Sunflower Bean: 'Using melody and classic rock is what makes us punk'

In a world of guitar rock dominated by men, Sunflower Bean’s Julia Cumming is the reluctant “king of the dudes”. It’s a title that was bestowed upon the frontwoman by her bandmates, drummer Jacob Faber and guitarist Nick Kivlen, after they observed the effect she had backstage at festivals. “There’s a lot of bands that are just like, four or five men in cool leather jackets,” says Kivlen, “and they’re all drinking and smoking, and then Julia just has this charisma that will defeat the shield of being a cool dude in a band.” “She’ll just disarm them,” says Faber. “Julia is just a king.”

Cumming hated the nickname at first – “I was like, ‘Stop f***ing calling me that! It’s so rude and annoying!’” – but eventually, she came around. The New York trio, who formed as teenagers in 2013, even named their new EP King of the Dudes. In the song’s title track, a plucky garage rock song with a supple pop melody, Cumming asks, her voice a kick in the teeth one moment, a soft caress the next: “Did I just walk in on some circle jerk s**t, just like I knew I would?”

That line, says Cumming, sums up her experience not just in laddy backstage areas, but in the music industry as a whole. “I think in many, many industries,” says the 23-year-old, “as a woman, you can end up kind of becoming a passenger in a conversation about something you may actually have insight into, and all of a sudden you have to listen to…” “A bunch of guys explain it to you,” says Faber. “It’s such an interesting thing about men,” smiles Cumming, as she sips on a coffee in a north London café, “their ability to talk so confidently about things they often know very little about, and to witness that is kind of like… I know ‘circle jerk’ is an old-school term, but it felt fitting. It happens in the studios, at venues, it happens everywhere. It’s just cultural.”

Cumming has been witness to this since she was 13, when she was a member of kitschy, all-girl pop band Supercute!. The group appeared in Teen Vogue, and toured with Kate Nash, but fizzled out after a few years. She met Faber and Kivlen, childhood friends who had gone to high school together, just as Supercute! was dissolving, and agreed to become Sunflower Bean’s bassist and lead singer. Their union was kismet, but after a few years as part of Brooklyn’s DIY scene, they soon realised how much their own philosophy differed to those around them.

“I think the DIY scene was focused on this punk ethos and this strict aesthetic where you show up to the venue, and you play in what you wore all day, and you don’t do any theatrics, and there’s no glamour, no costume…” says Kivlen, who is dressed in a loud yellow boiler suit, his black hair tinted blue. He might be the spitting image of a young Bob Dylan, but the band’s aesthetic is decidedly more glam-rock, their music a time-hopping, genre-hopping particle accelerator: Talking Heads meets Wham! meets Velvet Underground, all held together by the fuzzy, grungy guitar sound they came up with.

But where their peers were writing songs that focused on “noise and aesthetic more than songwriting,” Sunflower Bean wanted to embrace melody, and elements of classic rock. “Even playing a guitar solo was frowned upon,” sighs Kivlen, “but we just decided to go for it. That was our way of being punk – being subversive, and not doing what everyone else was doing at the time.”

It’s worked out well for them. After The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas gave the band his seal of approval, the buzz around Sunflower Bean became deafening. They released their debut album, Human Ceremony, in 2016, and its follow-up, the psych-rock-drenched TwentyTwo in Blue, last year.

With that record – which was tighter and more assured than their debut – Cumming “wanted to create a little space for women entering their early twenties, who are looking at how to prepare themselves for that and be strong. Of course, everyone else thinks, ‘You’re an idiot, you’re 22, shut up’, and you’re like, ‘I am, but I feel the weight of society, the weight of the world, I feel like my skin is falling off. Who am I as a woman outside of my shell? What is my body outside of ageing?’”

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The existential anxiety she professes is surprising. In conversation, Cumming – who has modelled for Yves Saint Laurent – is masterfully self-assured, and the clear leader among her bandmates. She won’t abide being interrupted by them, and is sure to keep Kivlen – who is endearingly, sometimes thoughtlessly, garrulous – in check. “No, Nick, please,” she says firmly at one point, when he makes a slightly inappropriate analogy that I promise not to repeat. “Sorry,” he croaks, willingly taking the rebuke. “I didn’t think that you would mind that. I didn’t know that that would be bad.”

It’s all in good spirits though. Theirs is a dynamic built on mutual respect, a touch of bickering, and a genuine, enthusiastic friendship. When Cumming suggests that making their new EP was like “carving an ice sculpture with a sword,” she is delighted when Kivlen suggests that a chainsaw might be more apt. “A chainsaw! Exactly!”

Whatever it was whittled with, the EP is a punchy, urgent offering, and a decisive step up even from last year’s TwentyTwo in Blue. “Fear City” is a power ballad with country licks; “The Big One” is a fidgety anthem channelling the raw energy of The Slits, and “Come for Me” is a cheeky, confrontational double-entendre inspired by the rapper Cardi B. “Her songs have such an element of humour, of sexuality, of strength,” says Cumming, “and kind of a blatancy that I feel gets lost in the world of indie rock, where everyone is always trying to be cool. I was sitting there and I was like, ‘I wonder if we can have a song [like that]. Then we started working on ‘Come for Me’, and it had this aggressive, fighting energy that also felt, in a weird way, connected to my sexuality. I think we wanted to be unafraid of any kind of shame that could come around sexuality in general.”

They wrote the 12-minute EP “really quickly and earnestly,” says Kivlen, and recorded it in a garage over the space of a week. Cumming doesn’t want his words to be misconstrued, though. “I don’t want to make it seem rushed,” she tells him. “It wasn’t just s**tted out; it’s all really considered. But with the sophomore record, we were sitting there like, ‘I hope it’s really good, I hope that we can do it really well, and I hope that everyone gets what the songs are.’ Now, with the EP, it’s like...” She shrugs.

“Just make that s**t sound hot’,” laughs Kivlen. “Make it hot,” adds Faber, “and don’t look back.”

King of the Dudes, the new EP from Sunflower Bean, is out now