Sonny & The Sunsets

Sonny Smith, the Bay Area-based songwriter who also works as an author, filmmaker, and visual artist, eventually funneled his less introspective output into Sonny & the Sunsets. The group fuses early rock, psychedelic pop, country, and the approach of Jonathan Richman inside an internet-era D.I.Y. framework. After Smith issued several solo recordings across the 2000s, the band delivered its first full-length album, Tomorrow Is Alright, in 2009. Throughout the 2010s they continued releasing melodic, free-spirited collections, at times alternating these with Smith’s solo LPs.

The 2016 album Moods Baby Moods, produced by Merrill Garbus, drew from ’80s new wave and funk yet remained identifiably Sonny Smith. In similar fashion, 2021’s New Day with New Possibilities leaned into acoustic country while still revealing Smith’s ’60s pop leanings, which stood front and center on 2023’s Self Awareness Through Macrame.

The Sunsets formed in 2007 when Smith gathered a shifting circle of San Francisco musicians that included multi-instrumentalist Kelley Stoltz, Tahlia Harbour of the Dry Spells, John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees, Tim Cohen of the Fresh & Onlys, and Shayde Sartin of Skygreen Leopards. The lineup supplied an impulsive yet knowledgeable setting for Smith’s wry love songs and his affectionate depictions of everyday oddities.

Following the debut EP Hypnotist, the band released its first long-player, Tomorrow Is Alright, both appearing in 2010. That same year the Sunsets took part in Smith’s 100 Records exhibition in San Francisco, where nearly one hundred artists designed sleeves and labels for a series of fictional 7-inch records that Smith had conceived. He then recorded matching songs and presented the results through a working jukebox, one of which was credited to the Sunsets. By the time Hit After Hit arrived in 2011, the group had settled into a core lineup of Smith on vocals and guitar, Stoltz on drums, Harbour on guitar and vocals, and Ryan Browne on bass.

One year later Sonny & the Sunsets issued Longtime Companion, a country-styled album prompted by the dissolution of Smith’s ten-year relationship. Antenna to the Afterworld, released by Polyvinyl in mid-2013, was shaped by the murder of their Austin patron Esme Barrera and by Smith’s psychic contact with another deceased friend; it signaled a return to a rock-centered sound. Smith followed that release in early 2015 with Talent Night at the Ashram, a set of songs built around characters drawn from screenplays and scripts he had written to varying degrees of completion. Produced by tUnE-yArDs leader Merrill Garbus, the band’s sixth album, 2016’s Moods Baby Moods, took sonic cues from the 1980s. After Smith issued a pair of solo releases, Sonny & the Sunsets returned with the more wide-ranging Hairdressers from Heaven in 2019. Produced by the Shins’ James Mercer and featuring Mercer, Stoltz, co-producer Yuuki Matthews, and contributions from several others, it marked the first release on Smith’s own Rocks in Your Head Records. The band’s second outing on that label, 2021’s New Day with New Possibilities, revisited the country direction of Longtime Companion. The project turned back toward playful guitar pop on 2023’s Self Awareness Through Macrame. Drawing from Smith’s experiences in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the album included songs about the demand for his ceramic replicas of people’s pets and about treating one’s shadow as a companion. Supporting players on the record included Josiah Flores, Ava Lynch, Rusty Miller, and Harbour, among others.