For teenagers in New York, rock music is kind of nerdy, Sunflower Bean drummer Jacob Faber said.
“Rock music is pretty out of the public eye,” he said. “Not only is it unpopular. It’s like extremely uncool.”
Sunflower Bean is a neo-psych rock trio made up of Faber, vocalist and guitarist Nick Kivlen and vocalist and bassist Julia Cumming.
The three released their debut album “Human Ceremony” in February and will perform Thursday at the Bishop.
Faber and Kivlen grew up in Long Island, and Cumming grew up in East Village, where they said most of their peers were listening to electronic music.
“I got shown rock music by my parents,” Kivlen said. “They bought me a bunch of CDs when I was really young.”
Cumming said all three musicians were introduced to classic rock by their parents, and this style of music is the band’s biggest influence.
It also inspired them to bring a more classic-rock sensible sound to the New York music scene, she said.
“There’s a lot of shoegaze and a lot of noise, and that’s great in its own right, but we kind of wanted to change it up,” she said.
Kivlen and Faber starting jamming together as a garage rock duo before adding Cumming, Kivlen said.
Once she joined and the three practiced together daily, the band refined its sound to its current state, which Kivlen said is exemplified in the track “Bread” on Sunflower Bean’s last EP.
“That kind of shows the direction that we started to head with Julia just a bit,” he said.
Kivlen said he and Faber learned a lot about band dynamics by watching Brooklyn bands Dive and Total Slacker.
“Those two bands are probably the biggest influence on us, I think, and then a thousand classic rock bands obviously,” he said.
Sunflower Bean tries to play as many venues as they can in New York, Faber said.
“We try to play a lot of shows for all ages,” Cumming said. “That’s kind of important to us.”
Part of the reason for this is that none of the band members are 21 years old yet, so they don’t want to exclude their age group from seeing the shows, Cumming said.
Still, she said all-ages venues can be crazy and fun in their own way.
Even though they are still young musicians, Sunflower Bean is touring the country.
“If you think that you have a chance at something, or you think that you might be on to something, you should just go for it with everything you have,” Cumming said. “That’s kind of what we do.”
