SUNFLOWER BEAN Announce New Album & Tour, Share "Champagne Taste"

SUNFLOWER BEAN ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM, PLOT NORTH AMERICAN TOUR & SHARE “CHAMPAGNE TASTE” Mortal Primetime out April 25th

Praise for Sunflower Bean:  “Spirited interpreters of rock ’n’ roll’s eternal truths…Sunflower Bean are equally adept at studio finesse and raucous live noise.” - The New York Times “it’s amazing to see and hear this band’s maturation…Cumming’s vocal is strong and confident, and the classic rock riffs conjure up comparisons to Joan Jett….ridiculously talented ” – NPR “a contemporary take on lo-fi psychedelia, wearing shrewd influences on stylish sleeves.” - The New Yorker “one of the best bands in America” – Billboard “Though Sunflower Bean’s sound nods to past decades, it’s not vintage: The mash-up of influences — T. Rex, the Velvet Underground, Tame Impala, the poet Dylan Thomas — makes it new.” - T Magazine “…moody psychedelic magic with exactly the right attitude, the NY trio are one of the most exciting things in music” – i-D “Listening to…Sunflower Bean is a bit like flipping through some smart stoner’s impeccably refined record collection. All the correct drone-rock references are present: the Velvet Underground at their beachiest, the Autobahn liftoff of vintage Seventies Kraut-rock, the Eighties drug-punk of Spaceman 3, recent garage-grind aesthetes like Ty Segall, and the entire college-jangle canon from early R.E.M. to the Smiths to Real Estate and beyond. Sunflower Bean take these influences and shape them like Silly Putty into sweet, ingenious psych-pop songs” - Rolling Stone Beloved rock band Sunflower Bean return reinvigorated with the most hard-fought and vulnerable album of their career: Mortal Primetime. In the three years since their last LP Headful of Sugar, the members of Sunflower Bean drifted from one another as they pursued new projects and confronted personal challenges, tragedies and transformations. But Mortal Primetime – the band’s fourth album, but first self-produced – finds Sunflower Bean with a renewed sense of purpose after nearly losing everything they built together. “You get to decide what your prime is, and you fight for it,” bassist and vocalist Julia Cumming says. “This is ours, and that can’t be taken away by circumstance. We can’t take it away from each other. This moment, where we are now, is what we’ve always fought for.” With mixing by Caesar Edmunds (The Killers, Wet Leg) and engineering by Sarah Tudzin (Illuminati Hotties, Boygenius), Sunflower Bean were inspired by alternative rock, dreamy psychedelia, and arena-sized ambition to create a sound that’s undeniably theirs on Mortal Primetime; a record that celebrates their history while hurtling toward the future. PRE-ORDER MORTAL PRIMETIME - OUT APRIL 25 VIA LUCKY NUMBER The first single off of Mortal Primetime is “Champagne Taste,” a fuzzed-out anthem of reckless determination. A nod to Sunflower Bean’s long-time alias when performing secret shows to test out new material, “Champagne Taste” features feral guitar riffs, soaring power chords and vocals that find Cumming channeling Iggy Pop circa The Idiot. The band explains, “This song came after a period that felt like rock bottom for the band. It is about feeling beaten down but still driving forward, to keep faith, to grow and to continue to create on our own terms, our Mortal Primetime." Listen to “Champagne Taste” now HERE, and watch the Isaac Roberts-directed music video below.

Sunflower Bean is known for their blistering live show, which has graced the stages of countless festivals like Glastonbury and Lollapalooza, to tours with Beck, Interpol, and The Pixies, and sold-out international headline shows. So the band is wasting no time in celebrating Mortal Primetime on the road, and announce a massive North American tour. See below to find a show near you and get your tickets HERE when general on-sale starts Friday at 10 am locally.

Tour dates 2/13 - Glasgow, UK @ O2 Academy Glasgow ^ 2/14 - Manchester, UK @ O2 Apollo ^ 2/16 - Wolverhampton, UK @ Uni of Wolverhampton at The Civic Hall ^ 2/17 - London, UK @ O2 Academy Brixton ^ 2/18 - London, UK @ O2 Academy Brixton ^ 2/20 - Cologne, DE @ Palladium ^ 2/21 - Berlin, DE @ Columbiahalle ^ 2/23 - Amsterdam, NL @ AFAS Live ^ 2/24 - Brussels, BE @ Ancienne Belgique ^ 2/26 - Paris, FR @ Zenith ^ 2/27 - London, UK @ George Tavern 3/10 – 3/15 - Austin, TX @ SXSW 5/15 - Troy, NY @ No Fun 5/16 - Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brendas * 5/17 - Boston, MA @ Deep Cuts * 5/22 - Brooklyn, NY @ Warsaw #  5/23 - Washington, DC @ The Atlantis # 5/24 - Raleigh, NC @ Kings # 5/25 - Asheville, NC @ Eulogy # 5/27 - Nashville, TN @ Third Man Records # 5/28 - Atlanta, GA @ The Earl # 5/30 - Denton, TX @ Rubber Gloves # 5/31 - Austin, TX @ The Ballroom # 6/01 - Houston, TX @ White Oak Upstairs # 6/04 - Phoenix, AZ @ Valley Bar # 6/05 - San Diego, CA @ The Casbah # 6/06 - Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room # 6/07 - San Francisco, CA @ The Chapel # 6/9 - Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios # 6/10 - Seattle, WA @ Madame Lou’s # 6/12 - Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court 6/13 - Fort Collins, CO @ The Coast # 6/14 - Denver, CO @ Hi-Dive 6/17 - Minneapolis, MN @ 7th St. Entry # 6/19 - Chicago, IL @ Sleeping Village # 6/20 - Detroit, MI @ Third Man Records  6/21 - Toronto, ON @ The Garrison ^ with Cage The Elephant * with Laveda # with Gift

