Sunflower Bean tell us about elemental new EP ‘Shake’: “We wanted to just keep it simple, stupid”

The New York trio Sunflower Bean took inspiration from their early years as a DIY band and the “rawness of nature” on their first self-produced record. They have returned with a new single, “Shake,” the title track of their upcoming EP. Check out the mud-covered video below and read NME’s exclusive chat with the band.

The “Shake” EP will be released via Lucky Number on September 27. Each of its five tracks will be accompanied by a 14-minute performance-based video representing a natural element: earth, wind, water, fire, and metal.

Directed by rising Toronto filmmaker Isaac Roberts, the videos were shot over a single weekend in upstate New York. The first video for “Shake” features the band performing in a dark, muddy forest, covered in mud from head to toe.

“When we told a lot of people, ‘This is what we want to do – five videos in one weekend and just go crazy,’ a lot of them were scared,” said singer and bassist Julia Cumming. “You need someone with a DIY ethos ready to do what it takes to get the shot, even if it means building a mud pit in the forest and spraying yourself with a hose over and over again.”

“When you make an EP inspired by raw elements, you’re gonna get exposed to the elements,” added guitarist Nick Kivlen.

“All the videos are very performance-based and live-based, which we thought would best speak to the music,” Cumming continued. “Getting back into that live spirit after feeling like a writing band and a studio band for the past few years was really cool. It feels good to put your body on the line – not that it was on the line, but our performance in the video and all the videos shows what matters to us, which is just giving ourselves to the song.”

“There are a few more videos with crazy setups, like Julia singing underwater,” Kivlen added.

The “elemental thing,” as the band calls it, came from “a little bit of wordplay,” said Cumming. “A lot of the songs were written in drop C, which [Black Sabbath guitarist] Tony Iommi popularized after losing his fingertips in a sheet metal factory, so there’s this industrial spirit embedded in how the songs were made. Even the word ‘shake’ is very tangible.”

“And like raw material,” Kivlen chimed in. “It felt very stone, slab-like… like a structure that’s unrefined.”

“With it being elemental, we wanted to think about how they work together,” Cumming continued. “Rather than just fire, we thought about magma as the visual through-line of a fiery song like ‘Teach Me To Be Bad.’ The mud in our video is mud, but it’s also granite-colored – it’s not concrete, but it’s like if mud was concrete.”

“We’re playing with how inspired we can be by the rawness of nature while being city people and a New York City band, and how we can interpret that into and respect the industrial-ness of the more metal or rock ideas. You start playing with the silliness of the word ‘rock’ and how far you can take that and what it means to you.”

The song “Shake” was inspired by drummer Olive Faber and the band’s manager watching the 1997 horror movie I Know What You Did Last Summer and its cover of Seals & Crofts’ “Summer Breeze” by Type O Negative. “It was fall, and every fall I get into heavy music again,” Faber explained. “I showed it to Nick, and he just sat down on the ground in the studio and played the ‘Shake’ riff.”

“The best part of the Type O Negative song is when the riff’s playing and there’s this breath sound,” Kivlen said. “We were like, ‘What if the entire song just had that energy and never became more of a ballad?’”

“‘Shake’ is as much about commitment to a riff as it is about what it says, and it was the first step in defining us wanting to make something more experimental,” Cumming added. “The whispery ‘shake’ on the song became almost like our pseudo DJ tag for the whole EP because it’s on every single song.”

The EP’s title track opens with that tag whispered through the crunching, uncompromising riff before Kivlen and Cumming take the reins vocally. “Happy couples make me sick,” they sneer in unison on the chorus, “I’m just shaking for the hell of it.”

“It’s a song that’s against convention, whether that’s monogamy or rigid social structures,” Kivlen said. “It talks about who you are when the world can’t see you and just having fun. The ‘Happy couples make me sick’ line is funny to me because there are so many songs about being in love.

“I think the song is kind of sexy in a scary way, like bands in the ’90s – Billy Corgan was hot but looked like a vampire. Alice In Chains were sexy but really dirty, and all their album covers looked like mud. Kurt [Cobain] was really hot, but not conventionally. So, I think it’s a sexy, ugly song.”

The “Shake” EP marks the New York trio’s first new material since their 2022 album “Headful Of Sugar” and also forms the band’s first fully self-produced record.

“On ‘Headful…,’ we did a bunch of that, but it was sent back and forth between us and [producer] Jacob Portrait,” Cumming explained. “But this is our first self-recorded, self-produced piece of work completely, so that’s very special for us.

“We’ve all spent a lot of time thinking about production and working in that area, especially Olive – she was the one who, during the pandemic, taught herself the most and has now been engineering and producing so many sessions for other artists, too.”

Cumming described taking charge of the technical process behind the record as “exciting and vulnerable in a different way.” Kivlen added: “It was nice to feel confident, know what you want to do, and not have anyone telling you what to do, or helping you do it. It was very matter-of-fact, natural, and just made sense.”

The “Shake” EP was inspired by the band’s early years in the DIY scene. It captures the heavier side of the trio that has always existed within their DNA but has not always been at the forefront of their sound as they’ve explored new ways of expressing themselves. “When you’re in the arts, you’re constantly reflecting on, ‘What do I have to offer? Why am I here?’” Cumming said.

“There were heavier parts of ‘Headful…,’ but we always noticed that when we played those songs live, that’s where the three of us felt at home. It felt like we hadn’t made a piece of work that reflected that since maybe [2015 EP] ‘Show Me Your Seven Secrets.’

“Even in [2016 debut album] ‘Human Ceremony,’ there’s strings and all this different stuff. So it was a bit of soul-searching, and there’s a lot within the EP that is about the love of being a rock trio and letting that stand as it is.”

“When you’re an artist, after you do one thing, it’s nice to do the other thing,” Faber said. “‘Headful…’ and even [2018 second album] ‘Twentytwo [In Blue]’ took shape over a couple of years, and with each of them, we were really into getting into the studio and trying everything. With ‘Shake,’ it just felt like the natural progression to move forward and do it [in a way] that’s not piecemeal production, but just live takes of us playing the songs. We made a couple of albums that were produced to the nines, and on this one, we wanted to just keep it simple, stupid.”

The “Shake” EP is out September 27 via Lucky Number. Check out the full tracklist below:

  1. “Shake”
  2. “Lucky Number”
  3. “Teach Me To Be Bad”
  4. “Serial Killer”
  5. “Angelica”

Sunflower Bean will also mark its release with a series of club shows across the US. See the full dates below and purchase tickets here.

October 2024: 2 – Brooklyn, NY – Baby’s All Right 9 – Los Angeles, CA – Zebulon 12 – Chicago, IL – The Empty Bottle

November 2024: 16 – Austin, TX – Empire Control Room