Embracing Outrage: Sunflower Bean on stepping into adulthood

"We’ve been speaking to a lot of people after shows who have literally turned 22 just as we have, who keep telling us that they’ve been going through the same things. It’s humbling."

Back in March, Sunflower Bean made a statement with their sophomore album, Twentytwo in Blue. It was a pretty quickfire follow-up to 2016’s Human Ceremony, but feels like a profound step forward in practice; after all, that two-year gap was hardly uneventful in matters both local and national. Barely out of their teens when their debut LP was released, the New York trio quickly found themselves touring the world extensively, selling out their own shows as well as opening for indie rock touchstones like DIIV, The Vaccines and Wolf Alice. This year, meanwhile, they've spent time on the road with Interpol.

Plus, the United States has become a considerably less certain place since Human Ceremony. It's a much less hospitable environment for young people, for a start – particularly young women, like singer and bassist Julia Cumming. It’s also become near-impossible for any creative person of a progressive political bent to prevent the darkness of the Trump administration’s reshaping of America from seeping into their work. Sunflower Bean are no exception, and rather than retreat into the escapism that the brash and irresistibly fun stylings of their first album might have offered them, they’ve embraced the outrage of the present climate, and taken a high road paved with empathy and compassion on Twentytwo in Blue.

The group are set to return to the UK this month, where they’ll be presented with the paradox of a country that has inspired them so readily (they’ve taken plenty of cues from The Cure, amongst others) heading into a black hole of near-fascistic misery. Not that that’s the be-all and end-all. "I’m glad that, when it comes to what I love about Britain musically now, it’s become less about the bands I listened to growing up," relates drummer Jacob Faber. "People here are just game to go to a rock show any night of the week, especially in England, and that attitude is something I wish that we had a lot more of in the States."

Image: Hollie Fernando

Records this keenly observed might traditionally have been called precocious, but that would be to miss the point entirely; Sunflower Bean are one voice amongst an ever-more-savvy generation forced to grow up quicker then their predecessors by the rolling tumult of the world’s social fabric in 2018 – #MeToo, gun violence, the laser-intense focus on the further marginalisation of minorities. Twentytwo in Blue is a coming-of-age record, but one handmade for today; the themes are familiar, but the atmosphere is uniquely febrile.

"I think one of the things that we were trying to summarise was the entirety of the experience of that moment when you really step into adulthood," explains Cumming. "There’s a lot of hope, strength and power, and then offsetting that is a lot of melancholy, anxiety and fear. It’s about early-20s confusion in the modern age. We were smart enough not to have any unrealistic expectations about what this point in our lives might be like, so it’s hard to know, seven months after the album came out, whether or not those have been met. What I can say is that this project has always been reactive, and written around our surroundings. We wanted to start understanding our own motivations as artists; it's easy to rock out and headbang, but it’s sometimes difficult to listen to yourself and figure out your feelings."

Few facets of the early-20s experience are overlooked on Twentytwo in Blue. There’s break-up songs that are all the more poignant for their maturity and perspective – Puppet Strings, for instance, or I Was a Fool, a stinging back-and-forth on vocals between Cumming and guitarist Nick Kivlen. The almost-title-track Twentytwo is a startlingly level-headed and coolly-executed deconstruction of the deep-seated misogyny of society’s view of a woman's worth relative to her age. The slow death of love and memory runs through the core of the record, but crops up most prevalently on opener Burn It, as well as Memoria.

It’s strange that such an inherently political album, which Twentytwo in Blue is simply by virtue of its reflection of what it is to be young in America in 2018, feature just one song that could be considered pointedly so – the rambunctious, defiant Crisis Fest, already embedded as a firm fan favourite. It’s also proved incredibly prescient; the song is preoccupied with the idea of the country’s youth taking back control, something crystallised by the response of the Never Again movement to the Parkland shooting in Florida just weeks ahead of the album’s release.

"I'm really glad that song ended up the way it did," says Cumming. "I mean, it casts the rest of the album in a certain kind of shade, in an interesting way. The way that we’ve experienced political feelings over the last couple of years, in terms of all of the rage and pain and excitement that goes with that, has not necessarily been something that fit comfortably with the rest of our personalities. It was never going to suit us to make a big protest record, but we did also want to show what it’s really like to try to deal with those feelings, and Crisis Fest is that one moment of release on the album. The most important thing about that song is that, at the heart of it, there’s the realisation that we, as young people, have the power to change the things we don’t like."

That’s precisely what Cumming’s been up to in extracurricular terms, too. In the downtime between Human Ceremony and Twentytwo in Blue, she formed her own activist collective, Anger Can Be Power, naming it after a lyric from The Clash’s Clampdown and involving artists who have tangible political heft; she gave an early interview about the project to Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter, and has since presided over events that have included left-wing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the prominent Muslim activist Hebh Jamal. 

"It’s definitely a personal project," explains Cumming, "and the whole point of it is to think about what it is that I might have to offer in the way of activism, in terms of what we’re facing at the minute. That goes for anybody else who's involved, too. The way I look at it is that your greatest strength is being able to use what you know, which in my case is being involved with many years of live shows and events. I just feel like it’s easier if you try to figure out what you can contribute to the cause relative to your skillset, and then bring that to some creative spaces. If you can channel your activism into the life you already live, then you’ll find it a lot easier to fight the good fight. That’s what we as a band have found, anyway."

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Twentytwo in Blue is out now via Lucky Number
Sunflower Bean play The Art School, Glasgow, 26 Nov