This week, Sun Spot at CLOSEUP's Artist Spotlight

This week, noisy indie pop duo Sun Spot chat to CLOSEUP for our Artist Spotlight feature ahead of their Bristol headline show at Mr Wolf’s Bristol.

Sun Spot, it’s great to have a chat! We love your music as you well know. This April you take on one a huge Bristol headline show, what should we expect!?!

Thanks for having us!! We’re stupidly excited for the headliner – it’s been a great opportunity for us to kind of pull out all the stops and do a bunch of silly stuff we couldn’t really justify when we’re supporting other bands. Without giving too much away, we’ve slowly been
transitioning into this much more mellow, dream-poppy kind of vibe, so playing around with that has been really fun. Plus, we’ve just added our pal Tom to our live setup, so it’s gonna be a great chance to show him off!

*the show has now been rescheduled for May 21st. Tickets are £3.50 and available here. 

What part of the musical process do you enjoy most, and why? is it performing live, creating your tracks or..?

I think we’re super lucky in that the creative and performance side of things are so different that we really enjoy them both for very different reasons. When we’re recording, it’s just me and George in our living room – usually listening to Toro y Moi and going down the rabbit hole trying to be as weird as possible. As for the live side of things, the songs really take on a life of their own and have this crazy amount of energy to them, which I think is down to the other guys we play with. We’re super lucky to have Scoops (keys) and Milvo (drums) on board – I think we’d be a very different (worse) live band if it wasn’t for them.

As a fairly new band, what do you see as the most important factors of the music industry? Spotify, live, or what?

I think it’s really tricky to be a successful act now more than ever – being a part of the music industry is so accessible, which is great, but it also means it’s so saturated. I think it’s important to focus on enjoying things for the right reason – if you’re not doing this because you enjoy it and it’s fun, then you’re only making things harder for yourself. Because of that, it has to be playing shows. No matter where you’re playing or how many people you’re playing to – it’s that chemistry you get between musicians working together that really makes it all worthwhile. Plus I really enjoy chatting absolute nonsense on stage.

If you created a Sun Spot Festival, and could pick three headliners, who would you go for?!

Without a doubt Porches, From Indian Lakes and Holiday Sidewinder. The first two have been huge influences on us for as long as I can remember us being friends – everything Aaron Maine does is wonky indie gold in my eyes and then Holiday Sidewinder purely because the calibre of pop greatness is absolutely something we aspire to!

Spotfest seems like an obvious name too but also a bit too much like an acne convention for my liking…

Tell us a little about what your new music, and your plans for 2020?

We’ve been super busy for a while now! We have some new music we’re hoping to share very soon, a bunch of really cool shows coming up, maybe a few tours and also doing our first proper festivals as a band – in May we’re playing the first day of Teddy Rocks, then we’re off to Salford the next day for Sounds From The Other City. Gonna be a wild one!