What’s the best part of the day? Bedtime? Tea time? Home time? It’s the latter of these that South London band Sunken has named their new EP, ‘Hometime’, for; a beautifully intricate and delicate exploration into emotions; five tracks of atmospheric, pensive pop made for wading into for a swim about and to get in touch with yourself, y’know? Led by siblings Poppy and Finn Billingham, the band talk us through the release, track by track.
Somewhere Not Real
It’s a really raw and honest track – unlike a lot of the other ones it was pretty much finished in one evening. We always knew what it was going to be, we didn’t want to factor the normal conventions of songwriting, and that was quite liberating. The vocal was literally the first time Poppy sang the track on a shitty little mic in our house which really adds to that whole atmosphere of the track for us. The lyrics came super naturally.
Jupiter
It is definitely one of the more experimental tracks on the EP. We worked it from a 6:8 ballad to something completely different, and I think it’s some of the most interesting production. It went through lots and lots of changes which never really works but thankfully this one pulled through.
Visions of You
So Finn had this nice lil motorik beat, and together we worked on structuring it into a demo which we later showed the others, and we all just really enjoyed working on it. It came together pretty naturally, and it was nice to have something more upbeat against the rest of the EP. It was originally a pretty minimal synth-y tune, but Boxer went and rewrote lots of it on the guitar and gave it a whole new angle. I guess it’s pretty different from our other stuff, but the process was super fun, we’d been listening to loads of old french pop music at the time which definitely inspired some of the vocal ideas.
Sorry For Everything
I wrote this one on acoustic first and then showed Finn, and he liked it, so we started making a rough demo. The chorus was so bad at first, but luckily we moved it somewhere else! I guess you could say it’s a good break up song and I kind of hate that I went there, but it just happened, and hopefully, people like it. I love the production, it’s kind of how I imagined the song from the start which is always nice, and I think we all learnt a lot through the process of changing the song quite a bit, and just finalising the arrangement to something we were collectively all happy with.
Zombie
‘Zombie’ is about a dream I had which seemed very significant at the time but I couldn’t understand why and still don’t. It was particularly vivid. The song develops in a way that is meant to slip from reality into the dream and then back again. It was initially recorded at a much slower speed, but we accidentally sped it up when transferring the files into pro tools which massively improved the song. The name zombie was a working title which seemed to work for this one, so we stuck with it.
Sunken’s ‘Hometime’ EP is out now.
