Indie-surf-punks Sun Room were thrown in at the deep end, but they’re riding the waves
It’s the hottest day of the year so far as I talk to Sun Room founder, singer and guitarist Luke Asgian, and it couldn’t be more appropriate weather – not just for their solar nomenclature, but because the band’s music has been bringing the south Californian heat across the world for the last three years. Their discography of EPs and singles provides a scuzzy, modern take on the sound that, in your head, soundtracks the image of a sun-tanned surfer running across a on a golden beach – ideally shot on grainy, half-bleached 8mm film.
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The band grew up in southern California beach towns, all playing in various garage bands across high school – but it was COVID that spurred Asgian to start Sun Room in earnest. After the band’s second EP netted them a viral hit, they caught a wave of enthusiasm that propelled them onto multiple international tours. It’s not often a band yet to release their debut LP has played shows in South America, Europe and Australia as well as their native US.
But for the band’s latest four-track EP Can’t Explain, they’ve branched out beyond the beach, even if there’s still a good amount of sand in their sonic shoes – the release owes as much to fuzzed out indie-rock like the Strokes as much as it does the Beach Boys. According to Asgian it’s a shakeup inspired by the influences they soaked in as they relentlessly hit the road across the last three years, touring with bands like Inhaler and Sports Team. As they did so, they were exposed to a lot of music that wasn’t quite as prominent on the SoCal beaches of their adolescence.
I spoke to Asgian about that shift in style, what the band has learned in going from house shows to world tours so quickly, the value of road-testing songs and why, for him, simple will always be better when it comes to guitar gear.
How would you define Sun Room as a project?
The band has definitely changed over time. It started off as just a COVID project – I was in my second year of university when the pandemic hit. We got sent home from school, and I had to go back to my parents’ house – so I was just super bored at home. That’s when the four songs on our first EP Sol Del Sur were written.
We were surprised at how quickly it took off – we couldn’t even play shows at the time, but the music caught on online really fast. It was never meant to be a career. After COVID it was just about throwing house shows, house parties and bringing all of our friends to get everyone dancing and moshing. And I still feel that’s the core of the thing – we want to bring people out to dance and mosh and have fun and jump around, with a really lively show.
Our recorded music – definitely the earlier stuff – sounds pretty mellow and laid back. But we never played it like that live. We would always play it as fast and as loud as we could. And now, a couple of years into learning about the recording process, learning more about songwriting, I think the recorded music is starting to reflect the live show a little bit more, the chaos of everything.
The earlier material is more overtly influenced by 60s surf and garage rock – was that just a result of where you grew up?
So all four of us grew up in Beach towns in Southern California. So yeah, that was just the music that was around all the time. And the culture of the towns, too – all the kids were starting garage rock bands, and all happened to be influenced by that 60s garage and surf – without really even thinking about it!
So that was a huge factor in us forming our sound – and I think we’ll never be able to shake it fully, because that’s just what we grew up doing. That Californian garage rock thing will always be a part of us, our guitar playing, our songwriting.
What prompted the shake up for the new EP Can’t Explain? It doesn’t lean as heavily on that retro surf style.
Part of the reason this particular EP is a little bit different is that we’ve been touring for a few years now, with bands from all over the world: Inhaler from Ireland, Sports Team from the UK, and so on. And that opened our minds to really cool music that we didn’t grow up around, but they did.
For example, I had never heard of the Stone Roses before we toured with Inhaler. They were all tripping that we didn’t know who they were! But now they’re one of our favourite bands. So touring has been a huge thing for expanding our sound, and moving beyond just playing what we grew up around – touring has shown us so much new music, and it’s made songwriting really fun again.
You headed out on big international tours earlier in your career than a lot of bands do – what did doing that teach you?
We were definitely thrown in at the deep end – I grew up playing in high school bands from the time I was like, 13, 14. And the biggest shows we had played to were like 75 people – and then we get all of these proper shows, these support slots where you have a soundcheck and there’s a green room – all that was so new to us.
We learned a lot about writing songs for live shows, because you realise that some songs are a lot more fun to play live or just go over better than others. So we started writing with that in mind, just to make sure we were putting on as chaotic and hectic a show as we possibly could.
And going to different parts of the world and seeing how they react to your sound is just really interesting – I feel like early on that sound we were doing was very specific to southern California, so it was even weird to play that in like, Ohio, let alone Uruguay or Argentina. So It was really cool to do that.
How do you approach guitars, amps and pedals for Sun Room?
I always take the route of ‘simple is better’ – for me, the guitar is a tool for songwriting for the band. So it’s funny, I must have the most simple pedalboard of all time – most of the shows, I’ve just run a Tubescreamer, always on, into a Fender Deluxe Reverb. And I was playing the same Jazzmaster for the first two years of the band – it was the only guitar I owned, I guess because I didn’t know that much about guitars. And it was working!
