INTERVIEW W/ Sunday (1994): "We want to furnish the song beautifully with words"!

It was very far from a Sunday in 1994 when we spoke to the transatlantic trio, in fact it was a Thursday in 2025, but you could be fooled into thinking otherwise. Sunday (1994)’s debut album may have been released last year, but it has a shimmery nostalgia, like a faded figure in an old polaroid. This sound has gained them an enormous following, and with a new EP looming on the horizon, we had to know what their music meant to them.

Sunday (1994)

Our conversation feels like digging through a teenage girl's memory box; they talk of film photography, Vegas and female fronted bands. “We are starting our own little lane” they say when asked where they fit into today's music scene, although they site countless bands that are releasing music now as inspiration from Fontaines D.C to Beach House and especially Amyl and the Sniffers as “there have been a lack of female led bands for…. ever!”. Their excitement about the music being released in 2025 is palpable; Paige Turner chats excitedly about how she discovered Fontaines in 2021 and, when talking to people in the UK, “I’d mention their name to people in the music industry to which they’d say ‘Who?’”. It feels as if you could sit at a cafe and chat until ushered out by someone with a broom and a wet floor sign, soaking in their excitement about the bands they see, the music they listen to, the songs they are yet to release.

They talk of the importance of live shows, stating that “We’d rather play live than release music on streaming platforms if we had to choose”. Paige reminisces fondly about their first London show “it was like a trip; everyone was singing along to the lyrics despite this being the first time we’d played here. The energy was fun”. That is, ultimately, one of the things that has propelled this band towards stardom so quickly, the lyrics that so delicately discuss the complexities of desire, towing the line so beautifully between nostalgia and raw emotion.

“We have a backlog of one liners, things that you overhear on trains for instance that spark something” is how they come up with these lyrics. They build worlds, soaked in glimmering guitar and day-dreamy lyrics that capture an audience’s need to wonder, to see their realities through the hazy air of luxury that Sunday (1994) drape over their songs. “The little bits and bobs that we’ve collected, we dress aesthetically. We want to furnish the song beautifully with words” Lee Newell explains.

This ties in to their aesthetic as a band. “We only use film, and only shoot in black and white because we draw inspiration from stylized films” they say, talking passionately about Sofia Coppola, Ken Loach and Scorsese as inspirations behind the bands image. “We are inspired by such a hodgepodge of things” they admit, a word that quite neatly sums them up as a band, a collection of different time periods, different bands, different lives.

They talk finally of their hope for the future. Lee tells of a BBC archive video that he was watching on YouTube “it was from 1994, about these kids picking up their first car, but they also talked about the music they were really into”. He considers that “maybe, subconsciously, that was why we chose the year 1994, that sense of optimism, expressed through music”.

They are doing a pretty good job at recreating that sense of optimism, making music that is constantly being compared to monumental 90s bands like The Sundays and The Cranberries, and with a new EP out soon, their sound is only getting bigger. In 100 years, they’re the kind of band that will be found, burned onto a CD in a teenage girl's memory box, their music floating around like an old friend, but in 2025 they are creating their own lane, one that we can’t wait to see more of.

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