Sun Kin
Last week, Sun Kin dropped their fourth album, After The House, and it’s a kaleidoscopic collection of songs that thrives on vivid, dance-powered sonic textures and bucks categorization, as it fuses seemingly disparate styles. Across its seven tracks, the Los Angeles based artist seamlessly traverses between sophisti-pop, disco, psychedelia, R&B, acid house, and more, while simultaneously engaging in some deep self-reflection with respect to relationships and identity. In this way, the record is simultaneously sonically adventurous and lyrically introspective, and the combination is really something worth celebrating, as After The House emits a contagious energy that’ll make you want to move your body while pondering the personal issues that it dissects.
Ahead of the album’s release, we caught up with Kabir Kumar, the songwriter behind Sun Kin, to chat about After The House, their long-running collaboration with Miguel Gallego of Miserable Chillers, the process behind writing the songs on the record, and much more:
The past year has been crazy. How have you been keeping busy during these strange times?
It feels like we’ve all lived a thousand lives since last March. Since the lockdown started, I’ve been lucky to be able to work from home at my online Customer Support job. Between calls and emails, I try to practice piano and guitar, as well as reading about and participating in collective power, a lot of which manifests in the form of donations to Mutual Aid. I’ve also started cooking Indian food for the first time—it’s been a very soothing and empowering way to spend my time, not to mention a connection to my culture and family from which I’ve felt isolated as a Third Culture Kid.
You were born in India and raised in five different countries. Did moving around a lot growing up shape your musical palette?
Music was a huge part of my household growing up, and my parents have always had eclectic tastes. Growing up, I would hear Tracy Chapman, Chopin, Miles Davis, Hindustani classical, Leonard Cohen and 70s Bollywood, often in the same listening session. During the mid-90s, when I was moving between India, Egypt and Dubai, there was a wave of Egyptian pop music that showed the burgeoning influence of Eurodance and house music. My parents and I would listen to this music as a way to celebrate and draw ourselves into the new cultures we’d be entering.
You collaborated with Miguel Gallego of Miserable Chillers for the 2018 album Adoration Room? How’d you two begin collaborating and how do you continue to maintain this collaboration?
Miguel reached out to me in 2016 over Facebook Messenger to tell me that he still listened to the self-titled song by my old band Anna Bradley, released in 2010. It wasn’t long before we were sharing demos and songs we liked online, along with discussing the trials of independent musicianship under late capitalism and our faith in music’s power to inspire collective movements. Inspired by split records from songwriter Lily Konigsberg (also of Palberta), we decided to work on an album that would alternate our songs. Sun Kin and Miserable chillers went on to perform these songs on both coasts, culminating in a tour of the Pacific Northwest. I also sang backing vocals on Miguel’s 2020 album Audience of Summer. Since the pandemic started, we’ve gone back to sending our work back and forth online, with some of our most fruitful collaborations being lyrical workshopping.
You’ve been performing as Sun Kin for almost a decade. How do you feel this project has changed over the course of the last ten years? What, if anything, has remained constant?
Sun Kin started as a folk band with glimmers of country and psychedelia and has gradually evolved into a more beat-focused project. I don’t like to put any sort of restrictions on the sounds I use, but there’s a through-line of contrast between light and dark, gridded and off-kilter, diatonic and modal. To me, dance music and folk music have a lot in common; my favorite examples of both are structurally simple songs with mischievous rhythms and melodies that feel a little off, in a human way.
In writing songs like “Blue Light (Keeps Me Up At Night),” you relied heavily on improvisation. Take us through your songwriting process. How has it evolved?
Two years ago I started a project where I would make 50 songs. There were no restrictions—the goal was just to drop songs into a private playlist I had online. All the songs on Private Time and After the House came out of this project, and “Blue Light” was a high point of my explorations with four-on-the-floor. To begin, I would choose a rhythm and try to enter a trance, letting the click play out while I found the chords, basslines and leads that fit underneath. This was a way for me to break away from the more melodically-focused “relatable indie” writing that felt limiting at the time. After sketching together different scenes on Ableton Live’s Clip Mode, I then recorded myself live-mixing these scenes. I would describe it like improvising a movie: editing together different scenes on the fly, along with adding different reverbs and delays for effect. After this process, I would go back and do small tweaks and add vocals.
The song draws on a lot of sophisti-pop influences like Sade and Nile Rogers, but mixes electronic and house music as well. How are you able to fuse these different influences? How do you think they complement each other?
I tried to have these songs emerge as naturally as possible from their different tempos. Once I had the compositional frameworks, I would then invite myself to perform over the beats in the manner of pop greats like Sade and Chic. After working with many different musicians in live bands for 10 years, it felt like a natural progression to delegate to myself, and allowed me to express different parts of myself in song.
How would you compare After The House to your previous releases? What can people expect?
After the House is at once the most immediate and the most difficult Sun Kin album. I think the directness of the dance rhythm allowed me to access some deep, raw feelings and decorate the songs with long, flowing, almost classical melodies and chord structures. A lot of the music is about being vulnerable at the end of the world, even if it hurts, because what else would be the point?
What was the process of recording After The House like? How does it compare to your previous releases?
Recording After the House was the inverse process from Private Time — if that album was about bringing together many friends to record an album about solitude that was as communal as possible, this album was almost all made by myself at home, with some overdubs added through friends over the internet. It was made for a more communal purpose, but almost fully by myself, which seems to me to reflect its core theme: a house is just where you find yourself.
