Sunflower Bean, Mortal Primetime Time marches relentlessly on, but it can pass unnoticed unless you find a way to capture it. For the entirety of their remarkable career, Sunflower Bean has made monuments of fleeting moments, by turning them into art, bottling them as song. They broke onto the scene as teens wise beyond their years with Human Ceremony, captured the melancholia of nascent adulthood on Twentytwo in Blue, and confronted the alienation of life under late capitalism on Headful of Sugar. Now in their Saturn Return, the band is back with the most hard-fought and vulnerable album of their career: Mortal Primetime. “You get to decide what your prime is, and you fight for it,” Cumming says. “This is ours, and that can’t be taken away by circumstance. We can’t take it away from each other. This moment, where we are now, is what we’ve always fought for.” That confidence is earned, because Mortal Primetime almost didn’t happen. In the years since Headful of Sugar, the members of Sunflower Bean drifted from one another as they pursued new projects and confronted personal challenges, tragedies and transformations. Synonymous with New York, the band lost guitarist/vocalist Nick Kivlen to California, leaving vocalist/bassist Cumming to write songs alone for the first time in the band’s history. Soon after, she separated from her long-time partner, informing much of her songwriting. Additionally, drummer Olive Faber birthed a new project, Stars Revenge, after coming out as transgender around the last album cycle. Despite the wealth of success they’d experienced together as a band–from the stages of Glastonbury and Lollapalooza, to touring with Beck, Interpol, and The Pixies–Sunflower Bean struggled to tend to their collective fire and tensions rose. The three friends grew up together and spent their twenties in the spotlight, but away from it, they struggled to make sense of who they were outside of Sunflower Bean. The future seemed finite– it felt like time was up. “Coming close to losing something you fought for, for over a decade, is a really good way to get close to your heart as an artist,” Cumming says. “Every long- term relationship, experiences challenges– you either stop or you go deeper. What is a band but a relationship with a body of work?” Reinvigorated, Sunflower Bean chose to keep the faith and go deeper. Presented by Hi-Dive. This is a 21+ event