Sunset Lines - Warm Places
Sunset Lines’ first ever full-length album, The Longest Day In June, out later this year, was written during a time of cataclysmic change for the quartet’s primary songwriter, Liz Brooks. Yet, the synth pop band’s 10-song debut feels carefully curated, artistically defining, and utterly exhilarating.
“The songs on this record speak to rediscovering myself and my creativity. It’s something of a catalog of that time—the ups and downs, the freedom, and the restlessness,” Santa Cruz, California-based artist says. “But there is definitely a sense of fun, travel, and love. We keep it pretty tongue-in-cheek.”
Sunset Lines’ well-developed aesthetic finds serrated Radiohead and Pixies-style guitars poking through well-crafted pop songs lavished with stacked harmony vocals and layers of 1980s synth-pop etherealness. The group’s wall of sound is meticulously crafted by Paul McCorkle, the band’s guitarist, producer, and synth player. Brooks’s dreamy vocals and layered-meaning lyrics evocatively complement the nuanced musicality. “I like to write lyrics that sound like they are about one thing, but are really about personal or autobiographical subject matter,” she details.
Sunset Lines formed in San Francisco and has issued two EPs to date featuring a rotation of talented rhythm section players, played shows throughout California, and been featured in SF Weekly, SF Chronicle, and SPIN, among other publications. The band’s name is pinched from its former hometown of San Francisco, California, and it is a wry nod to the queue at a beloved coffee spot in SF’s Sunset district.
Upon relocating to Santa Cruz, California, Brooks and McCorkle brought SF’s gritty, indie pop sensibility to the dancey and groove-centric pulse of their new ‘hood. This meshing is epitomized within Sunset Lines’ rhythm section, featuring bassist Brett Wiltshire and drummer Adam Soffrin. “Our sound is part San Francisco and part Santa Cruz,” Brooks confirms. “It feels coastal and gritty at the same time.”
With its watery reverb and washed-out ambience, the single Warm Places captures a yearning, nostalgic feeling. The song is a vacation travelogue. Here, Brooks sings in three languages, beautifully wrapping mesmerizing melodies around each dialect’s phrasing. “Warm Places” is a synth-pop love letter to the tropical places Brooks has loved visiting, including Mexico and Hawaii. Her lyrics are evocative with a subtle poetic flair. One standout stanza is: A cosmic solar flare marquee/Hand over fist in our fun spree/Tan skin that glistens bare for me.
“The story about that lyric in particular is that we were in Baja with friends when the last solar eclipse happened which—in conjunction to other events that also happened that day—kind of cast a metaphorical and literal shadow on the rest of our trip,” Brooks details. “Warm Places” has since become a fan favorite with the band anointing it their set closer.
The upcoming album, The Longest Day In June, was produced by McCorkle, mixed by Sean Paulson from Different Fur Studios (13 Floor Elevators, GRMLN, Kendrick Lamar), and mastered by Grammy-nominated engineer Jeff Lipton (Bob Dylan, Bon Iver, Magnetic Fields) from Peerless Mastering.
