Photo courtesy of Burning Sister
Denver low-end duo Burning Sister present their latest single, “Sunspots,” their first new track following their 2025 albumGhosts.
The seven-minute epic is psychedelic stoner groove at its finest.
“To me, ‘Sunpots’ is the sound of summer,” says bassist, vocalist, and synth player Steve Miller. “Immediately after coming up with the initial riff, I was instantly transported back in time to my youth and lazy days of hanging out with friends and getting our heads right. I leaned into that feeling, and the rest of the song almost immediately fell into place. It’s a throwback to the days of not having a care in the world, hanging out under the sun, and voraciously consuming music, art, and shared experiences with good friends.”
We chatted with the band further about the new track,
What inspired you to flash back on your youth and carefree days for this song? Why is that so needed in this day and age?
Initially we didn’t sit down and decide, “Hey! Let’s write a tune about the good ol’ days,” or anything like that. That came a little later as we were hammering the song into shape. Overall, “Sunspots” is a bit more “upbeat” or even “prettier” than most of the tunes that we’ve written in the past, but when we started jamming on it a bit more we started to let things fall apart in the middle of the song as some sort of bridge section and I’d loop some bits and just really try to destroy things for a little while.
Alison picked up on it right away and she’d really deconstruct her drums until it sounds like her patterns are disintegrating but still maintaining some sort of forward momentum. We’d let things get pretty dissonant and uncomfortable before reeling the bass and drums back in and having them coalesce again. It kind of reminded me of some (every) Sonic Youth tunes like “Total Trash” or “Catholic Block” where the songs devolve into a sonic mess before coming back to together. For me, anyway, it sort of just brought me back to my youth and exploring the world and discovering new music with friends and just devouring the noise rock and shoegaze bands that we were all getting heady with at the time. There was a park outside of Detroit where we used to gather after school and on weekends and the song brought me right back there and then the rest of the song kind of solidified around that.
It’s great to get out of your head for a while. Going back to those early days I was fortunate to not have to worry about things too much, whereas today it’s a totally different thing. The world is a heavier place than it needs to be right now and I’m raising a little guy and we have to worry about wars, justice, rising costs of living, inequality, AI, and whatever else is around the corner. All these things were probably on our parents’ minds—and ours too to a certain degree, but it just wasn’t a pressing, immediate concern of ours. Music has always been an escape for me as a fan, and even more so that I’m making music. It’s a great escape.
Do you have other songs in the works or plans for an EP or album soon?
Yeah, we recently went into the studio and banged out four new songs that we had started working on almost immediately after releasing our last album, Ghosts. Our guitarist moved across the country, and we were left with a bunch of tunes that we were working on. I started splitting my bass signal into an octave up channel and into three different amps, and we found that with a little tweaking, most of the material could work as a drum and bass two-piece. The new songs are just us becoming more comfortable with the gear and exploring the possibilities of sound. So yeah, we have a few new songs, and we have a tune in the archives that we think would work well with the batch that we just recorded. We just have to dust it off and get back in the studio, and we should be releasing a new album in the near future.
What direction can we expect from the new stuff, and what has been inspiring you lately?
We’ve been following the gear really and exploring what we can do with a couple of ABY boxes, octave up bass, and a few amps. The struggle has been getting the octave up bass to sound “natural.” With distortion and fuzz it’s usually a bit easier, but I’ve finally found a way to coax some killer “clean” and overdriven sound out of the amps. So, we actually have some tunes that are a bit more mellow like some latter-day Dead Meadow. But overall, there’s more of a shoegaze or even slowcore influence on this particular batch of tunes.
When Nathan, our guitarist, moved away I decided to pick up the guitar and decided that the band would continue even if we just released home recordings. Progress on guitar is slow—I don’t think we’ll be releasing a “guitar” album any time soon, but it is inspiring and has really help with composing. I’ll play something and be like, “How can I translate this to bass?” or “Can I get the same or similar sounds out of that octave up channel?”
During any waking hours in our, house music is always on. We’re still listening to a lot of slowcore stuff like Low or Codeine, and I was a little resistant to some of the newer shoegaze bands, but TAGABOW has been in constant rotation. The new Neurosis album came out of nowhere, and I’ve been diggin’ that as well. Also Big/Brave’s take on heavy music is refreshing and inspiring.
Do you have anythingelse you want to announce or promote, like upcoming shows, etc.?
We have a few upcoming shows that we are super stoked for—We’ll be playing with Seattle’s Witch Ripper on June 2 at The Crypt in Denver with another killer bass and drum band called Probes. On June 30, we’ll be at Bar 404 with Bong Wizard and our buds in Hashtronaut. We’ll also be making a trip to Rapid City on July 18 to play a show curated by Left of the Dial Radio at Lost Cabin Brewing. . It’ll be our second consecutive year heading to Rapid City, and they really turn it up and know how to have a good time.
