For singer-bassist Julia Cumming, guitarist Nick Kivlen, and drummer Olive Faber, who formed Sunflower Bean as teenagers in New York, playing a hometown show always raises the stakes. “For the fans that have been seeing us for all this time, I want them to know that when they come and see us in New York, it’s going to have something special,” Cumming says.
Kivlen was moved to see the venue packed to capacity. “I felt grateful and almost amazed that we still can do something like that,” he says. “After all these years, people are still coming to see us play.”
Both Kivlen and Cumming have been spending more time in Los Angeles recently, but they are agreed that Sunflower Bean will always be a New York band. “My family is still here, and the band is still here,” Cumming says. “Neither Nick or I could really leave New York if we wanted to.”
When the band is in town, there’s no shortage of friends and acquaintances backstage. “The real chaos unfolds after we play,” jokes Kivlen (pictured with GIFT’s TJ Freda). “The drama of the green room in New York is just wild.”
Sunflower Bean and GIFT hang out backstage. “I feel like we didn’t have a best friend band for a long time, and now it finally feels like we do,” Kivlen says. He and Cumming are both in awe of the huge, visceral sound that GIFT makes with its five-person lineup. “That’s something I love, is just having my ass kicked by a band,” Cumming adds. “That’s what I want.”
Faber admires a vinyl copy of Mortal Primetime backstage.
Kivlen rehearses backstage with members of GIFT. “We’ve never had the problem of translating our albums to the live space, because they usually start in the live space,” he says. There were some changes for this set, though: “There’s an added heaviness,” he adds. “’I Knew Love,’ for instance, is such a ballad on the record. But by the end, we can’t help but turn on the distortion. That instinct is within us, and it’s fun to push it live.”
“There ends up being a guitar solo in every single song somehow,” Kivlen jokes. “I was realizing that. I was like, ‘Man, I need to take a step back and think about my life for a minute.’” Cumming smiles: “Yeah, you do. You get to solo so much.”
Faber and friends (including Geese’s Emily Green, at right).
Overall, they feel grateful that the band has made it to album four, and excited about the future. “We all got some more space from each other, and there were some chances that it wasn’t going to happen,” Cumming says. “It’s a rare thing, especially now, for a band to last as long as we have,” Kivlen adds. “I’m just thankful.”
Though the set was mostly made up of new material from Mortal Primetime, they made room for a few older favorites, like 2016’s “Easier Said” and 2018’s “Twentytwo.” “People really love it, and that keeps it in the set,” Cumming says of the latter song.
The band brought in cellist Jenna Pascale to help fully represent the nuanced, “whimsigoth” sounds of the new album. “It’s hard to get that amount of emotion in the live show without something like that,” Cumming says. “Having her elevate the songs was super, super, super cool.”
Toward the end of the main set, GIFT joined Sunflower Bean onstage for a cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes.” “We went through a lot of ideas, including [Ozzy Osbourne’s] ‘Mr. Crowley,’ which would’ve been fucking awesome, too, but ‘Heroes’ won over,” Cumming says. “I just had to not overthink it. If I think too much about trying to become Bowie, I’ll probably have a psychotic break.”
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani came in from Albany to talk to the crowd, making him the latest politician to benefit from Sunflower Bean’s longstanding interest in progressive politics and activism. (In 2020, they opened for a Bernie Sanders campaign rally in New Hampshire, and Cumming interviewed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2017.)
“Life is too crazy to say that any politician of any kind anywhere ever is a hero,” Cumming says. “But on June 24th, there’s a candidate that represents a lot of values that we don’t have any other candidate representing in New York. Someone who’s people-first, who’s out there really fighting for us.”
Kivlen puts it pithily: “Things are going horribly. Let’s see what happens with someone who wants to make the buses free and make rent affordable.”
Sunflower Bean have long been known as one of rock’s best and busiest live acts; shortly after they formed, the local listings site Oh My Rockness awarded them the title of New York’s hardest-working band for playing 50 shows in the city in one year. (Cumming and Kivlen still debate how high the total would have been if they’d counted unlisted DIY shows.) “We would play two shows a night back in the day,” Kivlen says. “We would play at Muchmore’s and then get offstage and go load in at the Knitting Factory. We were playing that often.”
Set design was another big part of the Warsaw show. “We had a big angel. We had the candles. We were fully Mortal Primetime’d out,” Cumming says. The stage also featured large planter urns, which they considered filling with the red roses from the cover of their 2016 debut, Human Ceremony. Instead, they sent a friend out to nearby McCarren Park to forage. “We had actual city debris and branches,” Cumming adds. “When I saw it, I was like, ‘This is fucking awesome.’”