Meet Sunday (1994), the transatlantic trio dreaming big

In the ten years Paige Turner and Lee Newell have known each other, the pair – Turner from Los Angeles, Newell from Slough – have worked together in many different guises. They have written songs for other artists, composed music for sync deals and adverts, and become a couple. Always at the back of their minds, though, was the idea of starting a project just for themselves.

At the start of 2024, they emerged – together with an anonymous drummer simply known as ‘X’ – as Sunday (1994), a dream-pop band with irresistible melodies, a striking vintage aesthetic and with honesty at their core. In the year that’s followed, they have become a viral success on TikTok and are selling out live shows on both sides of the Atlantic.

“These songs feel very vital,” Newell – who first emerged as frontman of indie band Viva Brother in the early 2010s – tells Rolling Stone UK. “They feel like they are  bursting out of us. It’s a really weird feeling – it’s almost like we’re not writing them. They just kind of appear. It’s really weird.”

Watch the band’s video for new single ‘Blossom’ and read our full Play Next interview with Turner and Newell below.

You’ve been together as a couple and creative partners for a decade – why start a band now?

Lee: Great question!

Paige: Because we’re delusional. We’ve been working together for 10 years in music, doing our own projects, writing for other people, writing for sync – anything we could do to get by. We’ve been talking about this for a very long time, and just honestly didn’t find the time to start the project until COVID. We sat down and started writing music for ourselves, the sort of music we honestly just wanted to listen to.

Lee: We’d always talked about doing it, and had always really wanted to do it, and subconsciously we were procrastinating this whole time because we just wanted it to be perfect. I would constantly, start things and song ideas and I would show them to Paige, but it was never quite right. One time we just stopped trying. We were bored, and Paige asked me to teach her to play guitar. The first chords that she threw together was ‘Tired Boy’, which became our first single. From there, we were like, ‘Fuck, this is it! This has to be it.’ And here we are. It just happened so quickly.

The band’s look and style feels very conceptual and deliberate, but was it a more natural and exploratory process at the start?

Lee: Over the years we’ve been collecting musical ideas and doing work for other people, and we always knew what we wanted our band to look and sound like. When we got the window of opportunity to do it, we knew exactly what we wanted to do. We made a little manifesto…

What did it say?

Lee: That’s very secret! It’s about having a set of rules and limitations that we have to work within. It’s really liberating to know you can only use a certain amount of instruments in a song. We only shoot in film, never digital, because we want it to be tangible. We want it to be real, because the songs are real. That sounds terribly pretentious, but that’s because it fucking is!

You’ve just released an expanded edition of your self-titled debut EP – what made you want to add to that rather than release a whole separate project?

Paige: We knew that we didn’t want this era to be over yet. I was going through a lot mentally, so I had a lot to write about in that time. Even though things were going really well in my life, somehow my brain sort of didn’t want me to enjoy my life, and so those songs were necessary to write. It’s always the way.

Lee: We seem to be in a period where everything we write we like. The Pet Shop Boys call it the ‘imperial phase’. I’m not saying we’re having an imperial phase but we have found a bit of a purple patch, a bit of chemistry, and we just really enjoy everything we’re making. We just wanted to keep going.

There’s a nice and unique mix of humour and sincerity in your lyrics – is that how you conduct your lives separate from the band too?

Paige: There’s a lot of humour even in the darkness. The songs and lyrics are very, very true to who we are as people, and I think that’s why we’ve been going through this imperial phase of writing, because it’s exactly what’s going on in our lives or has happened in the past. It’s coming from a natural, instinctive place.

Lee: If you can do the humour right, it’s almost sadder. That’s how we deal with things, especially English people. We can’t really tackle the heavy stuff front-on, whereas I feel like Americans wear their heart on their sleeve more. That’s maybe where something happens between the two of us. ‘TV Car Chase’, for instance, was [about] Paige starting antidepressants. We just thought, ‘What better way to shed light on that than to have a big singalong?].  A bridge of, ‘My head is in the oven’ and almost Killers-esque singalong.

Has starting this project given you a renewed faith in music that you might have lost along the way through working for others?

Lee: It seems so obvious, but it’s about making things you like and making things that are completely true to your taste and your interests. From there, other people react to that as well. There’s other people like you out there!

Paige: There’s definitely been times in my life where I’ve done things that I thought other people wanted to see or hear from me, and it didn’t serve me. Now I’m doing something that’s completely who I am. It’s not even a character, it’s just who we are as people.

Lee: It’s hard to be yourself, weirdly, but if you can find a way of doing it, it really is very liberating. It’s honestly been the most unbelievable year of our lives, and we feel really, really grateful and lucky that we get to do this, and for it to be so honest.