Sundays & Cybele

A pleasant surprise today as longtime favorites Sundays & Cybele announce (and release) a new album. The band, long lingering in the stables of Guruguru Brain and Beyond Beyond is Beyond (RIP) shift to Chicago psych outpost Eye Vybe Records. The label has a long history with excellent works from the Japanese underground, picking up a litany of releases from Acid Mothers Temple and classic reissues from the likes of Shin Otowa alongside US outsiders like Matt Lajoie and SIP. The band follows on their 2018 album, a more atmospheric offering in their catalog, with a record that finds them locked into a humid ‘60s drip. Shades of Jacks, Fugs, and The Mothers bubble underneath the record, but there’s something new that the band brings to the speakers this time around, a lightness and sense of space that’s often been drowned in fuzz in their past releases.

Dabbling with the German strain of prog, the band’s past had a heaviness that was often dunked in Düül, but now the band lets strums, jazz reverberations, and a winking experimentation lead the way. Where some of their contemporaries seemed to know exactly the sounds they were excavating, sometimes Sundays felt like they were still figuring it out, but that feeling is wiped clear on Tsuboouchi. It’s the record that they’ve been working to wrangle for quite a few years. The eclecticism and pop-forward approach suits them, feeling like this could easily slip between the overcast psych-pop of Jacco Gardner, Badge Époque Ensemble, Wax Machine, or Kikagaku Moyo’s swan song from last year. This one has the potential to slip away among the brightly colored clouds of Eye Vybe’s ocular assault, but don’t let the yoga-glow guise on the cover fool you, the is a real one, and a record that should inhabit your speakers immediately and often.

Support the artist. Buy it HERE.