Artist Profile: Sarah and the Sundays, Making Music for Every Day

They’re of pretty average height and not British — this is what Sarah and the Sundays wants you to know about them. Oh, and they have new music coming out soon.

An indie-alternative, five-member group, Sarah and the Sundays has accrued over 380,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, wrapped up a cross-country headlining tour, and is currently slated to release their third album this summer. Sarah and the Sundays sat down in an interview with The Harvard Crimson prior to their show at the Sinclair on April 9.

Sarah and the Sundays does not actually include a Sarah, but is instead comprised of lead vocalist and guitarist Liam Yorgensen, bassist Declan Chill, drummer Quinn Lane, keyboardist and guitarist Miles Reynolds, and vocalist and guitarist Brendan Whyburn. Although an Austin-based group, only Brendan is native to the area — the remaining four members grew up in Connecticut and, after all dropping out of college, made the move to Austin to join its bustling music scene.

Reynolds, the last to leave college, hadn’t initially seen himself doing music as a career. Quitting piano and guitar lessons as a kid, Reynolds rediscovered musical interest whilst growing up alongside Chill.

“Me and Declan started playing music in his basement, and just messing around and doing stuff we thought was super fun, not to any kind of musical standard or anything. And that’s what got me more interested in doing it more seriously, was just like playing with people and having fun with it.”

Whyburn, on the other hand, conceptualized music as a potential career path early while growing up with musicians as parents.

“They were always big fans of your education being more important than school sometimes, so that was music for me and I always saw it as something I could do.”

Despite different paths to music, Sarah and the Sundays emerged together. For Chill, their individual musical styles are a strength to the band dynamics.

“I think each person’s role in the band and the instrument that they play, in a lot of ways, corresponds very well to their own tastes,” he said. “And so I think we kind of come in an amalgam of a bunch of different things that were pieced together in a way that becomes a cohesive thing.”

They were particularly able to click after moving in and living together during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Whyburn.

“We know where we’re at with each other and we know what we look like on our best and worst days,” he said. “And when you’re at that point with a person, you just kind of keep going.”

Sarah and the Sundays continues the close-quartered living arrangement while on tour. Particularly during their past experience traveling as an opener for The Happy Fits, Reynolds describes being able to learn about how to be a band on the road.

Additionally, Reynolds said, “I think every band we’ve toured with, we have taken away something from them. Whether they’re opening for us, or we’re opening for them, or whatever it is, I feel like you always learn from people who’ve been doing it longer, doing it differently.”

When headlining a tour, Yorgensen described the weight carried throughout the experience.

“You feel it,” he said simply. “It can turn into pressure if you let it, sometimes if you don’t let it. But it is a magical thing — the community and coming across like-minded people.”

Part of being on tour includes meeting various kinds of fans. Nonetheless, the audience of Sarah and the Sundays by Lane’s characterization is “super polite.”

“We have friends and family that come to shows every once in a while, and the one thing they take away about our band is that they’ve never had any bad interactions. Nobody’s pushy,” Lane said.

Sarah and the Sundays has several fans that have stuck by over the years whom they will remember and recognize. A few even have followed the band to different states to hear them perform their music.

In comparison to their past albums, 2019’s “So You’re Mad About the Cups” and 2021’s “The Living End,” their new record was written with more intent to have a cohesive theme.

“‘The Living End’ was definitely kind of a bridge between the first record, where we were very like, ‘Oh, we have enough songs for an album,’” Yorgensen said. For the upcoming album, “Like A Damn Dog,” Yorgensen explained that not many more songs were written than are on the track.

“It’s kind of like, just for the record,” they continued. “That’s what it is.”

Sarah and the Sundays released a single on the album, “Cease,” this past March.

“The song I wrote in a moment of despair, which I think is sonically obvious,” Yorgensen said. “I was convinced that I was fully in over my head with music, and I didn't deserve anything we had accomplished, and that I'm never going to be exactly what it is that I want, even though I'll try so hard, I’ll cease.”

Though he doesn’t think this way generally, Yorgensen clarified, songwriting is how he is able to find release for these momentary feelings.

Once Yorgensen gets down the vocals and guitar, the others in the band listen to the track and carry through with the song-making process. Reynolds explains, “We’ll each hear a specific vibe or a part to it, so we’ll all just go ahead and track that.”

Beyond writing the songs, the recording process differed from the last album, where they only had two weeks.

“It was very much like a-song-a-day, like ‘we gotta go, gotta go,’” Chill described. With a longer period of time on “Like A Damn Dog,” he felt a difference in the creative energy at work — they were able to play around with the music, before they sent the song off to David Greenbaum, the producer.

Changes in the music-making process keeps it fresh. “I feel like every album we’ve made has been so vastly different in how it comes together,” Chill said. “And I don't want to speak for everyone, but I really enjoy the newness of it.”

Now over two years in the making, Sarah and the Sundays is ready for their audience to hear the new album, “Like A Damn Dog.” They are coming out with a new single, “Skin and Bone,” on May 3, and the rest of the album is set to release this summer.

“It’s one of those albums where, as of right now, we’re still not tired of any of the songs,” said Lane. “It’s a no-skip album for me.”

With songs that run the gamut from somber to upbeat to humorous, Sarah and the Sundays continues to grow their dedicated audience. The five have opened up paths for creative exploration through finding balance in their respective artistic input and collective vision. For Sarah and the Sundays, being a band is truly a unique life experience.

As Yorgensen put it, “how many people get to be that loud in their lifetime?”

— Staff writer Emma H. Lu can be reached at emma.lu@thecrimson.com.