(Credit: Anna Nazarova)

Track Listing: 1. Champagne Taste 2. Nothing Romantic 3. Waiting For The Rain 4. Look What You’ve Done To Me 5. I Knew Love 6. Take Out Your Insides 7. There’s A Part I Can’t Get Back 8. Please Rewind 9. Shooting Star 10. Sunshine More on Sunflower Bean & Mortal Primetime: Time marches relentlessly on, but it can pass unnoticed unless you find a way to capture it. For the entirety of their remarkable career, Sunflower Bean has made monuments of fleeting moments, by turning them into art, bottling them as song. They broke onto the scene as teens wise beyond their years with Human Ceremony, captured the melancholia of nascent adulthood on Twentytwo in Blue, and confronted the alienation of life under late capitalism on Headful of Sugar. Now in their Saturn Return, the band is back with the most hard-fought and vulnerable album of their career: Mortal Primetime.  That confidence is earned, because Mortal Primetime almost didn’t happen. In the years since Headful of Sugar, the members of Sunflower Bean drifted from one another as they pursued new projects and confronted personal challenges, tragedies and transformations. Synonymous with New York, the band lost guitarist/vocalist Nick Kivlen to California, leaving vocalist/bassist Cumming to write songs alone for the first time in the band’s history. Soon after, she separated from her long-time partner, informing much of her songwriting. Additionally, drummer Olive Faber birthed a new project, Stars Revenge, after coming out as transgender around the last album cycle. Despite the wealth of success they’d experienced together as a band, Sunflower Bean struggled to tend to their collective fire and tensions rose. The three friends grew up together and spent their twenties in the spotlight, but away from it, they struggled to make sense of who they were outside of Sunflower Bean. The future seemed finite – it felt like time was up.  “Coming close to losing something you fought for, for over a decade, is a really good way to get close to your heart as an artist,” Cumming says. “Every long-term relationship, experiences challenges – you either stop or you go deeper. What is a band but a relationship with a body of work?”  Reinvigorated, Sunflower Bean chose to keep the faith and go deeper. “Faith is just another word for a healthy dose of delusion,” Faber says. “We make good music together – how could we walk away from that?” All three original band members convened in Los Angeles, encouraged by the team that’s uplifted them from the very beginning. They doubled down by choosing to self-produce the album, tracking it live to ensure that the immediacy of the performances so essential to Sunflower Bean’s mystique shined through. “It’s such a rare and special thing for a band to have played together this long, so we wanted to lean into the skills we’ve built and take an old-school approach to the recording—which is maybe the most subversive thing we could do at a time when it’s so easy to copy and paste,” says Kivlen. With mixing by Caesar Edmunds (The Killers, Wet Leg) and engineering by Sarah Tudzin (Illuminati Hotties, Boygenius), Sunflower Bean were inspired by alternative rock, dreamy psychedelia, and arena-sized ambition to create a sound that’s undeniably theirs on Mortal Primetime; a record that celebrates their history while hurtling toward the future. Sunflower Bean has never fit neatly into a scene, and Mortal Primetime will remind listeners why. They draw from a wide swath of influences most bands wouldn’t dare namecheck together in a sentence, and that daringness has made them undefinable. “Sometimes I think of this record as Belle and Sebastian meets Alice in Chains,” Cumming says. “In the past, we’ve been told to tone down who we are, and this album is our refusal to be anything but ourselves,” Faber says. “It’s the purest expression of who we are.” These songs are the most honest of Sunflower Bean’s career – unvarnished, exposed.  On Mortal Primetime, the members of Sunflower Bean carry each other’s pain in all of its complexity, even when the band itself is the source. By embracing discordance and uncertainty, they created the bravest album of an already storied career. When Sunflower Bean set out to make music together as kids, they knew they wanted to go the distance, to create something that could stand up to the unforgiving passage of time. “The further you move through life, the more you realize how precious every moment is,” says Cumming. “This album is about choosing the present as our prime, but also being in touch with the transient and fleeting nature of this existence.” However fleeting this existence is, with Mortal Primetime Sunflower Bean offers up another monument that will withstand the weathering of time.

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