With a freshly released sophomore EP under their belts and less than a week to go until they head to London’s The Grace for a headline show on 26 November, Sun Arcana have just kicked off what promises to be an exciting new phase for the London-based quartet. We caught up with the band as they shared the stories behind ‘Just Another Dream Away’, their best moments of 2019, and what the future holds.
New Beginnings
Our last EP ‘As I Take A Breath…’ was our first experience in releasing music and we were so over the moon with it. However as the time passed, we really wanted to one up that EP and smash the next one out of the park. Working with John Taylor and Gustav Wood was a real turning point, we’d never co-written before. It was so refreshing to get an outside opinion, sometimes you’re too close to see what the right answer could be.
I think with this record we wanted to be a lot more direct with our lyrics. We wanted to delve a little deeper emotionally, and tell a story that is a lot more personal. At first that was tough. We had to open ourselves up to each other a lot more, and in a way that has brought us even closer as a band. We pretty much approached the recording process in the same way. We had a lot of demos floating around that were more or less together, structurally, so once we worked with Gus and John, there was a firm base to build up from.
Quality Time
The beginning of this year we spent A LOT of time together. In the studio, on tour, back to the studio and then back out on tour. You see what I mean. Yet we never got sick of each other. Yeah we might have a few bickering moments but we genuinely enjoyed spending all that time writing, performing and just having fun together. I really think it allowed us to be more vulnerable with one another and help us express ourselves more into the music we were writing.
Great Times & Great Learning
We owe Normandie a lot. Taking us on tour is one thing, but watching them smash their show each night encouraged us to be better on stage and off. Those guys work so hard and are so great. It showed us the importance of hard work and how much we wanted to show the world how good we can be.
Our two support tours at the start of the year were a definite highlight of the year. A big run of UK dates with Emarosa was an amazing experience and a real learning curve for all of us. But when it came to the EU/UK tour with Normandie, that’s when our eyes were truly opened! We had a fantastic time and really put ourselves out there on our first full EU tour, quite a few experiences that we can’t go into in too much detail about… But it was definitely the highlight of our year in every aspect!
Finding Our Feet
Leading on from the above, this picture is the London show of the Normandie tour. Possibly my favourite show and our best show we have ever played. Everything just clicked, we just found our feet. Tom had the biggest nosebleed and he powered on through wearing a white T-shirt so it looked rockstar as f**k. We had been playing some of the songs on this EP throughout the tour and we were getting such great responses for songs that hadn’t even been released, it was dope!
The New Look
The music we had written was amazing, we were so buzzed with it. Only thing left to do was to give the music a visual. The theme that stood out was this 90’s LA skater vibe mixed with All Saints clothing (weird, right?). I guess the themes in some of these songs were kind of grungey and we were getting into a lot of skatery/grungey bands at the time. Deftones, Citizen, Basement. And although I wouldn’t say our music necessarily falls into the category, it just seemed like a good fit to dive into that aesthetic.
Rolling up Our Sleeves
This EP was the result of a tonne of hard work, so naturally it became our baby and we became very protective parents. We wanted to be involved in every sense of the releases. With the help of our director Rhys Davies (Furball films) we essentially came up with all the stories and set designs for the videos. Everybody was there every step of the way.
End Result
We couldn’t be happier with the record we have made, its taken a long time to get perfect but we are glad we took that time. Now we just look to the future for what comes next (hopefully big boy stuff).
We want to play as many shows as possible, really put our stamp on the live music scene in Britain and keep growing our name and brand around the world. We want to do a small and modest headline tour, and hopefully get the chance to support some other bands too wherever possible – maybe some new music from us too, who knows!
Sun Arcana play The Grace on Thursday 26 November – tickets are available here, and ‘Just Another Dream Away’ is available on all streaming platforms now.