Album Snapshot: Sun Club 'The Dongo Durango'

Image: Sun Club

Baltimore rooted Sun Club are a band made up of childhood friends and have just released their debut album The Dongo Durango.

A scour of the dictionary for either of those words expectedly flags up absolutely nothing, but either way it's now a blanket for a collection of unhinged indie pop that revels in wailing hooks and hurtling guitar rhythms to create something that harks Born Ruffians on one hell of a sugar rush. 

The record is the result of a month of recording in a Baltimore Warehouse: it's album bound by energy that's recorded entirely live.

We can imagine the band had a lot of fun recording it; on a general level they seem unperturbed by the pressures of modern life, instead choosing to live in a heavenly Sun Club bubble where nothing much really matters.  

In order to get an insight into their hyper sun-blushed album and their excitable heads, we posed a few questions to the band's Adam Shane to shed more light on the release from one of our favourite debuts this year. 

What does the album represent?

Haha, it's weird to think about exactly what this album really represents. Like we've all been writing and playing music as this group for like three years, so it's almost like a representation of those past years.

Some of the songs on it were written like years ago, and never really properly released. Other than that there's not like a narrative to it, we've heard that if you sync it up to The Expendables 3 there's some parts that line up, but that's purely coincidental.

Where does it stand musically? 

Stand musically? Hmmm... When we sit down and like write music we don't really pick out a specific place in the music world to stand. It's really up to people listening to decide where it stands I guess.  

Pick out a lyric from the album and why does that stand out? 

"I want you to see me in the flesh" Haha, no really! That's a line from the crazy title track. Like you know the album in itself has like a bunch of different stuff going on, and when we were putting it together we wanted to make sure the tone of the whole album was like still light hearted and weird as possible.

That song was just like recorded by Kory on and iPhone when me (Adam) and Devin were like just making weird songs together one rainy day.  

Favourite song to perform? 

Right now? It's funny, we like have been playing this song that's like just for fun were its just about pizza, which is really just a good time to goof off and stuff.

As far as a song from the album, probably like 'Tropicoller Lease'. Like it's cool because sometimes we'll hear people like singing along and stuff, which for us is crazy that people are recognizing our songs. 

Tell us something we wouldn't know about it? 

I don't know there's not a whole lot of secrets about the album. I guess one thing is that the warehouse that we recorded it in was like filled with like thousands and thousands of dollars of like power tools and a bunch of heavy machinery.

It was a place where people could rent stuff for free,so there was like jack hammers and huge axes everywhere. It took a lot of self constraint to not mess around with all of it.

Sun Club 'Dongo Durango' was released Friday 30th October via ATO Records (listen via SoundCloud)

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