Sunflower Bean Bring the Fury on ‘Teach Me to Be Bad’

[Rolling Stone]

Track is off upcoming EP Shake, which is paired with a short film

By Angie Martoccio

Sunflower Bean have dropped the scorching new single “Teach Me to Be Bad” off their upcoming EP Shake.

“I don’t even know your name,” Julia Cumming sings in the opening lines across a searing riff. “But I love you all the same.” According to the band, the track is about “a chance meeting with a special person can change your life forever. It can be exhilarating and frightening to fall madly for someone you barely know.”

As with the title track, “Teach Me to Be Bad” is paired with a video. Both clips for “Shake” and “Teach Me to Be Bad” are part of Shake, a 14-minute short film the band made, with tracks representing the natural elements earth, wind, water, fire, and metal. (While “Shake” represented earth, it’s safe to assume that “Teach Me to Be Bad” symbolizes fire.)

The band will premiere Shake at New York’s Roxy Cinema on Sept. 25 — participating in a Q&A with the director Isaac Roberts — before a screening of the 1975 Italian cult film Deep Red. 

Shake, the EP, arrives on Sept. 27 via Lucky Number. The band detailed the release last month, explaining that it harks back to the brief metal phase they went through following their formation in 2013. 

“Shake was inspired by our first years as a DIY band, the spirit that birthed us and gave us the chance to have this enduring journey together,” they said. “We wrote, recorded, engineered, and produced these songs so nothing was filtered through anyone else’s idea of us. We always felt like rock & roll was a feeling, not a sound. But sometimes, there is no subverting it or explaining it. We’re now offering it exactly as it occurred to us.”

Sunflower Bean will play a handful of shows this fall, kicking off at Brooklyn’s Baby’s All Right on Oct. 2. They’ll hit Los Angeles (Oct. 9 at Zebulon), Chicago (Oct. 12 at the Empty Bottle), before wrapping at Empire Control Room in Austin, Texas on Nov. 16.