Artist Profile: Star’s Revenge

Star’s Revenge, the budding side project of Emily Green (Geese) and Olive Faber (Sunflower Bean), has served not only as an outlet to but also an additional expression of the expanding creative thatcheries of its founders in the years since its creation, but, now, with their decision to expand the project into a full-band context, it has taken on a markedly different sonic outlook, all while maintaining the central mission of exploration and ongoing creative activity that led to its birth.

Growing up under similar musical and geographical contexts, it seems as though Emily and Olive were always meant to work together creatively in some capacity.

As a child, Olive was first exposed to music through her father, who would play classic rock constantly around the house, continuously quizzing his daughter on her knowledge of the bands who had created whatever songs would play. While her first experiences with an instrument came with a saxophone in her school band, it was when her brother got a drum set that things truly clicked for the first time.

As a high schooler, Olive then got an opportunity to begin gigging with the band Turnip King, , who was playing shows in the underground NYC scene, when their drummer (Christian Billard) departed for college. Olive began travelling into the city three or four nights a week, taking late-night trains with her bandmates. However, when Christian returned and rejoined the band, Olive and Turnip King’s bassist (Nick Kivien) had already begun working on songs together, and from that creative partnership Sunflower Bean was born.

Also coming to musical maturity also in the underground NYC scene, and having known her Geese bandmates since they were in kindergarten, Emily was deeply familiar with the gifts and the constraints of creative collaboration in a group setting, and most of her musical education was conducted in the context of full bands.

Therefore, shortly after the pair had first met when they were opening at the same show, it seemed to be almost a natural conclusion that, given their commonalities and their creative desires, they should work together.

“[Sunflower Bean] was opening for Peach Pit,” said Olive, “There was an after party in New York, and I invited Emily to come. I think we were both overstimulated, not really enjoying the party. So we were just standing outside talking, and we were like, ‘We should start a band’... It happened very naturally.”

They began holding joint recording sessions once a week, and, with each session, they would build upon the last track they made. Their track “heaven” was the first thing they recorded. They then sampled that track to make “text message breakup” and continued their creative process from there. As members of larger projects with their own demands, the formation of Star’s Revenge granted them not only the opportunity to enter with a clean slate sonically but also to take on expanded roles that their usual projects may not have afforded them. Therefore, while the duo was not formed with a specific intention in regards to the sound they wanted to pursue, it was formed with the aim to create freely, bucking any traditions or “rules” that had been imposed upon them within the context of their bands.

“I feel like, at that point, we'd both been very embroiled in our own other bands that had… not rules, because rules can always be broken, but [groups that are] established enough that there are things that the band does,” said Emily, “I guess it's easier to just do whatever the f*ck you want when you're starting a new project.”

For Olive, Star’s Revenge’s guiding light was based around the freedom it provided her and Emily. As long as it felt good, that meant that they were doing the right thing.

“We felt energy in the spark in the partnership and in the movement. It might sound stupid, but [there was always] the question of ‘Does it feel good?’ And, if so, keep going. I think, in other situations, that can kind of get lost, but with Star's I think the guiding light is: Are we having fun? Does this feel good?”

From this initial spark came their first, self-titled album: a project that fixated upon some of the vaporwave leanings that Olive and Emily were experiencing at the time and saw both artists take on new roles in the creative process that they were previously unaccustomed to.

Yet that first album, as evidenced by the new direction they’ve taken with their most recent single “Me and My Friends”, represented just the first transitory steps that the duo took toward finding their conjoined sound. 

Since that time, they have built out a full band, transplanting their songwriting from the context of the computer and its constraints to a more performance-oriented setting, and the limitations that come that the process has entailed have had a profound effect on their sound.

Combining some of the cleaner, classic rock roots of both Emily and Olive, Star’s Revenge’s new sonic direction represents a stark departure from the sound that their main projects, Geese and Sunflower Bean, pursue, and this is, in some ways, entirely intentional. At the same time, however, it also simply represents a continuation of the M.O. of exploration under which Star’s Revenge came to life.

While they have no immediate release plans, there is another Star’s Revenge album in the works, and, no matter what ultimate form it takes on, one thing is certain; it will be an undeniable representation of the ever-expanding tastes of its founders.

“I feel like that first record was sort of the process of Star’s becoming a band,” said Emily, “and now we are making a bit more of a decision what kind of band we want to be.”