Sunnsetter
The pursuit to find your way through the light and the dark and the balance within the quiet and the loud is a timeless exercise. Ever-asking questions. If you are Andrew McLeod / Sunnsetter, you can wear many (or all) of the hats from songwriter, multi-faceted musician, producer, and their own photographer, art director, videographer, booking agent and manager - and have to stare down every single question, and be solely accountable for your progress as a human and musician and translate your musical vision – not only to your newly minted bandmates and the other bands you lend your vast array of talents to, (notably/currently OMBIIGIZI + Zoon) but now directly to your own avid listeners. And, when you’ve done everything on your own for so long, how do you at last, take up your rightful space on stages and stereos and stand in the spotlight with the sturdiness of knowing your music and your instincts are precise, true and fully you – with even more players now on the team?
Sunnsetter knows their pedigree. What flows through them, the reasons they create, the music they love to listen to, play, work on and with and what they have learned, honed, and squirreled away is evidentiary. The foundations they build on, aren’t on the surface, perhaps vastly accessible or linear to your run-of-the-mill radio listener, (and that’s completely fine) but fuck do they slap, when that wall of other-worldy melodic, expertly crafted sound crashes down around you. They were built, layer by layer with purpose. Crafted with love by their maker.
And, with their new album, Heaven hang over me (due out November 15 on Paper Bag Records), Sunnsetter confidently stand in their power. Where previous LP The best that I can be., tentatively expanded their musical butterfly wings beyond the cocoon of their several previous solo releases, tenderly exploring the internal battle of carefully processing the death of their friend, this new album sees Sunnsetter building an unapologetic outward-facing sonic palate, that stands up to an over-arching theme of dealing with ever-present anxiety, while genre mashing tones and textures – and all 10 new tracks let us know, all that’s going really great, thanks for asking.
“I have always toyed with genre mashing. Something that over the years I have been able to hone more and more to maybe make some sense in the context of an album,” says Andrew. “I think that Heaven hang over me, so far feels like the most successful attempt for me to blend styles in a way that still feels cohesive.”
The LP title curiously, is drawn from a couple entirely individual sources. Heaven is in reference to the universal energy that surrounds us, not in religious faith. “I talk about it as this feeling, knowing it’s there, not knowing what it is or how to explain its existence. I don’t see the world as a literal place.” They also completely misheard a Nirvana lyric (in 1993’s In Utero track, ‘Dumb’) and that earworm has stuck with them. When Cobain sings ‘have a hangover now” it accidentally translated to Andrew’s ears as “heaven hang over now.” Another Sunnsetter mash up.
Album track “Fear It Comes In Waves” is a sonic runaway train out of the gate that instantly lock-steps duelling soaring guitar lines and heavenly layered vocals. To Andrew it’s their examination of “the daily dread or anxiety that just finds its way into your everyday life, in waves, even when you find ways to cope with it.” Never did panic pack such a melodic punch.
“‘I actually don’t wanna die’ is simply about knowing dread exists, and telling yourself that you can’t allow it to overtake you so much that you forget how important it is to stay alive,” notes Andrew. It’s a revisited offering from Sunnsetter’s 2018 release Worrybody and the new reboot hints at the stealth development of Sunnsetter's current musical mindset blending in a masterful collision of soft and loud, and genres that both whiplashes the listener and sonically appeases the soul with the melodic dexterity they achieve within a tidal wave of sound.
“Over the last year and a half, we have fleshed Sunnsetter into a fully-fledged live band, which is something I wasn’t sure would ever happen,” says Andrew. “We started playing and I realized how important this can be for me, and how important it was that I get some of these past works that people may have never seen or heard, out there.” In addition to Andrew now, Sunnsetter includes, Cole Sefton (guitar), Hannah Edgerton (bass/vocals), Trevor Cooke (drums) and Kyle Gottschalk (keyboards).
For much of their life Andrew has gravitated toward “heavier music” and always want to make albums that sat more in this space. “I’ve played in metal bands, sludgey bands, noise rock bands but when it comes to recording I’ve always fallen back on self-producing and writing things that made sense within the context of a singular individual multi-tracking and recording it all myself. Which by the very nature of it makes the idea of creating something that sound like a band playing a song difficult to do. There is a catharsis that comes from playing heavy music that I find myself pining after, since starting to play live as a band. The feeling of letting go and yelling and carrying on in front of people in a room is something that really drives me. Enveloping myself and everyone else in that room with sound, and letting it take over in a way that feels overwhelming and all consuming.” The truest version of what music can be for Sunnsetter, comes out in that environment.
