AUSTIN, TEXAS

Inspired Adulting

Sun June has finally grown up. When founders and primary songwriters Laura Colwell and Stephen Salisbury first met, they were working in Terrence Malick’s editing office and began taking advantage of their boss’ absences to use the space as a practice studio. “The hours were really long,” says the duo of their former jobs. “Our first collaboration was an office goof, where we rewrote the Pixies’ ‘Where Is My Mind?’ as ‘Where Is My Life?’ Management was not impressed.” At the time, they were going by the name JEFF and writing songs that they describe as “cute” or “fun,” rather than an embodiment of the unpolished and emotionally vulnerable vibe that they aspired to.

That was back in 2014. But over the course of the next two years, the informal side project grew into a quintet featuring multi-instrumentalists Michael Bain, Justin Harris and Sarah Schultz. By fall of 2016, they’d written and demoed 10 songs for their first album, the recently released Years, and this year, they performed for the first time at SXSW.

With a full-length LP in the works, the band had long stopped being a joke, so a rebrand was in order. “It took us a long time to take ourselves seriously,” says Colwell, explaining that, as a group, they needed to go through a certain maturation process to gain credibility. “[Changing our name to] Sun June instead of JEFF was the first step. We imagined our music could grow and evolve better under the new name.”

Years—which debuted in June on Keeled Scales— has a mix of warm, poppy, coffee-shop-ready tunes, like its first single “Young,” and ethereal songs (“Discotheque”) reminiscent of Zero 7’s ubiquitous 2001 track “In the Waiting Line.”

“Vocally, I can say I decided to allow myself to not always try and sound ‘pretty’ and to go for uncomfortable ranges,” says Colwell. “The songs on the album vary in range for me, and that was something I always was scared of. But sometimes, that’s exactly what a song needs.” She continues, “We want to gravitate toward the things that are harder for us to do, and we always want to say, ‘This could be better.’ At the same time, we want to be more comfortable sharing where we are.”