In 2018,  the much loved Sunday Records label returned after a 15 year hiatus, releasing a whole assortment of music centred around acts / members of acts, that they had released before. Strawberry Generation, stand out proudly as they are only the second completely new act (after the equally brilliant LIPS) to signal the re-birth of Sunday as thriving, here to stay, label once more.

In fact SG have had the Sunday treatment twice already in 2020 as they released the ‘Recollections’ EP in the first week of January. On Recollections three essentially very indie-pop openers, conclude with two tracks, Coffee and Call U 2, that set the bar for the more expansive, grumbling fuzz of this, their debut album.

Undoubtedly more noise suits them as Afloat, When You Were Here and I Was Sad, Hannah, East George (both below) and I Know It’s Sad But It Must Be Done, slide the sacharrine sweet vocals of either Valerie Zhu and/or Luk Yean underneath chiming jangly riffs that fight for the right to considered crystalline among a haze of strangely melodic fuzz. It’s this fight for attention that creates the tension and prevents the album being dismissed as merely pretty.

Of course when a band like SG possess every conceivable ‘pretty weapon’ in their indie-pop arsenal, they will never quite be able to surpress such natural proclivities. As such tracks such as University, Lying to Lauren and the almost Tame Impala-esque Breakthrough Feeling, strip down the wall of noise-pop and just let everything that is darling about their indie-pop thrive.

As a debut full length release they have hit the ground running and created a platform for their music to thrive in a couple of somewhat disparate directions…what more could they / we want?

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Artist Links:  sundayrecords.com, twee.net, instagram.com, Facebook