INDIE 102.3 PRESENTS: SUNFLOWER BEAN + GIFT + DRY ICE 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. “You get to decide what your prime is, and you fight for it,” 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.” 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–from the stages of Glastonbury and Lollapalooza, to touring with Beck, Interpol, and The Pixies–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. GIFT Now, Illuminator, their Aug. 23 debut album for revered New York independent label Captured Tracks, is the long-awaited payoff of GIFT’s ever-growing musical and human chemistry. And while nods are apparent to label forerunners such as Beach Fossils, DIIV and Wild Nothing, GIFT are shepherding those elements into wondrous new vessels for the present moment – sleek, often danceable and frequently mesmerizing. GIFT – vocalist/guitarist Freda, multi-instrumentalists Jessica Gurewitz and Justin Hrabovsky, drummer Gabe Camarano and bassist Kallan Campbell – are firmly enmeshed in the New York scene as talent buyers, photographers, DJs, audio engineers, art directors and, in the case of Campbell, an owner of the beloved Brooklyn DIY venue Alphaville. The melting pot of these varied skills helps make Illuminator an even more cohesive listening experience, with Gurewitz, a relative newcomer to making music herself, contributing a host of lyrics and vocal melodies and Camarano’s drumming providing the crucial rhythmic underpinning to the album’s 11 tracks. Hrabovsky, who previously engineered at Asheville, N.C.’s beloved studios Drop of Sun and Echo Mountain Recording, shared production duties with Freda for the first time. “We had a lot more confidence going in,” Freda says. “The main goal was to take a big swing, embrace the pop sounds we love and clear the mist and clouds surrounding the last record to make it a lot punchier.” Indie 102.3 Presents This is a 21+ event