Meet ‘The Sunday Estate’, the indie-rock band that will make you feel things with their crunchy instrumentals, hearty vocals and sunkissed vibes.
The Sunday Estate are like your favorite childhood rock bands, all in one. There’s a sense of familiarity behind the band’s music that will leave you with a feeling of nostalgia. Whilst they may be young– having formed only in 2018, the Inner-West boys have been busy releasing music and offering audiences three strong singles, “I Don’t Want To Be Alone”, “We Were Kids” And “Let's Stop Pretending”, all delivers punchy instrumental and emotionally-relatable lyrics.
Produced by Ryan K Brennan (King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Julia Jacklin), the band has nailed the raw and simple aesthetics. Their instrumentals are catchy and sincere, laying it bare on tracks, while the hearty vocals of lead singer, Conor, will transcend your speakers. It’s the kind of songs that will bring you back in time, to your childhood, to the first album you ever listened to and loved.
To celebrate their latest song, Give Me (Something), we sat with the boys to talk about nostalgia, growing up and how rom-coms are the pop of the film industry.
You’re a fresh band from the Inner-West– For people discovering you guys, how would you describe The Sunday Estate and your musical style?
Conor: Good laughs
Dave: We have a pretty eclectic sound. There's definitely a few common influences that we picked up when we started practicing together. Bands like The Cure, Phoenix maybe, The Strokes. We have some other ones coming out soon– some of them [are more] country, some more [like] The National, so our sound is very eclectic.
Conor: As a whole, we are very influenced by whatever we are currently listening to, so it really depends on the time. [Looking back at the songs] in the future, [there’s] going to be distinct periods that we have in terms of what's influenced us when we're writing. Currently, for the next batch of songs, it's going to be very 80s post-punk influenced, and very nostalgic and a bit of emo in it as well. I've recently grown to love emo, when everyone else seems to have loved it before me.
Tom: Some of us are still in our emo phase. Some of us never left. laughs
Conor: I think that now, the songs we're releasing at the moment, which we're still very excited about, are very much more so like The Strokes and garage rock, and the things I personally was influenced by a couple years ago. It's just going to be a lot of different progressions as we go. What the future holds, I don't know, but we're just a band that likes to play music that we like to listen to.
How did you come up with your name, The Sunday Estate?
Conor: Oh, that was the hardest thing! Dave had no say in it. What happened was, we just cycled through lots and lots of names: We started as "Luxuries", and then “The Bum Bags” laughs. Naming ourselves as a joke is a bad idea.
From the start, we were quite set to having "Sunday" in the name somewhere. There were two competitors, "The Sunday League" and "Surreal Estate”. We couldn't pick one, so we just threw them together.
You say your songs are “pop nostalgia”– and I can definitely hear that flair of old pop/indie going on there. What's that 'nostalgia' that helped define your music and who you are as musicians?
Conor: I think our music is very rooted in emotions, feelings and trying to convey those in a way that you don't necessarily have to have experienced what's in the song, but in a way, it affects your mood, your emotions, your way of feeling about something. What I like about us is that the eras that we are influenced by are nostalgic to us, and I hope that they are to other people. The 80s post-punk theme comes from the music my dad listened to, and the progression from that just changes because whatever my dad was into, that's what I listened to. Currently, my influences are defined around certain bands but from different eras. It spans every era, but I can't settle on one.
Finn: I think one of the reasons we use the word "nostalgic pop" is because some things never really go out of style. A lot of our songs are about childhood and being teenagers, and so it kind of makes sense because they harken back to old, familiar and warm memories. Even "Give Me (Something)", is kind of about teenage love and teenage drama.
Tom: The nostalgic element goes beyond the sonics of the songs– it's also about the content of the songs. Some of these songs, to me, feel like growing out of home. Even the name of the band is about a house. There's a lot of lyrics about people coming home, or leaving home.
Congratulations on your new song, Give Me (Something) ! Can you tell us more about it, the story behind it?
Conor: The song, as a whole, is about relationships that you have with people, whether or not they are romantic or friendships, or your family. It's not a sad song, I don't think. It's kind of happy-sad– nostalgic! The song's about those [super close] people in your life. You're going to fight. You're going to be annoyed at each other. You're going to get on each others' nerves. But at the end of the day, there's something that they give you that makes you want to keep them around.
There's always that "want" of having them there no matter what they do. It's not necessarily a specific reference to my own life, but I think it's a feeling that resonates with a lot of people. No matter what the circumstances are, at the end of the day, we all have those people in our lives that may get on our nerves sometimes, but you still love them so much.
