Sundressed: Sunshine State Of Mind
As we navigate the stormy weather of a global pandemic and ride the waves of a national lockdown, the toll taken on our mental health as humans behind the scenes is unsurprisingly slipping under the radar in the day-to-day news coverage, opting to hone in on political mishaps and physical detriments, rather than the subtler sides of the Coronavirus crisis. Mental health has often fallen by the wayside in the pecking order of awareness and attention, yet it’s fast losing its taboo-tag in the alternative music realm as more and more bands begin to explore their own experiences with mental health in hope of empowering their audiences to open up. It’s commonplace for these touching tracks to take a pessimist’s position, however Arizonian emo-poppers SUNDRESSED are throwing away the rulebook in favour of a far more optimistic approach on their sophomore outing Home Remedy.
Across eleven tracks and half an hour SUNDRESSED – comprised of vocalist Trevor Hedges, bassist Justin Portillo, drummer Vic Chan and guitarists AJ Peacox and Matthew Graham – navigate the nuances of mental health, and the positives that can come from those experiences, rather than playing on the parts that try to break us down. This fresh perspective comes from Trevor’s own harrowing experiences with mental health and struggles with addiction, and the way he overcame these.
“I’ve definitely always seen it as something therapeutic. I went through a lot of addiction problems in my late teens and early twenties, and one thing I learnt from getting clean with that was how powerful it is to share your experiences with other people who might be going through stuff and kind of making connections with people that way, and how that can be such a positive thing not only for that person, but for you personally, so I’ve always tried to look at it like that.”
Creating connections is something SUNDRESSED are becoming accustomed to throughout their career. Since their formation as the sobriety-maintaining brainchild of Trevor in 2012, they’ve wore their hearts firmly on their sleeves which has allowed them to build up a small albeit steadfastly loyal community of fans, in which they connect with regularly; which is a process Trevor has benefitted from personally over the years and is proud to be acknowledging and maintaining with Home Remedy.
“Sometimes, I feel like our fans have really been on this journey with me this whole time, I even had some reach out saying you know, that they kind of feel like lyrically it’s almost a sequel to the last record (2017’s A Little Less Put Together) where it’s like, we were laying out all the reasons why we’re a little less put together, and this one’s more about finding those little remedies and little beautiful parts of life that make everything worth it,” Trevor tells us. “That’s been a really cool experience, it makes it feel like it’s not just ours, it’s everyone’s. We have a pretty small fanbase but they’re all very connected, they’ve all made friends with each other and that’s the kind of community I want to keep building.”
Community is in essence what has driven the band to continue to create music throughout the trickiest of times. Much of Home Remedy’s lyrical output hones in on struggling with mental health whilst working hard to pay the bills and always being on the wrong side of broke, and it’s something that is very representative of SUNDRESSED‘s experiences in bringing their vision to life. With no label to their name at the time of recording, and no budget to match, they had to fight tooth and nail to make ends meet.
“We were touring last year purely to try to make money to pay for the record, and so when we were recording, we literally went on a tour and left AJ behind at the studios to record guitars and we got a fill-in, just so we could be continuing to work and pay for the record whilst making it. It felt like we were really grinding for it.”
It wasn’t just the recording of Home Remedy that Trevor and co. spent time grinding for, it was the release of the record too, as there were moments SUNDRESSED were questioning whether the fruits of their labour would ever see the light of day, as label after label sat on the fence, until a random recommendation changed everything and they found themselves facing an offer from Rude Records [BLOOD YOUTH, LIGHT YEARS, PATENT PENDING].
“It was super random how I contacted them, we had talked to a few US labels that were kind of on the fence, and it’s never a good feeling when they’re just like ‘maybe’, you want someone who’s all in with you. We had toured with SUNSLEEPER last year who’s on Rude, and I showed [their vocalist] Jeff the record and we were talking and he suggested we send it over to them, cause they’d been so good to them,” Trevor explains. “It was like over a weekend and they already had an offer for us, so even just that kind of enthusiasm made me feel really good, and they’ve been so willing to listen to my ideas, and they provide a lot of support, like I’ve never done any overseas interviews before this record, and we’ve been grinding for a really long time so to have support from someone so connected is so good.”
Working with Rude Records has been a refreshingly revitalising experience for SUNDRESSED, who’ve faced their fair share of music industry skirmishes during their time as a band, battling both mental health and toxic masculinity, the latter of which the band have taken on directly, particularly on the tongue-in-cheek acoustic balladry of Sensitive Motherfucker. “It’s definitely a hard industry to be in as someone who suffers from mental health and stuff like that, and there’s a lot of toxic masculinity in the scene, and that’s something the band and I have always been against and tried to speak out on, and Sensitive Motherfucker is a kind of like a sassy, ironic response to that kind of stuff,” he says. “I was worried it would get misconstrued, but what that song is really about is me growing up and being an overly sensitive man and being looked down upon because I wasn’t your typical manly man, I’ve never, in my family it was always okay to cry, violence wasn’t the answer, we were never into sports or anything like that, so it’s kind of like, it’s more sassy and ironic, I didn’t want it to come off self-serving, which is why we decided to make it acoustic. Musically, my favourite artist ever is BRIGHT EYES, so it’s kind of fun to do a folky vibe like them to make it more ironic, because you think with that kind of lyric it would be a super-punchy punk song, not an acoustic one.”
As much as Home Remedy is an expose on their music industry experiences, it is also an evolution of their sonic progression as a band. With a number of line-up changes taking place in the three years between albums, SUNDRESSED have developed their rough-and-ready emo into a part-indie, part-pop-punk pie that is as technical as it is catchy. It’s something Trevor’s always hoped to achieve, and has guitarist AJ in particular to thank for it.
“Our guitar player AJ had a big influence this time. He took a lot of songs I wrote to places I never thought they could go, which was a really cool experience for me because I’m not much of a guitar player so I feel like that was something we didn’t focus on before,” Trevor says. “I’ve always been the type of person who’s like ‘the more, the merrier,’ I’m not one of those people who has a specific vision for my song, like it has to be a certain way, I just try to surround myself with people who are better at music than I am, and it tends to work out that way. Having everyone contribute just felt like there were more people pushing the ship, and it’s all of ours, and not just a group of my songs, so it feels like an evolving thing.”
Evolution, ultimately, is at the heart of Home Remedy as an album, and SUNDRESSED as a band. At the start of it all, the project was put in place to help Trevor evolve as a person, and now it’s become a fully-fledged band tasked with helping others evolve into the best humans they can be. In a time where the news is constantly reporting the world to be ending, SUNDRESSED give us the sunshine state of mind we all need right now.
Home Remedy is out now via Rude Records.
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