Sunbather
Dream-pop duo Sunbather takes you to a mesmerising, shoegaze heaven with the release of their sophomore EP, Simmer. Released on the 13th of July, this 5-track EP is one of the hottest releases to come out this year. Hazy Days Music would like to thank Sally and Mike for taking the time out and having a chat.
Hey Mike and Sally! How did you two meet? And how did Sunbather begin? You’ve just moved from Brisbane down to Melbourne; was that always the plan?
SALLY: Mike and I met as housemates a few years ago in Brisbane. We lived in a warehouse together in West End that had a studio set up down the bottom. I'd been writing and working on some of my music once my old band had finished up. I asked Mike to come down and put some guitar over the demos I had been putting together, and that's sort of how Sunbather formed. Mike had sort of given up on playing guitar/music in general and hadn't touched it for a few years while he was studying/doing other things. I really encouraged him to continue doing something creative while you have other things going on in your life. We had become really good friends since being housemates.
We started recording in 2018 and have been releasing music for a couple of years now. We just moved down to Melbourne, and it's something we've always wanted to do. It's a pretty well-trodden path coming down here, but we've come down for work, and hopefully, the music scene recovers, and we can start playing some shows soon.
MIKE: I think we've always angled at moving to Melbourne. We've got a lot of friends down here, and work just lined up really well.
Congratulations on just releasing your second EP, Simmer. Holiday is one of my favourite tracks taken from this EP; what was it like writing this song?
MIKE: Holiday all started with the main guitar riff. It just came into my head one day, but I didn't really have any direction for it. It was written over the first lockdown back in early 2020. We'd actually been overseas in South-East Asia in Myanmar (Burma), but we suddenly had to rush home when the pandemic started, and we were all a bit displaced. I slowly began to build upon the riff but still had no real direction until Sally came up with the vocal melody that made it all tie together.
Compared to others, something really interesting with this song is that our friend/drummer Stu Mckenzie (Good Boy) brought a new energy to our music. He came up with this drumbeat that changed the vibe of the song.
SALLY: We recorded Holiday with Aidan at Plutonium Studio in Brisbane. It's been the four of us putting our music together so far. It's a great team.
MIKE: It's my favourite song we've written because it has the most from all the different members of our creative team, and we all added our own flavour to it.
The first single you released from this EP was the track, Out Of Context. What was the inspiration behind this song?
SALLY: Out Of Context started with Mike going through a phase of listening to a lot of emo/new wave emo bands. He got really inspired by that, writing all these new guitar parts and these new demos in that vein, haha. We'd pick apart and go through all the ideas for what could work as a Sunbather song. What were the bands?
MIKE: I was listening to Oso Oso and a lot of American Football, the kings of the midwest emo, haha.
SALLY: Out of character for us, haha. We just wanted to write this really bright, positive song, which is reflective in the lyrics. It was written in a time of quite a lot of changes for us, embracing all the ups and downs enchanted in the emo riff. It's a little bit brighter than our usual sound.
How have you found your songwriting journey develop since releasing your debut EP Brown Bread?
SALLY: It's just writing more; you get a sense of where you go and the kind of music you want to write. I feel like we are still figuring things out, and with anything creative, it's just volume. You have to keep creating and putting stuff out, and you get to a place where you like this more than the stuff we used to write.
MIKE: Starting out, I think, especially for each of us, neither of us has traditionally played the instruments that we are now. Sally was never a singer, and I didn't play the guitar, we were both actually bass players, and now neither of us plays bass in this band. So I think we've been trying to step out, play new instruments, and do things differently. I think there was a lot of development in figuring out what our inherent sound was and what sort of flavour we brought to the music we made and the instruments we played.
When we were making Brown Bread, it was the first time I wrote guitar parts, and Sally was writing vocal melodies. And in doing that, you learn what your natural inclinations are, you understand what you do well and what seems to work within your voicings. And certainly, for me, I've pushed deeper in and just not step too far out of my ability.
SALLY: We have been thinking a lot about a song having a particular mood or inspiration when you are writing that song. Lately, we start out by thinking about an emotion or a character from a book or film we had recently watched, read or identified with and then wrote the song with that inspiration in mind. We did that with this EP and are still doing that when we write new songs.
That's a cool and different way to find inspiration when writing a song. How have you found this experience has developed/influenced your music?
MIKE: I think it's playing on impressions. We did a lot of our writing in the first lockdown of 2020. I wasn't working at the time, so I was reading a lot and identifying with lots of characters, emotions and moods. It was a creative exercise to get an impression of a different character or mood and write within that. It is just a general framework/inspiration to write within and see if it would yield anything. It was a fun exercise for us to start out a song that way, but then obviously, once a song progresses, it goes in so many different directions from where it started.
Whats planned for the rest of the year? And can we catch you playing shows anywhere soon?
SALLY: We've been planning to play some shows around the release of this EP, keep an eye on our socials for any show news. And we are actually demoing to write an album, so we're keen to keep writing and keep playing shows. We are just really excited to get involved in the Melbourne scene.