Band Spotlight: Fuzzy Sun

By now, festival season is just over the horizon and it is not uncommon to see a new wave of acts hitting the road to showcase their material. Indie five-piece Fuzzy Sun are no anomaly to this. Having recently played a string of European dates in February, the band were set to continue their momentum with a headline UK tour in May and a corresponding number of new releases.  With the implementation of a nationwide lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, many of the band’s plans have been put on hold indefinitely. We spoke to frontman Kyle Ross to gain a greater insight into what life is like as a band in lockdown. S] Firstly, how are you coping with all of this? Not too bad to be honest, I’m just bored. I just don’t know how long it’s going to go on for, that’s the thing lingering in my head, I just want to know when it’s gonna stop. S] You guys were all set to go on a headline UK tour in May, what’s happening with that now? ‘The tour is hopefully getting rearranged and we hope to have that sorted for September, it’s really frustrating, but I suppose it’s better than not being able to play at all’ ‘With the new releases coming out, we were hoping to build momentum before the tour, but to be honest with you we have an absolute shedload of songs, all written and demoed, so it’s just a case of putting those out and hopefully getting a nice push from them.’ ‘This does mean we can release more music later on in the year and tie it in with the next tour in September, so its swings and roundabouts, we just have to keep writing. S] With the summer coming up, this would have been the perfect chance for you to do some festivals, have you had any news about that? ‘We didn’t have a lot of festival bookings unfortunately, but with everything getting cancelled it hasn’t really affected us too much. ‘We’re awaiting confirmation on a few later on in the year that we haven’t announced yet, they’re really cool festivals as well so fingers crossed that we can still play them.’ S] I’ve noticed you have been very active on your social media as of late, how else have you been keeping busy? We’ve been able to keep quite busy to be honest, we did an isolation gig for ‘Jimmy’s Live’ over on their Instagram page and I’ll probably do a few live acoustic sets soon.’ ‘Also, we’ve been working on song covers together that our followers have suggested, so that’s all been good fun.’ ‘It’s allowed us to get some music videos edited too.’ ‘Most days I’ve just been getting up and sitting with my guitar to write new music and correct pre-existing music and making it perfect, we’re hoping to maybe do some collabs with other bands at some point.’ It’s been a bit of a blessing in disguise in some ways, we’re creating lots of content while we can’t do anything else.’ S] You mentioned you’ve been writing new music, how has this been possible without face-to-face interaction? ‘It’s a long-winded process of being in the room or studio together essentially,’ ‘If I have an idea I’ll bell George up and tell him an idea for a tune and send him the project and then he can open it and add his parts to it and so on.’ ‘We are planning on doing an acoustic album, where we take some of our best tunes and put that spin on them, we’ll be able to do that from the comfort of our own homes, it would be great to get something out.’ ‘It’s not the same cause it’s not as immediate, when we are all writing in the room together, I might hear Lou play a bassline and I can say ‘I like it but why don’t we add this?’ whereas now we don’t really have that dynamic where everyone can throw in ideas.’ S] What would the band have been doing this week if we weren’t in lockdown?’ ‘When the lockdown got announced, we planned to go to Sweden to film a new music video, we would have been there right now!’ ‘A couple of lads from Sweden came over to Barcelona to meet us on the Inhaler tour, and they were really buzzing about doing a video with us and unfortunately that didn’t play out.’ ‘For the release of one of our new singles ‘A Modern Kind Of Blue’ later this month, we’ve actually managed to do a quarantine style music video with those guys and it looks really good.’ S] As one of the UK’s biggest new bands, do you feel this pandemic has caused you to lose momentum? ‘The live gigs is something where it’s a very different experience to hearing us on our record, and I think those shows are really good for keeping that momentum up as it’s a different medium and format for listening to the music, it’s what people love.’ ‘That momentum does get stifled, but it’s just like what we’ve been doing on Instagram, you have to try and emulate it the best you can and keep playing songs.’ ‘We might have slowed down a bit but in the digital age we live in, especially with music, there are ways around it.’ S] Lastly, away from the music side of things, I know you guys are big football fans, how are you coping without it? ‘Well, I’m a Manchester City fan so I’m pretty buzzing cause at least Liverpool haven’t won the league.’ ‘I was worried as well because our tour fell on the night of the Champions League final and if we (City) would have got there, no one would have come to our gig.’ ‘I am really missing footie, but I’m glad our band hasn’t been affected by it as well.’ Despite being on lockdown, the band are set to release two new singles later this month, ‘Warm Nights’ on the 8^th and ‘A Modern Kind Of Blue’ on the 22^nd of April respectively. Both will be available to stream on all major platforms. Words: Owen Thompson