Premiere: “Lover Knows” by Steady Sun
A tender song of escape from the Brooklyn band’s self-produced album, Flora
Brooklyn band Steady Sun is made up of quite a few passionate music nerds. Frontman Dylan Nowik met drummer Andrew Emge at NYU while they both pursued music studies, while fellow NYU alum and bassist Danny Rose owns his own recording studio in Greenpoint. Add Slack Barrett on keys and Pete Victor-Gasper on guitar, and you’ve got a rock band that’s more self-sufficient than most. The production is especially honed on their sophomore album Flora, done by Nowik himself and engineered and mixed with the help of his bandmates.
A standout from the album that also serves as a great intro to the band is “Lover Knows,” which is, on the surface, a tender tune—but boils with tension throughout, manifesting in extended instrumental sections. By stretching the musical “rules” of traditional key signatures, the mellow yet unsettling song worms its way into your ear with its particularity.
“Lyrically, I was writing about my desire to escape the urban environment and be somewhere more natural—that natural place was the ‘Lover’—but, then again, it wasn’t supposed to be all about a physical space. More a general return to a state of nature, in location, in love, passion, etc,” Nowik tells CH about the song. The accompanying music video, directed by Zach Terry and premiering on CH, shifts between shots of the band and modern dancers. The latter move their bodies to projection-mapped images of nature like fire and clouds, but the artificially saturated range of colors make it feel less idyllic, more unsettling. Nowik jams on a small backpacker guitar; “It just has a really janky rattly shoebox-kind of sound that I gravitate toward,” he says.
Stream Flora in its entirety via Bandcamp, where it’s also available for digital purchase; it’s not yet available in physical form. If you like what you hear, you can catch them live at The Bowery Electric tomorrow night.
Images courtesy of Steady Sun
