Late last summer, Nick Kivlen was at home in the Hollywood Hills, trying to figure out what to do with all the music he’d been making. The Sunflower Bean guitarist had spent the past two months writing and recording dozens of new songs, painstakingly tracking every instrument and vocal part on his own. The only thing missing was a set of drums, and a place to bang on them without bothering anyone.
“Eventually, I was just like, ‘I’m going to go to my neighbor’s house, borrow his kit, and take it to Julia’s,’” Kivlen, 31, recalls. “‘Even if it sounds bad, it’ll be done.’”
That’s how he finished Addicted to the Sunset, the mellow, mindful solo debut he self-released on July 7. The results don’t sound bad at all — they sound, in fact, like a highly gifted musician coming into his own and exploring a new side to his creativity, in the time-honored tradition of rock sidemen taking unexpected solo detours.
The “Julia” in whose relatively soundproof home he ended up recording those drum parts is Julia Cumming, the lead singer and bassist he’s played with for more than a decade in Sunflower Bean. Together with drummer Olive Faber, they spent those years building a devoted live following, a catalog full of adventurous rock & roll, and a sterling reputation as leading lights of the New York indie scene. But Kivlen, who grew up on Long Island, began to feel jaded with the city as his twenties drew to an end.
“In New York, I felt like a lot of the music culture, especially around 2022, 2023, was going out to DJ sets, staying up ’til four in the morning,” he says. “I was there my entire life. I never went to college. I never got away from home.”
After spending time in Van Nuys recording Sunflower Bean’s fourth LP, Mortal Primetime, he knew it was time for a change. Kivlen and his girlfriend of five years ended up moving into the apartment where they still live, “in a really cute little five-unit building that looks like a motel.” Like countless East Coasters before him, he loves the L.A. weather and the easy access to nature — “even just having a little patio to hang out on with trees and bushes and all that,” he says. “And then, it was also just wanting to expand my musical horizons and shuffle the deck a little bit.”
He started making Addicted to the Sunset immediately after Sunflower Bean finished their North American tour dates for Mortal Primetime last summer. The plan, he notes, was always for the band to take a year off after that. They played their only show of 2026 at Milwaukee’s Summerfest last week, and have otherwise been busy with separate projects that include Cumming’s own excellent solo debut, released this spring on Partisan Records.
For Kivlen, the down time was a chance to find out what a solo record from him might sound like. He has always written, including for the band, where he regularly sings on a handful of songs per album. But being part of Sunflower Bean means that he naturally yields the spotlight most of the time. “I would have a song where I sang the demo, and then when Julia would show up to the studio and sing it, I would just be like, ‘OK, well, you crushed it,’” he says without any rancor toward his longtime friend and bandmate. “We all have our different strengths, and I’ve learned to make my vocals work, but I’m not the kind of singer that is going to be top-lining big songs.”
In the meantime, he’d built up a large archive of solo recordings that went unheard by the public. “I would say that less than one percent of the music I work on comes out,” he says. “I made tons of homemade albums that will never be released. But I knew that this was going to be the one.”
The first song he wrote for Addicted to the Sunset was “Anywhere in Time and Space,” a far-out psych-rock ballad that he sees as “the blueprint” for the rest of the album.
“I was really sick of drum machines and spliced loops,” he says. “So I recorded the song by just doing an acoustic guitar to a click, and then I built up all these different layers of practical percussion, whether it was sticks, rocks, scissors, rubber bands, rice, cups, pots and pans… All this homemade percussion. I threw a bunch of reverb all over it and all of a sudden it was sounding very Phil Spector, Beach Boys.”
Another big influence on that song, and the album as a whole, was Jimi Hendrix, whose spirit echoes through Kivlen’s spectacular guitar solos and subtly experimental sound design. Kivlen also took inspiration from some of the one-man-band projects he listened to in high school, from Tame Impala to Unknown Mortal Orchestra to Mac DeMarco. “I think they all probably had a lot nicer gear than me, though,” he says wryly.
Lyrically, these 10 songs are suffused with a bittersweet feeling of nostalgia for early adulthood, as heard on the album’s title track. “I’m yearning for a time when I was younger and more hopeful,” he says. “I feel like that’s the theme of the record, is being wistful for the time when I felt like there was this whole world of possibility in my life.”
He thinks back to the early days of his career with Cumming and Faber, when Rolling Stone named them “NYC’s coolest young rock band,” and the ways the world has changed since then. “The first Sunflower Bean album, we were working on it when Trump announced he was running, and then the entire first half of our career was during his presidency,” he says. A few years later, they campaigned hard for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 presidential primary as they worked on their third album, Headful of Sugar. “We did those two shows with Bernie, and then a week later, the pandemic happened…. I still want to find the way forward. But I am nostalgic for the time when I was 20 and everything was brand-new and malleable.”
For now, he’s enjoying disconnecting from the music business for a while. In addition to self-recording and self-producing Addicted to the Sunset in the very same living room where he’s set up the Zoom for this interview, he chose to self-release it. “I didn’t even try to get a record deal,” he says. “I wanted to try to do it completely DIY… That, to me, is a more fun option.” (He also recently finished a stint playing guitar in avant-garde star Yves Tumor’s backing band.)
As for Sunflower Bean, he assures me they’ll be back in action together soon enough. “We’re pretty dedicated to the idea that we’re going to be a legacy band, for better or for worse,” Kivlen says, echoing Cumming’s recent comment that she can see them “making records together when we’re in our seventies.”
“I hope that one day, we make a truly awful record,” Kivlen continues, laughing. “I feel like that’s almost like an artistic achievement. Once you’re able to make a truly bafflingly bad album, that’s when you know you’re a legend.”
