One evening back in May, Sunflower Bean found themselves in the woods of upstate New York, caked in 200 pounds of clay. They were shooting Shake, a short film to accompany their EP of the same name, and their goal was to look as muddy as possible — a direct reference to Nine Inch Nails’ iconic Woodstock 1994 performance.
In the backyard of their Airbnb, the rock trio stood on a piece of tarp, performing the title track while routinely being hosed down to make them appear authentically muddy. “You have the idea and then you have to do it,” singer and bassist Julia Cumming says. “Then you’re like, ‘I have no one to blame for this. I did this, and now I’m falling and slipping in mud.’”
The cleanup was far from easy. Shivering, the band — Cumming, singer-guitarist Nick Kivlen, and drummer Olive Faber — shed their clothes and ran into the house. “The Airbnb had a bunch of ‘live, laugh, love’ signs all over the place,” Kivlen says, chuckling. “So it was just this funny, demented thing we were doing in this poor person’s backyard.”
Now, on a recent afternoon in September, Sunflower Bean are sitting inside Marlow & Sons, a charming, dim-lit joint in Williamsburg. It’s right near Baby’s All Right, the venue where they spent years performing, cutting their teeth and gaining a reputation for being a spectacular live band. (They’ve since graduated to bigger venues, but they come back often, and they’ll kick off a series of Shake shows there on Oct. 2.)
Shake, both the Isaac Roberts-directed short film and the EP, are out today. The latter marks the first project Sunflower Bean wrote, recorded, produced, and engineered entirely by themselves, in Faber’s family’s basement in Long Island. “Even though recording has become so much more accessible than ever, I think there’s still this feeling that you need a producer to be interested in you — they’re holding the keys,” Cumming says. “It was our way of taking control and being able to stand in that responsibility.”
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The five tracks hark back to the band’s early DIY years, including the brief doom-metal phase they had after forming in 2013. (“The DIY spirit that went into the songs we wrote at that time is what brought us here,” Cumming notes.) Gems like “Shake” and “Lucky Number” might be as turbulent and feral as the muddy scene in the woods, but they’re bolstered with stunning melodies — resulting in what can only be described as the 2024 Brooklyn version of Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf.”
As Kivlen puts it, “It’s our taste that the three of us have that’s very different than a lot of other people who make mosh-friendly music. We were like, ‘What is the most abrasive thing we could create while still having it be very beautiful?’”
It’s a far cry from the 2022 LP Headful of Sugar, the trio’s previous release, which veered into high-gloss, psychedelic pop-rock. “Headful was very much us in quarantine times, trying to communicate with the world,” Kivlen observes. “A lot of that was experimentation — we wanted to push ourselves and make something that sounded completely new. We had a lot of time at home, and we were writing about current events. It was about America and being in society, where this EP is pre-society. It’s this very primal thing. We’re in the earth before it was industrialized or settled.”
The band took that idea a step further, pairing each of the five tracks with a natural element, as seen in the 14-minute film. If the dirt-ridden “Shake” scene symbolizes earth, “Lucky Number” is wind, “Teach Me to Be Bad” is fire, “Serial Killer” represents water (filmed in an upstate pond that Cumming describes as “mysterious” with most likely some “weird parasites”), and “Angelica” is metal.
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“Elements are kind of cliche, but the stripped-back production and the zeroing-in on back to basics brought us back to our own elements, and that made us think about the natural world,” Cumming says.
This week, the film Shake premiered at the Roxy Cinema in New York City, right before a screening of Dario Argento’s 1975 giallo classic Deep Red. It’s a fitting vibe for the EP’s vinyl edition, which will be pressed in a shade the band and I can’t quite pin down. Cumming sits at the wooden table examining a copy of the record in her hands: “I’m calling it all sorts of wine colors. Merlot … blood purple red.”
Italian horror films and their scores were another influence on the band’s latest project. “Goblin on a literal level was a direct influence,” Faber says. “That’s where it all started.” Adds Kivlen: “We’re not of the metal world making this thing that’s metal-adjacent. That’s kind of in the spirit of Argento. I’m an Italian-American making rock horror music with horror-adjacent music videos. I think there’s something cool about it happening.”
The Shake highlight “Serial Killer,” a slow-burning rocker that features Cumming on lead vocals, is not actually about a murderer, but the idea of one. “It’s about being scared of something that might not be real,” Faber says. It also tackles the disappointment you feel when you realize your childlike fears are only imaginary. “It’s being afraid, but it’s also when you can’t look away from a car crash,” Cumming says. “That sort of voyeurism curiosity and wanting to feel the impact, and being actually disappointed that you can’t find something physical to attribute to the fear that you’re feeling.”
Cumming says she especially feels this when performing the track live: “I feel like Sting when we play it, which makes me feel cool — but then when I’m singing it, I feel like Michael Stipe. And that also makes me feel cool.”
And that’s not all. Italian horror films and true crime aside, each member of the Bean would like to note that “metal” isn’t necessarily the best term to describe Shake.
Kivlen: A lot of hard rock music is so corny. We were like, “You know what? Stuff that’s really heavy can be super cool and just as hipstery as stuff that’s ambient or soft. Somebody’s got to make some cool fucking rock music.”
Faber: Metal is so serious. When we do this, this is us being unserious.
Cumming: If there’s one thing about Sunflower Bean’s plight through the world, it’s being earnest. For better or worse, it’s our super power. We’re trying to hit that part of anyone who wants to rock without judgment.
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But then I read a quote the band gave to Rolling Stone in 2016, during their first interview with the magazine: “The metal world is super-elitist, and we were definitely poser doom metal.” Hearing it, Cumming smiles. “‘Poser doom metal’ is actually a really awesome label. Can we still be that?”
More than a decade into their career and having signed a new deal with label Lucky Number, Sunflower Bean feel like they’re just getting started. “The Bean world is always moving forward,” Cumming says. “Shake could have been an album, but it isn’t. So what comes next? Who are we rebelling against next? Who are we pissing off next, including ourselves?” We’ll just have to wait and find out.
