the result of that freedom. Sunflower Bean has always known who they are, but on Mortal Primetime, there’s a sense that they finally feel they know how to say it.
Filled with jagged guitar riffs, subdued swells of sweetness, and an emotional clarity that feels utterly hard-won, the 10-song LP was the quickest turnaround the band’s ever had. Between last year’s gritty Shake EP and this year’s full-length, Sunflower Bean has evidently hit some stride of productivity, one that’s made all the easier by unusually quick production cycles. “In the music industry, a lot of the time, once something comes out, it’s already been like two or three years since you actually wrote it,” Kivlen says.
Cumming jumps in earnestly. “I think a big part of it is our new record label,” she says, referring to Lucky Number Music. “They did the distribution in the UK and some other parts of the world for two of our previous albums, and we just really really loved their ethos. They’ve been treating us with this process of, like, ‘the right thing is always going to be who you are and what you want to be making.’” It’s a rare thing in music, she admits: being told, explicitly and repeatedly, to just be yourself. “Even though that obviously makes sense when you hear it, that’s not really the kind of ethos you get with a lot of the industry.”
The majority of the songs on Mortal Primetime were written barely a year ago then recorded just last summer, and as a result, the material still feels new and fresh and true to who the band is right now, not some past version of themselves prior to a protracted, multi-year production interval. Kivlen continues: “We’re always the most proud of the last thing we did, so to have this be something that was all conceived and recorded very recently is super exciting.”
This immediacy is audible in the recordings, which were mostly done in LA at Black Rainbow Studios, every song tracked live in a way that harkens back to an older, less fussy era. No digital scaffolding, no Frankenstein’d takes, just the three of them in a room. “There’s no copy-and-pasting,” Kivlen says. “Every performance is unique. We never, like, played a guitar part and then cut it in half and then posted it in the second half of the song. It was all done in a more traditional rock band way, because I feel like that is the sort of production that we excel at—the kind that’s organic and performance-based, rather than all living in the computer.”
It’s an old-school approach in a hyper-mediated moment. But Sunflower Bean isn’t chasing a trend. They’re trying to capture something real—something that feels, and this is important, like them. “There’s a lot of heaviness that we love,” Cumming says, referencing the rawer textures of Shake and their earliest work. “But there’s also so much sweetness all over our career, and I think that is sort of the key to Mortal Primetime. It’s really a record about love. I mean, all songs are probably about love in some way, but I think love is just really embedded into every part of this record. And on this album, there are a lot of songs where we let that prettiness really breathe. I think that balance is something we were able to actually accept about ourselves for the first time [on this record], and I want for us to continue to take that into the future.”
Throughout the album, that balance of grit and grace plays out again and again. On “I Knew Love,” Cumming sings with clear-eyed gratitude for a love that changed her, even as it passed. On “Champagne Taste,” the band returns to its alter-ego roots, channeling desperation into a fuzzed-out anthem of self-reclamation. “It’s about feeling beaten down but still driving forward,” they say. It’s about hitting bottom and deciding to play your way out.
Mortal Primetime is notably more direct, even blunt, in a way that surprised the band themselves. “For so many years, I just didn’t…,” Cumming pauses. “I’ve felt the things that were able to be put on this record for a long time, for years now, but they were always shrouded in a lot of ways—because of not knowing how to put it into the music, not having the life experience. There was just a lot of fearfulness because I was still just figuring out how to be an artist.”
“Now I no longer need the shroud,” Cumming says. That difference—between veiling and naming—runs through Mortal Primetime. The album is flush with the kind of intimacy that takes years to unlearn the instinct to avoid, and it changes everything. As Cumming puts it: “We still know who we are, but now, instead of needing the shroud, we can choose when and where to put it on and take it off. We’re able to get right to the heart of it when we want to.”
And get to the heart of it they do. “There’s a Part I Can’t Get Back,” the searing final single before the album’s release, is a song Cumming wrote about surviving sexual abuse and grooming. Its anger is controlled, but unsoftened. “I didn’t want to write a song about being healed,” she’s said. “I wanted to be angry about needing to heal at all.” The record is full of these hard-earned permissions: to speak plainly, to name things, to be both angry and tender.
