Sunset Rubdown was a shooting star. The band began as a solo project for Spencer Krug's bedroom recordings, and expanded into one of the weirdest, densest, most essential bands of the late 2000s. As one of Wolf Parade's vocalists and creative forces, Krug was already building some buzz for himself as a vital voice in the burgeoning indie rock moment, but he had too many ideas for even that once-prolific band. That's where Sunset Rubdown came in.
Following the project's solo and lo-fi debut album, 2005's Snake's Got A Leg, the band released as strong a trilogy of albums as any act to come out of the music-blog era. Shut Up I Am Dreaming, from 2006, was the breakout, landing on year-end best-of lists, thanks to its simultaneously glittering, brooding, and claustrophobic sound, and its expansive instrument collages. As an aside, this is where I hopped aboard the Sunset Rubdown train, having heard the album shortly into my first semester of college a year after its release. For someone only just starting to broaden his musical horizons, Shut Up I Am Dreaming was a sledgehammer to the brain. (I mean that as a compliment.)
The band followed with 2007's Random Spirit Lover, which was both stranger and vaster in its scope. If Sunset Rubdown started as a so-called bedroom band, categorized thusly thanks to Krug's singular talents and the lo-fi nature of the debut, Random Spirit Lover was the evolution and the unshackling. There are so many instruments layered on top of each other and overdubbed onto the final mixes that each song becomes a propulsive runaway train. Take "Up On Your Leopard, Upon the End of Your Feral Days," which I once described as "a carnival of demented clowns on the back of a hellbeast bent on the destruction of your expectations."
That's exactly the type of bombastic and frankly terrible writing that Sunset Rubdown pulled out of me in my late teens and early 20s; it felt like a challenge to try to match Krug's esoteric lyrical content and the bonkers-ass music. To be fair to my younger self, it was a challenge many critics took up and failed at.
Following the one-two punch of Shut Up I Am Dreaming and Random Spirit Lover could have been an impossible task. Sunset Rubdown had nailed down the kind of indie pop that inspired Tumblr posts with the former, and had satisfied the maximalist itch for perfect noise with the latter. Where do you go from there? Well, to 2009's Dragonslayer, which is my favorite of the band's releases and what I consider the perfect distillation of what Krug was working through with the project.
However, something happened after the release of that masterpiece and the tour that followed: Everyone in the band got sick of Sunset Rubdown. Without much fanfare, the band stopped playing shows and stopped recording music. Though there was never official confirmation—trust me, I checked—that the band had broken up for good, it sure felt like that. Krug moved on, maintaining his customary productivity. In the 15 years since Dragonslayer, he has recorded three albums with Wolf Parade, five albums with his piano-led and Siinai-aided project Moonface, and three albums under his own name. There simply didn't seem to be space for Sunset Rubdown to exist anywhere other than in the memories of those who cherished their particular brand of chaos.
That is, until last year. Out of nowhere the band announced a reunion tour in the spring of 2023. The tour succeeded both in bringing Sunset Rubdown back together and also giving fans the chance to hear the songs they thought they might never hear again, live and at full volume. The tour was successful enough, and the reunion joyful enough for the band's members, that a new album followed. Always Happy To Explode is the band's first release in the years since its original hiatus/breakup/extended hibernation, and it too marks a sonic shift for a band never content to stay still.
The album, which came out on Friday, rips up Sunset Rubdown's usual formula, instead opening up space in the songs for silence to breathe. The instrumentation lacks the experimental bent of early songs like "The Taming of the Hands That Came Back To Life," but there is an experiment here, as Krug and his bandmates—Camilla Wynne Ingr, Jordan Robson-Cramer, and new member Nicholas Merz—find a way to give toned- and stripped-down instrumentation the same emotional and sonic weight that made Sunset Rubdown stand out in the first place.
It doesn't sound like it was an easy experience, but the results are enthralling. Ahead of the album's release, I called Spencer Krug, who had just returned from walking his 10-year-old labradoodle on Vancouver Island, where he lives with his partner and son. We spoke about returning to Sunset Rubdown 15 years later, taking inspiration from a fortuitous dream, and relearning what it means to be bandmates and, more importantly, friends. He walked me through the differences in the recording process this time around, thanks to the march of time as well as the state of the world outside the studio. Finally, Krug also talked about moving past Sunset Rubdown's own past, and into a new era with Always Happy To Explode and its accompanying tour.
The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Sunset Rubdown had been on hiatus, or maybe on something that was more permanent than a hiatus. Either way, it had been a while: 15 years since Dragonslayer and your final shows in 2009. What made last year the right time to get back together for the reunion tour, and then what made this the right time to record a new album?
Yeah, it was more permanent. We weren't on hiatus, we were broken up. I really didn't think the band would ever get back together. I was more adamant about that than anyone else, which made it even more definitive in the other member's eyes. "Well, Spencer doesn't wanna do this, so it's not gonna happen."