But when we got into the studio, there were all these vintage guitars – the studio that I grew up going to in Long Beach is called Jazz Cats, and the guy who runs it is called Jonny Bell. He’s a local legend, and he just has so much cool vintage gear, and records to tape and all that – so it was cool getting kind of mentored by him in terms of tone and all of these vintage guitars.
So we got to use some old Silvertones on some EPs and stuff, and recently I finally got my first “new” guitar – new to me, as it’s vintage. It’s this Gibson Melody Maker – it’s so fun playing that live, because it’s just so different to the Jazzmaster that I’ve used for three years straight.
I actually have a funny story about our bassist Max getting a free bass. We played this festival, Shaky Knees in Atlanta, and after our set we’re walking around, checking out a couple of bands. And then some guy, an older guy, 50s or 60s, starts yelling at us – he runs up and says something like “sick set – which of you is the bassist?”
Max [Pinamonti] is like “oh that’s me,” and he’s like “man, I really loved your bass guitar – was it a red Rickenbacker?” – Max is like “no, it’s a Fender P bass,” – and this guy is like “oh, I thought it was a red Rickenbacker.” So Max says something like, “no, but I wish I had a red Rickenbacker”
And then this guy goes, “okay, I’ll buy you one.” And it’s a bit like, “wait, what?” – but Max gets this guy’s number, and gives him his address – 24 hours later he gets some text from the guy being like “the Rickebacker is out of stock – but I’ve got you this custom shop P bass.” Which is like, a $5,000 bass! But, he got it, and that’s the bass he plays live now!
But for me, it’s been really nice to have the most simple approach I possibly can. Even with guitars – I only own a couple, and we’ve been doing the band full time now for three years. I don’t see my approach changing anytime soon. I think I would get a little anxious, if I started chucking more pedals on my board or adding guitars into the rotation.
You mentioned the guitar is just a tool for songwriting – what’s that process like now for Sun Room? How does a song go from idea to finished track?
The way it happens is that I’ll be at home or on the road and come up with a verse and a chorus – and then that’s brought into the garage, and jammed out with all of the boys to figure out the transitions, the intros, the guitar parts and all that stuff.
But, importantly, basically every song we recorded in the past two years we played live for months. All the recorded songs have gone through so many revisions from us playing it at live shows – we’ll notice that crowd goes dead at a certain point, or if we don’t do a build quick enough and so on. And it’s been cool as we’ve had the opportunity to be on the road so much, and I feel like that’s helped our writing a ton as we can just test songs out. By the time we’re ready to record, we’ve already played the song 30 times live – so we can get a really good live take of it, too, and not have to overdub stuff a million times.
But all the boys are really good at songwriting at this point, so everyone will bring in their different ideas, whether that’s a guitar riff or a bassline, and then we’ll build it up in the garage.
This new release is a four song EP – a format you seem to have a particular fondness for. What’s made it your release method of choice, over longer EPs or even an LP?
We’ve been kind of finding our legs a little bit – like I was saying, we hit the road right away, before we played together for any length of time, before we had dialled in who we want to be, what we want to sound like. It all just happened really fast, and so I feel like we’ve been finding our bearings ever since then – and therefore just haven’t felt fully ready to commit to doing our first album.
But in the past six months, I think we’ve really started locking in on our sound, our songwriting, who we want to be as a band – so I think an album is definitely the next step for us. Because I kinda hate that the digital age has kind of forced everyone into making singles and EPs, just to find the next TikTok hit or whatever. I think that’s super lame, and it’s not why we’ve been doing singles and EPs rather than an album. It’s more that we just want to lock in on who we are in our sound, before we take that leap. But I’d say we’re there – I’m really happy with the songwriting and the sound lately.
But it’s crazy how TikTok and everything has changed how people write songs these days – I feel like people are just looking for a viral 15 seconds in a song, they’ll just write whatever so it’s not just a 15-second song. We’re trying to write songs – good songs. We’re not just looking for viral moments…
Other than the step up to an LP, what’s next for Sun Room?
We’ve got a tour supporting Dayglow in the US, Mexico and Canada – and we have so much new music that’s all really fun to play live. We kind of took the whole summer off to just work on new stuff – since we started playing live, it’s been the longest gap that we’ve not done a show for. So we’re super excited to get back on the road, as all the music is really live-oriented – and it’s also just gonna be fresh, as we’ve been playing the same set for a really long time. Having this new arsenal of songs to go in with is fun, and, you know, we all start to miss it when we’ve been home for a bit!
Can’t Explain is out now.
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