Track-By-Track: Sunscreen's 'Just a Drop'

Sydney band Sunscreen release their debut EP Just a Drop tomorrow. But we are impatient and restless jerks who have somehow cajoled the band and their labels, Spunk and Dinosaur City Records, to run a stream of the five-song EP alongside a track-by-track from lead singer and guitarist Sarah Sykes.

The band have drawn references and comparisons to the Cocteau Twins and The Go Betweens and we can hear that but there's also a solid sense of their own songwriting skills and style.

They just played a show with DMA’s at Paddington Town Hall and have a hometown EP launch at the Botany View Hotel on December 1.

Tide

One of the earliest instances of the band writing as a team. Lyrically, it’s about waking up hungover and confused. However, on a deeper level, the song traces feelings of purposelessness, and having no control over the direction your life. I think everyone can relate to that empty feeling you’re sometimes left with after a big night. The opening line, "Saw my love today, kept my head low. Went off on my way, as the sun rose.’ Very plainly, it’s about waking up with somebody and leaving straight away, questioning if it meant anything at all.

Arms

I wrote most of this when I’d just moved to Sydney and was feeling pretty lonely. I was 19, and a lot more naive. I really liked a guy but he only wanted one thing. It’s relatable.

I worked in a cafe every weekend morning and I’d find myself really tired letting my mind wander back to this person I had a crush on. The second verse "I’m always drowsy counting the till" sums up the feelings of exhaustion. I constantly felt stretched thin and stressed about money, and homesick for my hometown, Newcastle.

I’d been listening to PJ Harvey’s Dry, where many songs are based on a really simple guitar riff. I was binge-listening Radiohead’s “Talk Show Host". I came up with the song on an acoustic guitar. I took it to practice with Alex, and he put these groovy guitar lines over the top. We call them ‘noodles’. Then when he came up with the guitar noodles in the end part, it changed the whole song. They suddenly took all the misery away from the song’s tone, and it was suddenly ending in a happy place.

For My Brother

This began as a jam in a bedroom in peak summer in 40-degree heat. The original iPhone recording was called "Melting". I was so sweaty, exhausted and dehydrated that I was grateful that the song only had two chords.

The lyrics are about the tough times a close friend was going through. I wrote them all in one go, in about five minutes. At the time, I was going through a strange stage in my life, of feeling older than I’d ever felt. Everything seemed pretty bleak and hopeless; I feel like I was experiencing the first taste of how emotionally complex adult life could be. The song admits defeat at the end, mourning the way things used to be in the past, as I repeat the line ‘I guess this is the future now’. Sorry, it’s dark.

Far Gone

It’s about a breakup but I consider it triumphant and celebratory in tone. It’s angry but also happy. About breaking up with someone and feeling glad that you’re out. Like that song "I Can See Clearly Now the Rain has Gone". I credit the song to Alex though, as Alex, Hugo and I wrote it around a bass line that Alex wrote. It turns out he’d written the bass part when he was 15, and had kept it for years, still without having a song attached to it.

Voices

This is about anxiety and how it distorts reality and makes you feel like you’re insane. The lyrics are semi-triumphant, acknowledging that things, in reality, aren’t as bad as they seem. However, they’re also self-deprecating; about kicking yourself when you realise that it’s your own mind that you’re fighting. This constant battle against yourself is something that anyone who has anxiety can relate to. It’s hard when it comes to romantic relationships, as self-doubt sabotages pretty much everything. My anxiety was making it very hard for me to believe that this person who I liked actually, indeed, did like me. I sing ‘I’ve burnt down our love to a shared cigarette’ - this basically sums it up, the kind of self-sabotage I’m talking about. I want "Voices" to be an encouraging song, though. The lyrics I wrote for the end part of the song are almost a mantra of encouragement to myself: ‘The armour that I’ve built so strong; I know only I can slice it off’. I’m telling myself that I can beat the anxiety, you know… I’m telling myself that I can win, despite it.

'Just a Drop' is available Nov 17 on Spunk and Dinosaur City Records.

Catch Sunscreen at these shows:
Nov 25 - Newcastle at The Commons
Dec 1 - Sydney at Botany View Hotel
Dec 10 - Wollongong at North Wollongong Hotel
Dec 17 - Newcastle at the Lock Up