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 hasmade monuments of fleeting moments, by turning them into art, bottling them assong. They broke onto the scene as teens wise beyond their years with Human Ceremony, captured the melancholiaof nascent adulthood on Twentytwo in Blue,and confronted the alienation of life under late capitalism on Headful of Sugar. Now in their SaturnReturn, the band is back with the most hard-fought and vulnerable album oftheir 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 takenaway by circumstance. We can’t take it away from each other. This moment, wherewe are now, is what we’ve always fought for.” Thatconfidence is earned, because MortalPrimetime almost didn’t happen. In the years since Headful of Sugar, the members of Sunflower Bean drifted from oneanother as they pursued new projects and confronted personal challenges,tragedies and transformations. Synonymous with New York, the band lostguitarist/vocalist Nick Kivlen to California, leaving vocalist/bassist Cummingto write songs alone for the first time in the band’s history. Soon after, sheseparated from her long-time partner, informing much of her songwriting.Additionally, drummer Olive Faber birthed a new project, Stars Revenge, aftercoming out as transgender around the last album cycle. Despite the wealth ofsuccess they’d experienced together as a band – from the stages of Glastonbury and Lollapalooza, totouring with Beck, Interpol, and The Pixies – Sunflower Bean struggledto tend to their collective fire and tensions rose. The three friends grew uptogether and spent their twenties in the spotlight, but away from it, theystruggled to make sense of who they were outside of Sunflower Bean. The futureseemed finite – it felt like time was up. “Comingclose to losing something you fought for, for over a decade, is a really goodway to get close to your heart as an artist,” Cumming says. “Every long-termrelationship, experiences challenges – you either stop or you go deeper. Whatis a band but a relationship with a body of work?” Reinvigorated,Sunflower Bean chose to keep the faith and go deeper. “Faith is just another word for a healthy dose ofdelusion,” Faber says. “We make good music together – how could we walk awayfrom that?” All three original band members convened in Los Angeles, encouragedby the team that’s uplifted them from the very beginning. They doubled down bychoosing to self-produce the album, tracking it live to ensure that theimmediacy of the performances so essential to Sunflower Bean’s mystique shinedthrough. “It’s such a rare and special thing for a band to have played togetherthis long, so we wanted to lean into the skills we’ve built and take anold-school approach to the recording—which is maybe the most subversive thingwe could do at a time when it’s so easy to copy and paste,” says Kivlen. Withmixing by Caesar Edmunds (The Killers, WetLeg) and engineering by Sarah Tudzin (Illuminati Hotties, Boygenius),Sunflower Bean were inspired by alternative rock, dreamy psychedelia, andarena-sized ambition to create a sound that’s undeniably theirs on Mortal Primetime; a record thatcelebrates their history while hurtling toward the future. Kivlensays these songs are about “friendship, perseverance, revenge, and rebirth.”They are the most honest of Sunflower Bean’s career – unvarnished, exposed.Kivlen wrote the tender sixties-inspired “Waiting for the Rain” in a fit ofnostalgia, as the new Los Angeles transplant yearned for the simplicity ofchildhood and friendship. “As kids, life felt easy, but in adulthood everyoneis on a different path. As much as I miss those days, I also know that gettingolder is a privilege, and it’s healthy to embrace the changes of life andresponsibility.” Featuring a mellotron from Roger Joseph Manning Jr.(co-founder of legendary power-pop band Jellyfish), the poignant song feelstimeless and reflective of the album’s message of perseverance. To hear the bandplay it together speaks to the endurance of their bond – life is no longereasy, and their career is now stretched across both decades and coasts, butlove keeps them tethered. SunflowerBean has never fit neatly into a scene, and MortalPrimetime will remind listeners why. They draw from a wide swath ofinfluences most bands wouldn’t dare namecheck together in a sentence, and thatdaringness has made them undefinable. “Sometimes I think of this record asBelle and Sebastian meets Alice in Chains,” Cumming says. “In the past, we’vebeen told to tone down who we are, and this album is our refusal to be anythingbut ourselves,” Faber says. “It’s the purest expression of who we are.”Recording vocals for the album’s power-pop opener and lead single “ChampagneTaste,” Cumming channeled Iggy Pop circa TheIdiot, purring the album’s namesake over wolfish riffs. “Hey babe let’s goout tonight/ I want to spend ten thousand large/ It’s mortal primetime.” Later,on “Look What You’ve Done to Me,” her staggering range conjures the unsettlingmadness and whimsy of Kate Bush’s “Babooshka.” Tappinginto their respective senses of faith and spirituality, the members ofSunflower Bean make reference to religious imagery throughout. “NothingRomantic,” which searches for salvation under desperate circumstances. “Sittingat the bar drinking alone/ Waiting for God to take me home/ When the Devil saidheaven is closed,” Cumming sings, as soaring power cords harken back toarena-ready hits of the ‘70s and ‘80s by Heart, Pat Benatar, or Joan Jett. “Foryears, I sabotaged my own happiness—and hurt the people I loved—because Ibelieved suffering was essential to creativity,” Kivlen says. “The truth is, Icreate my best work when I’m happy, not broken. This song is a raw confessionand a declaration that there’s nothing beautiful about self-destruction.” Thoughshe’s written about being groomed in the past, on the searing “There’s a Part ICan’t Get Back,” Cumming wanted every lyric to be “as intentional and direct aspossible.” On the chorus, she recites a childhood bedtime prayer over a baroquearrangement that contrasts painful revelations. Later, on the disarminglybeautiful “Shooting Star,” Cumming questions how worthy she is of beingloved.  “It’s about asking someone ifthey want to be a part of your journey given your baggage and personalhistory,” says Cumming. “I think many of us wish we could change who we are—andyet we wake up the same, and the only answer is to try to learn to acceptyourself.” “So many things have happened/ That I can barely start to explain,”she sings. “Do you really want a piece of all this pain? Do you really want apiece of all this pain?” OnMortal Primetime, the members ofSunflower Bean carry each other’s pain in all of its complexity, even when theband itself is the source. By embracing discordance and uncertainty, theycreated the bravest album of an already storied career. When Sunflower Bean setout to make music together as kids, they knew they wanted to go the distance,to create something that could stand up to the unforgiving passage of time. “The further you move through life,the more you realize how precious every moment is,” says Cumming. “This albumis about choosing the present as our prime, but also being in touch with thetransient and fleeting nature of this existence.” However fleeting thisexistence is, with Mortal PrimetimeSunflower Bean offers up another monument that will withstand the weathering oftime.