Q&A: Sunday (1994) Returns with “Doomsday,” an Ode to Love and Loss
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
FOR SUNDAY (1994), LOVE IS NEVER WITHOUT ITS SHADOW – Following an incredible breakout year, rapidly rising indie rock band Sunday (1994) has made their highly anticipated return with “Doomsday,” a lush yet fatalistic single exploring deep love and the anxieties that come with it. The track, their first release since September’s deluxe edition of their debut EP, arrives with an equally moody music video that perfectly complements its dreamy yet haunting atmosphere.
Sunday (1994) emerged only a year ago as a band with something to say about the magic of the mundane, unveiling a collection of songs that captures the bittersweet nostalgia of 90s cinema, blending effortless artistry with quick wit and dark humor.
“Doomsday” is peak Sunday (1994)—a glistening blend of dreamy textures, warm guitar, and shuffling drums, kissed by shoegaze and pop influences.
Frontwoman Paige Turner delivers delicate yet devastating lyricism, capturing the morbid side of loving someone too deeply: “I hear church bells at a nearby funeral / And now I’m picturing you six feet underground / That’s the price I pay for being in love / I’m grieving that you’re gone when you’re lying next to me.”
The band’s signature dark poetry and cinematic sound make “Doomsday” feel like it belongs on the soundtrack of a ‘90s romance film—aching, nostalgic, and effortlessly captivating. Turner describes the song as an intimate reflection of her own fears of loss: “When I love someone too much, I can’t help but wait for the inevitable. ‘Doomsday’ is a song about the ghost I can’t stop kissing, the funeral I keep dressing up for.”
“Doomsday” follows the announcement of Sunday (1994)’s long-awaited debut headline tour, the UK leg to take place in May. The run of nine dates kicks off at London’s Village Underground, and will see the trio play a series of shows up and down the country including two sets at Brighton’s new music festival, The Great Escape, as well as slots at Live at Leeds and Manchester’s Neighbourhood Weekender. The European dates will follow a run in North America and Canada, where the band recently played support tours with Phantogram and girl in red.
LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with you yet, what inspires your artistic style and sound?
PAIGE: Our mundane lives inspire a lot of the lyrical inspiration.
LEE: We can start at the beginning to give some context to our music. So, we’re dating—we've been together for 12 years. When we first started dating, we always dreamed of starting a band together. And, well, we work fast—it only took us 12 years! Over that time, we figured out what we love and what we don’t in music, both consciously and subconsciously, pulling together elements that would shape the sound and identity of our band. It’s been a long journey, but ultimately, as Paige said, we try to zoom in on the small details of life—the little moments that often go unnoticed. We’re big into films. I know there's a bit of a cliche for bands, but we are so much so that our band name is stylized like a film. Sunday (1994) and our music is cinematic, so film is a big part of it and sort of dramatizes the small moments of life, making many movies out of it, I suppose, without sounding terribly cheesy.
LUNA: What kind of atmosphere or emotional space do you aim to create for your listeners?
PAIGE: I want our listeners to be able to see themselves in some way or another when they listen to our music, whether they've gone through the same thing.
LUNA: You just released “Doomsday,” your first single of the year and first single since your debut EP. Can you talk about the inspiration and the themes and emotions you explore?
LEE: Having a song called “Doomsday” in this day and age felt fitting, though it’s not actually about the end of the world—more like the end of your world. It’s about catastrophizing even when things are going well, which is something we tend to do. And to add to what Paige said earlier, we write music for ourselves first and foremost. We aim to create things that either make us laugh or tap into a deeper, sadder part of our psyche. And when you're making music that's truly for yourself, I think it naturally resonates with others—because, at the end of the day, we're not all that different.
PAIGE: It's about when things are going really well in your life. You can't help but wonder when that's going to end and when it's going to go wrong. We wrote it in the guise of a love song or but it could mean anything in your life, because that's just naturally where my brain goes when good things are happening.
LUNA: How did the song evolve from the initial idea to its final version?
PAIGE: Lee had made a track, kind of a bare bones track of what the song is now, and I thought it sounded really good. We just sat down in our living room on the floor and wrote it fairly quickly. Maybe because it was upbeat, we wanted that contrast to having something catastrophic, conceptually.
LEE: It came together really quickly, which tends to be quite a good sign, at least for us. Everything you've heard or seen from us is made in this very room, just our little one bedroom apartment. That adds to how personal our music is. Because we've known each other for so long, we can almost finish each other's sentences. It feels quite effortless, really. I completely trust Paige and her creative decisions, and she almost trusts me and mine, so we just get on with it really.
LUNA: Sonically, how does “Doomsday” compare to your previous work? Did you experiment with any new sounds or songwriting approaches?
PAIGE: I feel like it's a little bit upbeat and elevated from what we were doing before on our debut EP. It still feels like us.
LEE: I mean in terms of the writing of the song, like the structure of it, we wanted to do something a little non-linear, whereas before, we tend to stick to quite traditional pop structures because we love them, and it's good to have those limitations sometimes. But for this song, we wanted to do something that followed its own path. The song doesn't really have a chorus. It's sort of just verse and verse, verse, and it's just bits and bobs.
LUNA:You’re about to go on your first ever headlining tour across the US and the UK and huge congratulations! What can fans expect from a Sunday (1994) headlining set? Any surprises in store?
PAIGE: We're working on that right now. We have a lot of more new music that's going to be coming out, so we will be adding those to the set.
LEE: It doesn't start for a couple months, but we have slowly started piecing it together and what we're going to do, and we have played headline shows before, but it's a completely different ball game to support shows because it's a no pressure and low stakes sort of thing. You just got to go out there and do your best, but for this, we like to make an event of it and we have a dress code and things like that. I'm really excited to do it.
LUNA: Are there any specific cities you’re most excited to play, either because of past experiences or personal connections?
PAIGE: I'm excited to play all of them. As this band, we haven't been touring for very long, so we've only been on a couple small tours so far, and we did hit some cities on a support tour at the end of the last year, and we are playing some of those cities on this tour. I'm excited to see those people again that discovered us from those shows like Columbus, Ohio. I felt like the crowd had a really cool energy. But of course, New York City and stuff like that, I'm excited for it.
LUNA: What’s your favorite song to perform live?
PAIGE: Our song called “Blossom” is really fun to play live. It feels heavy. It gets those moments that are heavy and fun.
LEE: “Blonde” is my favorite to play because it usually opens our set, and I love the intro, and it's really easy for me to play, so I don't have to think too much.
LUNA: Touring can be exhausting—what are some essentials you’re bringing with you to stay grounded on the road? Any pre-show or post-show rituals or regimens that you do to help ensure you play your best set?
PAIGE: I'd say there's not really a routine. We do the typical things like warm up and drink tea, or you will drink a beer, but just getting a lot of rest is very important.
LEE: I always bring my weighted blanket. I have a very specific sleep routine, so I'm going to bring my weighted blanket, my 15 pound weighted blanket, which I double up, so super heavy. I've got my eye mask that I cover my whole face with, and then I have this fan that blows on my face when I sleep.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like that you would like to share with Luna?
PAIGE: We're really, really excited and extremely grateful how the last 18 months have been for us. Yesterday was our one year anniversary of putting out our first song, “Tired Boy.” It's just been amazing. We're so grateful, so excited. We have a really busy year. Every single day there's something new that gets added to our calendar, so we know what the rest of the year looks like for us.
LEE: Which is a little bit frightening, but also extremely exciting. This is all we've ever wanted to do, so it feels like a dream, truly.
