VIA PRESS RELEASE | New York trio Sunflower Bean, vocalist and bassist Julia Cumming (she/her), guitarist and vocalist Nick Kivlen (he/him), and drummer Olive Faber (she/they), announce that their long-awaited third album Headful of Sugar will be released on May 6 via Lucky Number.
Fuelled by the agony and ecstasy of contemporary American life, Headful of Sugar is a psychedelic headrush designed to be played loud, windows down. It is about outsiders disillusioned with the modern world who, despite their alienation, refuse to be subdued; buoyed by the relief found in interpersonal relationships that counteract the daily barrage of cheap entertainment and convenience. “We wanted to write about the lived experience of late capitalism, how it feels every day, the mundanity of not knowing where every construct is supposed to ultimately lead you,” Nick Kivlen says. “The message is in the title: this is about fast pleasures, the sugar of life, the joy that comes with letting go of everything you thought mattered.”
If their acclaimed second album Twentytwo in Blue, released in 2018, was a self-described “ode to the fleeting innocence of youth,” then Headful of Sugar shoves the listener into a new, dangerous world, one that is less safe but also less suffocating. “Tomorrow is not promised, no tour is promised, no popularity is promised, no health or money is promised,” bassist/vocalist Julia Cumming says. “Why not make what you want to make on your own terms? Why not make a record that makes you want to dance? Why not make a record that makes you want to scream?”
Headful of Sugar was produced and mixed by UMO’s Jacob Portrait, co-engineered by Olive Faber and Portrait, and recorded between Electric Lady and Sunflower Bean Studios.
Today Sunflower Bean also share Headful of Sugar’s opening track, the taut groove “Who Put You Up To This?” It’s a kiss-off to a former lover, maybe, but also a former self. “In another life I was a bitch/ In another life I was your bitch/ Here’s how it turned out,” Cumming sings, her voice alternating between the gritty and the divine. “Who Put You Up to This?” finds freedom in a fraught predicament, her sense of self fully divorced from the circumstances she finds herself in.
The band says of the track, “Are you satisfied? Who put you up to do things that you do? Was it your own choice? Questioning your life is the first step to taking the agency to change it. Sometimes you have to let go of who you have been so that you can become who you want to be. “
