Premiere: Sunjacket Releases Second Album “More Lifelike” – Stream Below

More realistic Released on June 4

June 03, 2021

By Caleb Campbell

Photography by Micah Sedmak

Chicago art rock group Sunjacket took a long hiatus after their 2016 record Mantra. While debuts are usually followed quickly, Sunjacket is far from typical. Instead, the band spent time working hard on a dense and experimental approach to the sounds of indie rock, synth pop, ambient music, and rock art. These sounds unite on the band’s new record, More realistic, released on June 4.

Following the aquatic ambient tones of the “Gates” opener, fans are welcomed to a world carefully crafted by Sunjacket. The group creates dramatic soundscapes with meticulous detail and striking artistry. Eerie synth sounds and Bryan Kveton’s painful falsetto form a raw and seductive combination on “In My Head”, enhanced by choppy percussion, surges of Spanish guitar melody and a fiery electric guitar solo. Yet elsewhere the group explores the art of Radiohead rock on “More Lifelike”, the spiraling buzzing soundscapes on “Uptight” and the pulsating electro rock on “Machine”.

The group rarely repeats an idea on record, with each new song offering new genre combinations, studio deception, or a captivating ear candy production. It’s an exploratory approach that easily blurs gender lines and constantly crosses new territories unknown to the group.

Sunjacket says of the record, “In making this album a lot of our energy has been devoted to exploration. Explore new chords and progressions, new ways of generating melodies, new ways of collaborating and writing in a trio, new ways of assembling disparate influences, new ways of producing sounds that we were passionate about. We never stopped learning and spent very little time on familiar ground. When we weren’t exploring, we were analyzing everything: what we thought of the songs, ourselves, the world, creativity, worry, doubt, loss. The title of the disc More realistic stems from a purgatory quest for something better, something more. It might seem like an impossible chase, but it’s kind of our MO as a group.

Check out the full disc below, premiering a day earlier with Under the Radar.