Sonny & the Sunsets – Queen City Sounds and Art

Sonny & The Sunsets, photo by Sarah Moore

With the title “Androids” you may not be expecting the folk-inflected garage pop song Sonny & The Sunsets have given us from the Self Awareness Through Macrame album that released on September 1, 2023. The bright accents in the jangle give it a physicality that gives its circular riffing some real momentum and at times it’s reminiscent of some of New Order’s more garage-y moments like “The Village” or like later period Beat Happening. But Sonny Smith’s words about wanting to be able to honest and comfortable in his truth and genuine feelings with another person give context to “Androids” as a symbol for how we so often have to be politic in life and adopt a depersonalizing presentation to fit in with a technocratic view of humanity that seems in place in so much of public life. So this song is about a quiet resistance and rebellion for one’s humanity in the face of the pressure to conform and become a product to be tweaked like, yes, some android. The rest of the record has similar expressions of moments of focusing and thinking about presumed norms and things we take for granted without ever examining whether they’re really of value or whether its more dead weight conforming impulses and ritualized behavior. Listen to “Androids” on Spotify and follow Sonny & The Sunsets at the links below.

Sonny & The Sunsets on Facebook

Sonny & The Sunsets on Bandcamp

Sonny & The Sunsets on Instagram

Sonny and the Sunsets, photo by Sarah Moore

Sonny & the Sunsets has certainly written one of the most charming and spare pop anthems of the current period of human society with “Waiting.” Few frills, just a repeated jangle guitar melody, some hovering, very basic, classic keyboard tone that one might associate with garage rock but more like something The Kinks might have done if they were a twee pop band recording demos and emerged in the early 90s. More like the 90s indiepop bands the Davies brothers and company influenced out of the Elephant 6 collective and associated scenes. Sonny Smith sings about waiting for someone to come and sewing an outfit while in bed for the inevitable trip away from all this paradoxical chaos, stasis and peril of the pandemic era. He sings of having an outer space radio and waiting upon “my UFO” to take him away after the manner of the Calgon commercials of the 70s and 80s minus the consumerist angle. The song isn’t complicated, intricate, it is all but unadorned and that’s what makes it so effective and why it stays with you. Listen to “Waiting” on YouTube and follow Sonny & the Sunsets at the links provided. Look for the new album Self Awareness Through Macrame due out August 25.