Sun Club is an experimental indie pop project based out of Baltimore Maryland, and has received a lot of hype over the past few weeks from the release of their first full length album The Dongo Durango. WVAU DJ and music staffer Matt Reise got to meet with band members Devin and Cory behind the scenes after their latest performance at the 9:30 club.

Matt: So Sun Club has a really long history, right?

Devin: Yeah, it goes way back! So me and Shane are brothers, and Mikey was our next-door neighbor and we became best friends with him. When we were all around 10 or 11, we decided we wanted to be in a band and started picking up instruments and just playing around. We called ourselves Pandemonium, and when we were in like 10^th grade Cory rolled around, and then two years later we found Adam. I feel like once all 5 of us were together, Sun Club was really born. Pandemonium is kind of viewed as a totally separate project—like something leading up to this. But Sun Club was really formed in 2012.

Matt: Did you guys start touring after the inception of Sun Club, or did you tour at all before that?

Devin: *laughs* We actually started touring back in 2011, we did this little mini tour at these tiny venues, it was pretty bad.

Cory: It‰’s almost kind of embarrassing to look back, our parents were so involved in the band back then. They would come to a lot of our shows, they were really invested in what we were doing. For some reason they would only let me or Devin drive our cars to shows and stuff. A few of our friends helped out too.

Devin: Once Adam joined the band in 2012, we really started TOURING touring. Like 6 weeks of not talking to anybody but each other kind of touring. Then the year after that we all had finished school and really started doing it.

Matt: Speaking of touring, can you guys tell me about your van, Booty?

Devin: Oh boy. Good times with Booty, I feel like booty had been trying to kill us for a while. This one time we were all on the New Jersey turnpike and our tire popped and it somehow bent the exhaust pipe back up into the car. So as we were driving it was, like, spewing carbon monoxide into the car, pretty much slowly poisoning us.

Corey: Then one day the car started smoking, so we pulled over and went to grab coffee or something, but when we got back it was smoking like crazy and on fire! We had to call the fire department and stuff. That was an intense day, our manager had to come and pick us up and take us to the show.

Matt: Woah, that‰’s rough. How did you guys meet bands like FIDLAR and Alvvays?

Devin: Well we would just get put on shows with these bands and have to meet them afterwards. Alvvays had the same booking agency as us so we just kind of got paired with them. And then FIDLAR was just booked the same night here at the 9:30 club with us a while back. They were really cool though, it would be awesome to tour with them again in the future. Recently, though, we‰’ve become really good friends with the Districts! We‰’ve been touring with them for five weeks, and we just have so much in common with them—same age, same sense of humor… same sense of confusion about what‰’s going on…

*both laugh*

Matt: So lets talk about your new album. Why did you name it the Dongo Durango? That‰’s the name of the shortest song on the album by far, it‰’s just an itty bitty clip.

Devin: The Dongo Durango has become this term we use, it‰’s interchangeable with a lot of things. It could be the F-word, an adjective, noun, verb, you know. Like “What are you doing today?‰” “Oh, you know, the Dongo Durango‰Û.

Corey: Part of the importance of the Dongo Durango is just that it came out of nowhere. It was one of those things where someone just said it, and it just felt right. It‰’s very in the moment. That‰’s how a lot of our songs get named.

Matt: The Dongo Durango was dropped just a few days ago, what were you guys feeling on that day? Like nerves, excitement..?

Devin: It‰’s been a slow process, the album has been available online since like two or three weeks ago. And then worldwide it became physically available two days ago. We‰’re just so happy to have it out, because it‰’s been recorded for a while now.

Corey: Yeah, we actually recorded it probably around October last year, so we‰’re ready for it to be out. We‰’re at that point now where we are really focused on our next album. We don‰’t want to stay too focused on just one record.

Matt: So you‰’ve already started thinking about another album?

Corey: Oh, definitely! I mean, half of our set tonight was new songs. Hopefully we‰’ll tour a bunch off this new album and write some songs, then after a few months we‰’ll go and record the next stuff and wait another year for that to be processed. I feel pretty good about this next one, we‰’re so anxious just being locked up in a van for so long. We kind of feel that we should be productive and not just stare at the walls, so that‰’s when we write the new stuff. I‰’m really excited about it, our new stuff is pretty weird. It‰’s gonna be really cool.