When we broke up, we didn't really talk about breaking up. We just played our last show, and there was so much sort of bad energy in the air that whole tour, that we all knew it wasn't healthy. We just stopped playing shows and stopped writing and stopped working together, and didn't really talk about how there was no more band for probably six months after.
Last year's reunion tours were the result of everyone being back in the right place in their lives. The year before when I broached the idea to them ... it sounds very made up. It sounds like bullshit. But I had a dream that the band had gotten back together and we were on tour and we were having fun, and really loving each other and loving the music and just having a really fun tour. And then I woke up and had that "it was just a dream" disappointment. You know what I mean? Where you're like "I can't get that back."
I laid there kind of bummed out about that for a little while, and then I thought "Well, this is one rare case where I could actually try to make that happen if I wanted to." And I thought about it for all that morning, about whether or not I would be interested in trying to play shows again. And then I thought, "Fuck it, why not?"
I wrote them all a group email and asked them if they'd be into a conditional reunion, where we would get together, and if that felt good, then we would start jamming the old songs and if that felt good, then we would book a reunion tour. They all wrote back that same afternoon and said they were all into it.
Like I said, it was conditional, we had to get together and get to know each other again, and be OK with each other. That happened, and it was good, and it was really fun. We played music again, and that was really fun. So then, we booked a reunion tour, and it was received really well. There seemed to be still support in the world for the band. That's when we started discussing making a new record because, that would be the next step, right? But we didn't talk about it until then. That was never part of the plan until we knew we could do all the other stuff first.
Once you did get back together to record, did you find it difficult to get back into the same groove?
It wasn't easy. There were differences. We're grown ups now, whereas before we were barely that. Everyone got better at knowing how to talk about their feelings, process emotions, and all those things. I feel like the whole world's gotten slightly better at those things over the past decade. Anyway, it was just never gonna be the same as it was, because it was so different than the first time.
The other thing is that we, as a band, were different. The guitarist who is on all the first records, Michael Doerksen, was on the reunion tours with us, but he had to opt out of the band for this record and for this tour, not because there's any bad blood, just because he had other commitments. So, that was different. We didn't have Michael on guitar, and we had the addition of Nicholas Merz on bass, because he had been filling in on bass for us a little bit on the reunion tours. He was opening for us at the time, and then he would join us onstage about halfway through the set, to cover bass because the original bassist was not part of the reunion.
So now we have a new member, we're up a bass player and we're down a guitarist. The original Sunset Rubdown never really had a lot of bass on the recordings, and we definitely never had a person who was good at that instrument and who thought about what it meant to play bass. Nicholas very much can do that. So there's this whole other sonic element with the bass, and no electric guitar. Yeah, it was all completely different just for those logistical reasons.
The instrumentation on the new album is sparser than before, thanks to that absence of electric guitar, which definitely takes up a lot of room in the earlier songs. Was that a conscious decision, or did it follow logically from Michael's absence?
We never sat down and said "OK, let's make a more stripped down record," but we did sit down and say "let's not try to replace Michael. Let's just make a record without electric guitar for the most part."
You're right, the electric guitar does fill up a lot of space. It's usually a little distorted and it takes up a ton of sonic space. So, without it, there is a lot more room for everything else to come through. It does make for a more of a stripped-down sound.
As we were recording, we had much less time than we thought we would. We only had time to learn the songs quickly and without too much time to overthink how we're playing them. So we would play them over and over again, until someone had an idea. When we got in the studio where we're recording, we set it up so we could all play live off the floor to recreate that feeling, that everyone is just playing at once with whatever ideas they have. As we're putting down those foundational ideas, we realized that we liked the way it sounded without overdubs and distortion. Not only is this fine, this is actually good. This is actually better.
Everything kept pointing us in that direction anyway, first with the absence of the guitar and then with the lack of time to really arrange the songs in a overly complicated way, and then just liking what we heard. So we just went with it. That's what bands should do when they put out a record. This is where the band is at right now. This is what happened. This is the art we made, not trying to sound like the last record, or not trying to make some big statement. Just, this is who we are in this moment. It feels good to me.
The lyrics on the album feel anxious, as do the arrangements. Did the pandemic change the way you approached your songwriting?
During COVID, everyone was experiencing the same sort of feelings of isolation and loneliness and anxiety. I had that, just like everyone else, and those feelings definitely bled into those lyrics. I also had a kid with my partner, a son born in April 2020, so right when COVID was taking off. He changed our lives, our whole future. So when he was born, and COVID happened, we were isolating in our place. We're in the countryside, not far from a small town, but definitely spending our time at home. Even now, we live the home life.
