Sunday (1994) for Love, Dark Humor and Leaps of Faith
Aesthetics vs. Asceticism
April 30, 2024
Web Exclusive
Sunday (1994) recently made waves with their impressive debut single, “Tired Boy”. Not only does the single resonate like a lost classic, but the band also arrived with a fully formed visual aesthetic. Combining confessional lyrics, booming guitar and bittersweet melodies with dark humor (they even manage to make erectile dysfunction sound almost romantic), Sunday (1994) emerged as a band capable of reaching back and touching their toes with the past by infusing the music with a fresh contemporary twist. Founded around the creative core of Englishmen in Los Angeles, Lee Newell and American Paige Turner, they began creating music in their one-bedroom apartment and releasing it on TikTok, as Newell explained in the press release, “to finally see if we were criminally insane or if these songs could actually mean something to someone. Immediately, we had thousands of views and people begging us to release them. We picked our jaws up off the floor and got to work.”
“Paige and I met 10 years ago at a concert in Los Angeles,” Newell reveals in an interview with Under the radar,” and we’ve been joined at the hip ever since. We know each other so well, we've been dating for 10 years and we've always been involved in music in one form or another.” The couple led a creative life writing music for other people, creating syncopations, as well as designing artwork for other artists. And then they started writing for themselves, partly for their own amusement, partly out of boredom, and also, one imagines, to keep the creative juices flowing. “I know it sounds like a cliché, but these songs were really just for us, we had no plans to release them in the first place,” explains Newell.
But the pair discovered that the music they had written was infused with more than a sprinkle of magic. Turner, who comes from a musically inclined family, says: “Even my family loved it and they don't believe anything good,” he laughs. “I had a friend in the UK who works in PR,” adds Newell, “and to get another opinion, I sent him the songs. The response was positive. he said “These are very good, you must release them.”
“When we were originally writing these songs, there was no pressure to do anything, so we could come from a purely instinctive creative point of view,” adds Newell. “And we started thinking, 'What would our perfect band sound like and sound like?' The overall visual aesthetic was also important to us. we kind of wanted Look as the band sounded.”
Turner agrees, “When we came to record the songs, we started taking it a lot more seriously.” The pair began to create a visual narrative around the music, one filled with a kind of faded, sad cinematic glamor that perfectly matched their sound. They designed everything themselves, from the photography to the videos, which Newell shot in Super 8.
“Doing everything yourself can be a blessing and a curse,” reveals Turner, “but we're huge fans of film, art and fashion and know that people can often judge you before they hear any music, and we've he learned a bunch of new skills doing it that way.”
It was also out of necessity, laughs Newall. “I mean, we don't have a 'team' and so you end up wearing a lot of different hats. But it seems to have worked as we are now being approached by labels, which was previously an alien concept!”
The TikTok phenomenon may be overstated, but it certainly hasn't done the duo any harm. “Right now in music, it seems like you have to be on platforms like TikTok, and of course there are pros and cons,” says Turner. “But it gave us a fan base very quickly and we could gauge the reaction to the two songs we wanted to put out, which was extremely positive. We really didn't want to put out a song that no one was listening to. So we own the music, we saw new bands doing it and we thought, “Fuck it, let's do it.” “I didn't want to give too much away, but then I thought, 'If I don't — what's the point? You have to put yourself out there even if it's a little scary.”
Obviously, as a couple, there's a bond that goes deeper than the music, and speaking with Newell and Turner, you get a sense of the mutual trust they have in each other's creativity. It was when Turner played a few sets of “Tired Boy” that things really started to come into focus. “This song came surprisingly easy to us and we thought, 'Oh, maybe we've got something here.' And the key matched my voice. Trust me, I've sung a lot of different songs over the years and my voice doesn't always sound like this,” laughs Turner, “but yeah, the stars kind of aligned with this song.”
The mutual admiration Newell and Turner have for each other is touching and it's easy to see how their songs truly come straight from the heart. Despite building a world around the Sunday (1994) aesthetic, their music is rooted in the reality of their own experiences. “I love hearing Paige sing,” enthuses Newell. “You know when you hear some singers and you don't Really do i believe them But with Paige, she believes it. I mean, I know these songs are based on our own experiences, but still…”
Turner agrees, “Yeah, we both come from completely different worlds, so it's really interesting to sing one of Lee's songs, to sing the words that were written about his experiences in the UK.”
Another song that is pivotal to Sunday (1994) is the still unreleased 'The Loneliness of the Long Flight Home'. It's a beautiful shimmery suggestive number that, as you can tell from the title, is about a long-distance romance. It's also extremely relatable. “I wrote a version of that song when we first got together,” Newell confirms. “I had to leave the US and I was so in love I didn't know what to do, so without sounding too mean, I wrote a song, which was originally called 'Los Angeles'. It is taken in a series of iterations over time.”
“Yeah, that's another song that definitely helped shape our sound world,” adds Turner.
Certainly, the images created around the music suggest a nostalgic, almost cinematic quality. In a recent press release, Newell was quoted as saying – “our CV would be Dumb and Dumber directed by Federico Fellini”.
“And that,” laughs Newell, “is the weirdest thing I've ever said. I mean, when we were writing our songs, we didn't have an aesthetic, it just kind of came out and we thought it was actually quite cinematic, like we had a kind of John Hughes vibe. In terms of influences, I would like to say Chinatown the Good friendsbut maybe we're romantics at heart.”
“But I think there's a darker tone emerging,” Turner adds. “We're definitely not rom-com people, we've both had our struggles in the past and maybe that will happen, there's definitely an undercurrent of melancholy there, although they're upbeat.”
Their second single, “Stained Glass Window,” is another true story and contains the memorable line, “I took some pictures of me and you and pasted them over scriptures, so I could worship something real,” but instead of O Newell would prefer if “people make up their own minds about it,” before adding, “I'll say it's a personal story about a religious upbringing that kept two people apart.” The artwork is equally ambiguous, showing scrapes on the knees that could be from… “Right,” says Newell, “that's it, is it from kneeling? Are you praying?… Is it sexual?”
The band will release their self-titled debut EP this Friday and there will be live dates, which could also feature their enigmatic live drummer simply known as “x”.
“Paige and I write everything, and we can almost read each other's minds, but we thought it was important to have another voice in the room to give an opinion,” says Newell of “x,” “He also looks cool !”
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from our partners at http://www.undertheradarmag.com/interviews/sunday_1994_on_love_dark_humor_and_leaps_of_faith
