Artist Profile: Sunsick Daisy

Photo Credit: neasansucks

Sunsick Daisy, the Adelaide-based, shoegaze and dream-pop influenced rock band, was originally formed from the teenage creative yearnings of its founding members, Kane Gabell and Sarah Grainger. But it has since blossomed into an energetic and surprisingly free affair– one that is capable of achieving the rare balancing act between a continuously evolving sound and a central sonic imprint and identity. 

For Gabell, this sonic identity stretches well beyond even the first time he picked up a guitar. Both his parents– and many members of his extended family– were musicians around Southern Australia in the ‘90s. Family gatherings for him, growing up, were soundtracked by acts like The Clash and Joy Division. 

It wasn’t until he saw the film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and first heard David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” featured within the movie, that he truly had the desire to pick up the guitar. But as his interest in the instrument grew, a weightier, more immense sound caught his ear: the all-collapsing boundaries and shimmering waves of shoegaze. He quickly fell in love with local groups like Sweater Curse and Horror My Friend, and his own songwriting initially followed suit with their subdued styles.

“I think for me it was just how I think how massive everything sounded…. for a kid it was like, ‘Oh, this is f*cking heavenly or something, you know?’ [laughs]. That's not the stuff I'm hearing around or hearing on the radio, whatever else people my age were listening to at the time. So for me, it was just like a whole other world that I felt like I was discovering.”

Once he reached secondary school, his sister, who was a musician in her own right, convinced him to attend a songwriting workshop. He had mostly played music in isolation to this point, but he ultimately relented to her advice. At that workshop, he met Grainger, and the rest of the original lineup of Sunsick Daisy, for the first time.

The first song they wrote and recorded was 2022’s “Someone Like You”.

That song became one of five finalists for Triple J’s Unearthed High competition. All of the sudden, an unimaginable amount of doors had opened for the band members, many of whom were no older than 16 at the time.

As the industry can often work, the pressure was immediately laid on to release their first EP. Gabell and Grainger began to hammer out a true creative workflow, with Gabell contributing most of the unconventional guitar licks and instrumental arrangements while Grainger laid down melodies and lyrics. Combined with their school duties and frequent live shows, their first years as a band were among their most arduous.

The work that emerged from it, 2023’s Breathe In… Breathe Out, is stunning in its clarity, calling out eager refrains from the depths of its seamless five-track run.

But by the time that project was released and they began to focus on their second EP, Yonder, both Gabell and Grainger had graduated school, freeing them up to truly devote their energy to making the second project what they intended and envisioned creatively.

“I think you can hear a massive change in maturity, obviously, if you compare both those EPs, purely because of the fact we also were going into young adulthood and things expanded… Sarah started playing guitar rather than just singing, so we had a lot more textures to work with. We had a lot more to play around with.”

Yonder, in its own right, is an expansion upon what was clearly attempted in its earlier forms on Breathe In… Breathe Out. From the soaring leads and riffs of “Hideaway” to the slow-burn tension of “Yonder, Young Wonder”, the EP brings some of the Oasis and Brit-Pop-tinged patterns from their earlier releases to the forefront— all while maintaining a centrality of sound that unites the project in its bold-faced complexity.

While the tracks jump from one sonic motif to another, showcasing the versatility of both Gabell and Grainger’s creative touch, they are all unique, in some way, to Sunsick Daisy. Something about the refined and youthful energy, the enigma that bursts forth from the band’s shoegaze roots, is almost instantaneously recognizable in every single one of their tracks.

“We see ourselves as a rock band with shoegaze influences, so there's always going to be that sound. In that regard, we do at the same time have a sound that we go for, I think… But we kind of started figuring out ways to jump from a pop song to a rock song to a shoegaze song, all whilst making it sound like it's the same band doing it.”

Now, as the band continues to work on their debut album, those constraints that were placed upon them by the pressure that mounted in the early days of the band’s history have been lifted. With a new bassist in Ella Phillips, their live shows have taken on a wilder and more massive complexion as well, and Gabell knows that these combined flexibilities and evolutions will be more present than ever in Sunsick Daisy’s first long-form release.

“I think with now four years of experience under our belt, we're just really kind of honing in on, well, what is Sunsick Daisy actually?  What's our sound? And what can we aim for?...  I'm having a lot of fun because with an album, we have a lot more range artistically to work with…. And it's kind of going anywhere, like a super kind of psychedelic shoegazy song to a country song to a rock song. It can kind of go anywhere. And that's very exciting.”