So, this huge pivot happened in 2020, when my life really started the second half of the book. I thought "OK, this is my life. I guess this is what happened." I wasn't planning on it. I live on Vancouver Island. I've been here for a decade now, and I only planned on moving here for maybe a year, maybe two, and then probably go back to Europe, or move to Montreal. We didn't plan on settling down in this tiny little rural community, but it happened and now I'm thinking "OK, this is it. I have a quiet life in the country. I got a son. I'm alone a lot, and all of that is OK. Not only is it OK, it's really amazing!" But I'm often reconciling that reality with whatever other past realities and other potential realities that could have happened, which were a lot more urban, a lot more kinetic.
I feel like a lot of lyrics on this album are me talking to my past self, and being like "things are like this now, and it's actually cool. Don't worry about it." Those sorts of themes are mixed with the anxiety of making peace with those realities, the anxiety of the crumbling geopolitical world and the climate, and all the shit that gives everybody anxiety. It all gets folded in there, into one big emotional word stew. I just exercise those thoughts through song.
I try to do the same, whether in my articles, or some short stories.
Do you write short stories?
Yeah, not great ones, but it's a way to get whatever is in my head out of there.
Yeah, same and same. I don't write great short stories. It's something I'm trying to get more into as I get older, writing short fiction. I realized I'm not a poet and I never will be. I'm OK writing songs, but I'm a terrible poet. I also probably don't have the attention span to ever write a novel, at least not at this point in my life. Nor do I have the training or the talent, but I do like writing a short story now and then. I'm getting more and more into it.
It's a nice art form. I know this oversimplifies it, I like how it can be something that anyone can do. A lot of my music, my solo music, I can sit down and play a solo piano show, and I feel like if I'm doing that at 70 years old, that's OK. But I don't really wanna be like, LARPing around stage with a rock band at that age. There's something—not undignified, just something out of place about it for me. Just leave some room for the younger people. But writing is something that you only get better at with age. I'm looking forward to exploring it more as I live through the second half of my life.
The point about getting better with age just made me have a really terrible flashback to writing short stories for creative writing classes in college. I'm sure they were terrible.
I did creative writing in school too. Yeah, of course, they were bad. I'm sure they were terrible. No one knew what they were doing. But that's why we were in school. I still don't know what I'm doing and I'm sure what I'm writing now, even the ones I like, if I read them in a decade, it'll be "yuck." But, that's OK. It's supposed to happen like that, I think.
Speaking of revisiting our old work, how was it playing your songs from the early records once again? Did the muscle memory of playing them live come back, or did you have to relearn them, and how to play with each other?
Enough time had passed that the muscle memory had disappeared for the most part and we all had to relearn them. There is a feeling, because so much time has passed, there's a feeling that they're not your songs anymore. Just speaking for myself, the person who wrote those original Sunset Rubdown songs wrote them so long ago that it doesn't feel like me anymore. It feels like another person wrote them. Then you couple that with having to relearn them, listening to the recordings and figuring out what chords I was doing. Some little flashes of muscle memory do come back, of course, but for the most part, you feel like a cover band. Sometimes I would feel that Sunset Rubdown is the best Sunset Rubdown cover band in the world. We're so good at doing Sunset Rubdown! I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think any band that's been together for longer than a decade would feel that when you're playing the old ones; you can't even really remember who you were when you wrote it. You just know the song.
The music is still really fun to play, though the lyrics mean different things to me now. And as I sing them every night, like different things will occur to me, different interpretations. Sometimes I remember the original thing and it'll take me back to that moment. Mostly, though, we gleaned energy from the audience, who, for the most part, were all super stoked to revisit these songs that they thought they would never get to see live again. For the reunion tour, there was this celebratory and grateful energy, both in the audience and on stage.
Were there any old songs that surprised you when you played them live?
Well, there's that song called "Dragon's Lair" off of Dragonslayer; This big, long, epic thing, and I didn't want to do it. When we got back together, I said "it's too long and it was never that good of a song, anyway." It's just too much. It was such a big statement of a song, but we don't need to do that. Let's just go have fun, and not make people listen to this 10-minute epic thing.
The band talked me out of that pessimism, so we tried it, and as we were rehearsing, I thought "oh, actually this is kind of cool!" So then we ended up doing it as an encore most nights, and it was super fun. I had no memory of that song being fun the first time around. I remember I had a memory of it being a bit of a chore, an emotional chore too. It's just heavy, right? The song is heavy and I have to put myself in this dark head-space for 10 minutes. Now, though, I realized it's actually got a lot of beautiful moments and a lot of really fun moments, and it really rocks out in the end. What a fun thing to get to lean into and then have other people glean emotion from.
There were other songs we loved on the reunion tour, but we're not going to be taking all of them on this next one because we are making time and space for our new record, the focus of this tour. We did the reunion thing, you know, here's all the old Sunset Rubdown songs we all thought were gone. Our sets were so long, an hour and a half at those shows, it was too long. But we played all the hits, and now I think we're not going to be playing all the hits. Everything is going to be different. It's a different incarnation of the band, and I feel OK about that, because we played a lot of shows on that reunion tour. We went all over. People had a chance to relive that and now we're going to move. We can't live in the past forever.
