All Punked Up caught up with Sun Arcana, an alt rock band hailing from Essex, UK to talk tour life, inspirations and everything in between.
Back in November, the band put out their latest EP, Just Another Dream Away from Easy Life Records and they’ve recently released a music video for EP track, “Through the Night”.
Check Sun Arcana out on Instagram and Spotify.
You toured with The Maine back in February – how was that experience? Any stand out moments?
The tour was insanely good!! We all obviously had the time of our lives as it’s the biggest scale one we’ve done to date. It was so humbling to be performing on such massive stages in some really historic venues (like Kentish Town Forum, The O2 Ritz), a real dream for us and our kind of performance. There are so many stand out moments for us all but the best highlights were probably just every time we got to experience our fans coming through for us, mainly in the major cities like Manchester and London, but it was just such a special feeling having crowds like that singing our songs and coming to find us after each show. We would have people in the crowd just after doors there for us and that was so unbelievably amazing. Further into the tour that was clearly growing through The Maine’s fanbase and that taste literally stuck with us as a huge highlight straight away.
For newcomers, how would you describe Sun Arcana’s sound and who are your main inspirations?
As a collective, it’s very hard to name our influences as we have so many different inspirations behind us as individuals from all sorts of backgrounds. Naming a few of our favourite bands would be; Muse, Radiohead, Bring Me The Horizon and Blink 182, and we will always seem to take inspiration from them. Our sound is probably best described as pop rock, at the moment at least, but there’s always elements of alternative rock, punk rock, metal and obviously pop music. We really just want to be able to produce a perfectly palatable mixture of music genres that grows to only be described as ‘Sun Arcana’, and Tom’s voice is so perfect for that.
What’s the story behind the band name and how did the band first come together?
So, the band formed in late 2015 when Tom started a fresh project in music roping in friends of friends from Essex, drummer Ryan Daniels and guitarist Harry Acreman. Then, the university friend of Harry and Tom, Jules Wildblood was brought in as the bassist shortly after. Tom’s idea for the name ‘Sun Arcana’ came from a tarot card. And is representative of optimism.
You released your EP, Just Another Dream Away, at the end of last year – what would you say are the themes behind it?
Yeah we did! We’re so proud of that EP. For us, we wanted to open up more than we had ever done in our songs before for the Just Another Dream Away EP. It was a different approach for all of us as we exposed our own deep feelings to one another in order to get real meaning behind these songs. We’d all had a particularly frustrating year and had serious struggles with personal issues. So, the best thing to do was to channel that into our music and lyric writing! The themes would probably have to be a mixture of, self acceptance, anxiety, coming to terms with loss. Loads really! But mainly as a whole it focuses on owning your faults, self acceptance, dealing with loss and learning to be better knowing that it’s okay to be imperfect.
What’s on the (tarot) cards for the band’s future plans?
2020 has started off as a great year for us as a band. We were given an incredible opportunity in supporting The Maine and that brought a wealth of good times that we will cherish forever. The year had been shaping up well, and we’re still optimistic that we can achieve more this year than we have done in previous years. We’re working harder than ever to produce some incredible things for our fans and our next release and can’t wait to share it with you all. We, like many others have sadly had some of those release and tour plans temporarily put on hold in the midst of the current and upsetting situation that the world is facing. Every certainty that we had is unfortunately no longer there, like it is for everyone at this moment, but we are dealing with it positively and productively and promise to bounce back with the rest of the world when it is possible and safe to do so. In the meantime, we do have some small treats in the pipeline.
Listen to “Through The Night”, here:
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