Nothing 'Motionless' about Sun After Dusk's post-release success

Not many bands come swinging out of the gate like Sun After Dusk did with their EP release. Bursting into the Perth indie scene and playing shows often, we wondered what it was like to work the balance between the stage, relationships, the work grind, and home life.
In an email with Sam from Sun After Dusk, we found out about band life after a release cycle, the daunting feeling of making a huge move for your musical career, and what following your gut for songwriting can really get you.

Congratulations on the release of your debut EP 'Motionless'! How did you find the release process for such a huge undertaking? 

Thank you - we’re really, really stoked but I think a little burnt-out. It’s definitely time for a bit of rest. It was our biggest endeavour yet – not just the recording and releasing but keeping on top of it all amongst our regular life duties. We probably took too long to get this all done, but we were also still so busy gigging, finding our footing as a band and trying to balance each others’ personal lives. In a way, that was kind of cool because it started to feel like we were living the experiences the songs were about. We watched each other lose our baby teeth as a band over the whole year of recording and releasing the songs, so the EP’s release marked the end of a period of growing pains… not that those ever stop. But at times it felt like we’d bitten off more than we could chew, and we’ve come out the other side a stronger unit than before. It’s really easy to get lost in the emails and the numbers and the numerous platforms you’ve gotta jump through to get music out, and you can only dedicate so much time to that each day with work and other stuff going on. But once we hit the stage and heard the songs coming back at us so loudly, it was this sort of feeling of, “Whew, it all worked out.” 

Who was involved in the output of this collection of smooth indie poetry? How'd you find the production process as an independent band? 

There wasn’t really any aim to get an EP together until we’d written maybe our fourth or fifth song together as a band. I’ll usually bring a concept or hook to the band and we’ll jam it out. We all have slightly different tastes, so we kind of stretch the song out to form something unique, and test things out with one another. Conceptually and lyrically though, the songs kind of bubble up inside and eventually they start to spill out in this tangible way. They’re not written out of necessity – they’re the product of experiences and feelings that I feel need to just get out into the air. It’s this kind of cathartic explanation of what I’m feeling; “I couldn’t say this any other way. Here’s what’s going on right now”. 

We recorded our first track ‘Sunscreen’ at Emerald Room Studios with our mate Emmett way back at the end of 2023. It was our first time recording and I think we were trying to find our footing with what we could do in a studio that we can’t do live. When we came back to Emerald to record the rest of the EP, especially with songs like ‘Motionless’, the songs had gotten so much more time to build their own identity and space from playing them live so we had more of an idea of how to get the sound and feeling we wanted out of the production. It’s still something we’re working on and experimenting with and we felt so comfortable knowing we had Emmett at the reigns. 

I think it’s this thing of trying to match the sound with how the song is supposed to feel. It’s hard to describe; it’s like trying to mix the colours on a palette together to get the canvas just right. You know when you’ve added something and you kind of go, “Yeah, that’s it. That’s exactly how this song feels.” That was definitely the case with While We’re Down – Emmett had the idea to add these swells, slowly rolling up the guitar volume, combined with layers of vocals we added on the last day of recording. It’s this kind of production vocabulary that you can only build from listening and experimenting. 

You've now accumulated over 46,000 listens across every track on 'Motionless'. What was the promotion strategy to gain new fans and keep listeners coming back to those tunes? 

Honestly, it feels like most of the listeners right now come from the friends and connections we’ve made right here in Perth. Last year, we played a gig pretty much every two weeks for the whole year and it really feels like we’ve got a little bit of a community around us. It would be great to go viral, for sure, and god knows we could improve our TikTok game. But it’s nice to feel like each time we’re playing a gig we’re trying to win over a couple new fans. It makes every gig feel really special and Perth is great for that, there’s always someone hanging out who comes up to you after a set and goes, ‘Hey, I didn’t expect this. Your music is really cool.’ A lot of our identity is built at our live shows – we just have heaps of fun, and I think that’s what we have that keeps people coming back. 

The music industry is no cake walk and it takes a lot of resilience to stay on track. Was there a moment where you collectively thought you were at your limit? 

I think there were lots of moments in this process where we had to step back and gauge where we were at, and what we still had left to do. That’s super daunting. There were lots of moments where it felt like we were back at square one and not really progressing. I can’t remember any one moment, but as we geared up for the EP release, there were lots of conversations about what all of us wanted from the band. It’s becoming a lot more of an investment and that can be tough – I remember this one rehearsal where we totalled up what we still had to pay various bands, photographers, and our studio and kind of went – oh, we have no money. At the end of the day, it really just took a lot of patience from one another. We’re all juggling relationships and work and studying amongst everything else, so we’ve had to give each other a lot of grace. 

Music is made to be felt and sung. Vulnerability is what makes sharing art so fun. Go out and get excited for some music. There’s nothing better. 

At least from us, there won’t be any new music until way later in the year, but we’re really looking forward to what’s coming.

Sun After Dusk's newest EP, 'Motionless', can be heard anywhere music can be found but here it is on Spotify.