Perhaps this is why, for Kivlen, Mortal Primetime marks a return to something real, maybe for the first time since their debut: “This record really does feel like a rebirth. In some ways it’s a lot like our first album, but now we have more of the skill and more of the knowledge about how to do it. Because of how much history this band has by now, all of the choices we were making on this record felt validated, in a way, just by the time we’ve already spent making this music together, the history we have together.”
“There’s a lot of acceptance involved,” Cumming adds. “That was the thing about Mortal Primetime—being like, ‘There is more for us to say together. There’s all of our tastes in this thing that we’ve built. There’s something here that we need to honor.’”
As a result, Mortal Primetime awoke organically, in contrast to records written specifically to adhere to “how streaming and social media and trends affect music these days,” Kevlin says. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we need to make a record because it’s 2025 and this is what’s going on in our career.’ It was like, ‘No, we’re just a band that’s gonna be around forever.’”
He continues: “This album is just a natural thing that happened without a lot of outside or career influence, which I think is really cool—it’s like we’re playing on our own terms.” There’s a long pause, followed by an expression that’s half-wince, half-cheeky grin. “Although I don’t know if that was true for our third album!” All three band members break into laughter, before Kevlin, still grinning, waves it away: “Buuuut we don’t need to go into that.” There is some truth to it, though: If Kivlen’s framing of Headful of Sugar is right, if that third record was the sound of a band trying to push forward primarily because they knew that they were supposed to, Mortal Primetime feels like the result of finding their footing again, entirely of their own volition, and realizing they never really lost it.
Faber jumps in dryly, saying, “Someone said last night that we’re telling people what modern rock music is.” Kivlen bursts out laughing, Faber follows suit. “I mean, apparently that’s what we’re doing! I don’t know. It’s always so funny to me, because for us it feels like we’re always kind of just out in the open doing our own thing.”
That sense of being slightly sideways to the moment—both of it and outside it—threads through everything Sunflower Bean does, including the accidental poetry of their career trajectory. Earlier, when I asked about their recent trip to Paris for Fashion Week, Kivlen launched into an ode to the city’s bakeries, eyes practically glazing over at the memory of four-euro quiche (in his defense, I would do the same). Cumming, amused, pushed back with just the right amount of exasperation. “Personally, I believe there’s a few more things to say about Paris Fashion Week than just about food?” she said, laughing. But there’s something revealing in their back-and-forth: the balance between rigor and irreverence, between spectacle and snack.
That push-pull—between aesthetic myth-making and earthy reality—is at the core of Mortal Primetime. It’s a record full of bruised optimism and earned sweetness, one that finds power in its contradictions. Nowhere is this more evident than in “There’s a Part I Can’t Get Back,” a song that almost didn’t come together until, at the last possible second, Kivlen strummed a pattern that changed everything. “It’s one of those moments where everyone in the room immediately feels like, ‘Okay, now this thing is alive,’” Cumming recalls. “And now this has a reason.” That balance—of waiting, of trusting, of quietly hoping someone else will see the glint you’ve been trying to signal—is the work of a band that’s grown up together, and stayed.
And contrary to what popular wisdom might have one believe, staying is not a passive act. It’s not inertia. It’s work. It’s choosing, again and again, to make art in a way that doesn’t hollow you out. “I think the thing that’s helped me the most,” Cumming tells me, “is making your own parameters for what you’re going to be happy with your life looking like, parameters that aren’t based on anyone else’s opinions.” It’s an ethos that recalls their earliest days—those relentless, no-budget years in the Brooklyn DIY circuit—but now carries the weight of survival. And perhaps that’s the quiet thesis of Mortal Primetime: that reinvention doesn’t always mean rupture. That sometimes it’s enough, more than enough, to circle back with clearer eyes, to make something honest from the place you already are. Cumming compares bands to marriages, to the necessity of loving every former version of your partner. “You just don’t know these things originally,” she said. “You have to go through it.”
Sunflower Bean went through it. They tripped, they stumbled, they grew apart—but when the lights came up and the heat bore down and they almost lost their balance, they got back on their feet. And what do you know, Kivlen was right; they’re even better for it.
Mortal Primetime is out April 25 via Lucky Number Music.
Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
