Release of the Week: Sunny Girls

We talked to Arnau, the "alma mater of the band" to learn more about the band, the wildest punk shows they've been too, and what they have up their sleeve for 2021:

Who is Sunny Girls?

Sunny Girls is a band from Barcelona that was born from a solo project of the singer (Arnau) and later formed as a band. Besides him, we are Albert (guitar), Álvaro (guitar and keyboards), Sergi (keyboards), Sunyol (bass), and Iñaki (drums). We have been active since 2018 and this year we have released our first full-length, Missbehave. We are a very live-oriented band, trying to offer shows full of madness and debauchery. Musically we define ourselves as pop-rock with a punk heart, drinking from a thousand different influences and always with the aim of making danceable songs.

Can you tell us about your new single Cibeles?

Cibeles is a bit of an odd track for us; not only is it a genre we don't usually play but it's the first track we recorded 100% digitally. I had a summer where I listened to a lot of reggaeton, a style I had always considered "inferior" or musically uninteresting, but my change of attitude happened after seeing Yung Beef live, it seemed like the most punk and wildest concert I had ever been to. I started to get interested in the so-called "underground" urban scene in Barcelona in particular and Spain in general, and I found artists like Albany, Soto Asa, or La Zowi doing unthinkable stunts based on these rhythms.

I composed this track with Álvaro, who with his personal project (Ivory.the) was already playing these genres. Instrumentally, the idea was to mix reggaeton with string arrangements and, lyrically, we wrote a song about our hatred of Madrid (a little meme we have among us) and our political dissatisfaction. We thought it wouldn't be honest to talk about "coming from the street" or these clichés of the genre, as it's not our reality. The track has been around since 2019 and has been circulating among our close ones, but we thought the time had come to remaster it and release it to the public so they can enjoy a summer full of dancing.

Can you tell us a little bit about your journey on Spotify and other streaming and download platforms?

We have never been too interested in playing the game of streams and playlists, it always seemed superficial and dishonest, but little by little you realize that it is important to have a good digital strategy, which can be very useful to reach more people. Being an independent band and acting as our own "managers", it's difficult to keep everything in mind and to be constantly aware of these things, which in the end ends up wearing us down. Since we formed Malapata Records, an independent record label between several friends, and since we have been working with iMusician, we have managed to find a balance between not having to be on top of this all day and being able to create a powerful strategy for what we want to achieve. The secret for us has been to do things with time and intention; it's not about uploading stuff to Spotify, it's about knowing where you want to go and what the right path is. In that sense, we're happy to be developing release and distribution strategies that we can easily manage.

What projects do you have for this year?

For the moment, we are going on vacation, and in September we will see how we continue. Without euphemisms, the scene for independent and emerging bands is very complicated and, although now the venues are opening, there are many artists, big, medium and small, who will play before us. We know that in our small local circuit we will be able to play, but obviously we aspire to get out of the city and reach bigger stages. If all goes well, we will release one more single before the end of the year, and I will continue to write songs for the next album. From there, it's a matter of figuring out how we can reach a wider audience, but we're not in a hurry or under pressure. We want to have a good time and make worthwhile music, and we're happy to have made it this far.