SUNK LOTO - The Birth, Death & Rebirth of SUNK LOTO
Written by: Tom Wilson @thetomwilsonexperiment - Sense Music Media | Friday 20th May 2022
Aussie Nü Metal Heroes Go Back to the Primitive.
The rumours are true. It is our pleasure to announce that one of the coolest heavy bands of the 90s and 2000s, SUNK LOTO, have reunited their original line-up of Jason and Dane Brown, Luke McDonald and Sean Van Gennip. A reunion lunch led to the band reconvening in a rehearsal space earlier this year and breaking fifteen years of silence with Primitive, a track from their 2000 debut LP Big Picture Lies. Lift your head up, because SUNK have returned, and Jay took some time out at home in the Tallebudgera Valley to tell SENSE what to expect.
You have a big announcement. I have two theories as to what it is. Either SUNK LOTO are about to do something, or you’ve just started an OnlyFans. Which is it?
[Laughs] If I had a better body, I’d probably make more money out of OnlyFans. Nah man, we’re reforming the band with the original four members, and we’re about to announce some shows. At the moment we’re doing Brisbane and the Gold Coast, and there are other dates that are getting sorted out. Brisbane is the 6th of August at the Triffid, and we’re doing a small club show for our first show back on whatever the Friday before that is, at Mo’s Desert Clubhouse on the Gold Coast, which holds about 300 people. We sort of wanted to bust into a small venue to get warmed up after fifteen years of nothing, and then hit the big stage the next week. That’s what’s happening man. And yeah, we plan on doing Sydney and Melbourne later in the year if everything goes well.
When we first spoke, I was under the impression that SUNK was done and dusted for a long time. I remember being hesitant to ask you about it, and you were like, “Nah, it’s been close for the last couple of years.” Without reopening old wounds, what was the process of getting back together as a band? How different are you as people than when you broke up?
We’re different but we’re the same, you know. We’ve grown up, obviously, but I’ve stayed in contact with Luke on and off over the past couple of years. He’s had his battles with addictions and other things that have sort of held off the possibility of things happening, and obviously my brother, Dane, the drummer, I’m always in contact with him, and he always said, “Nup, it’s never going to happen.” So I sort of went, “Fuck, how do we do this?” But it ended up being … Luke actually reached out to Dane without me even knowing, and said, “Hey man, I’ve been sober for eighteen months now, how do you feel?” We didn’t start with “Let’s get back together and start rehearsing and playing gigs.” It was “Let’s catch up for lunch.” And Sean as well, the bass player, we all caught up for lunch in late February/early March. It was just crazy to all be back in the same room together after such a long time of not seeing each other in person. Of course, that subject came up. The first thing was, “Let’s just have a jam. Let’s just get in a rehearsal room and just play the songs and see how we go.” And just straight away, it was like, bang. The first song we played, unbelievably, after such a long break, it was just perfect.
What song was it?
You know what? I think it was a song called Primitive off Big Picture Lies. We just straight away went, “Here we go. We’re on!” Honestly, I felt more power this time than when we were at our best, and we all were in agreeance, going, “How are we better?”
When you were sitting down to have lunch, who surprised you the most with how different they were? How life had changed them?
I think, because I hadn’t seen Sean in such a long time, and really sat down and spoken with him … He’s not different – he’s still the same guy – but it was just weird to see him after ten years. But really, honestly, this whole thing has felt like ten or fifteen years have passed, but it hasn’t? And that’s what’s so weird about the whole thing. This huge amount of time has gone by, but it still feels like nothing’s changed. [Laughs]
It was so weird to me when you re-surfaced as a singer-songwriter. I missed ELECTRIC HORSE, so you’d essentially transformed from a seventeen-year-old with dreadlocks and an eyebrow ring to a very responsible-looking grownup with a beard and kids and RMs. [Laughs]
Yeah man, I know! I guess, we definitely look more grown-up in an image sense, but we’re still in pretty good shape. I think we’re in better shape now. We were just trashing our bodies back in the day. It was like, “How much damage can we do to ourselves?”
It’s what you’re supposed to do!
Exactly! When you’re twenty years old and in a rock ‘n’ roll band, that’s sort of how it goes. Yeah, we’re in good shape man. Maybe a little bit less hair, but you can fix that with a bit of wax! [Laughs]
Just to be petty, since people have spent most of your Jay Brown solo sets shouting at you to sing SUNK LOTO songs, have you considered fucking with them by reuniting SUNK LOTO and only playing country music?
[Laughs] Just play a whole Jay Brown set, yeah. That’d be funny. That would be the ultimate mindfuck. I actually covered a SUNK song at the last gig I played [Everything Everyway], which was a bit of fun.
Have you floated the idea of recording new music with SUNK?
Yep, definitely. The deeper we get into being a band again, the conversation has come up, and we realised that we’ve still got it – we’re still as sharp as we ever were, if not sharper – that’s definitely been spoken about. There’s actually a song that we rehearsed a while ago, in the past month or two. It was a song that didn’t make Between Birth & Death, and we don’t know why it didn’t make it. It was recorded in the same demo sessions, because we pretty much demoed a lot of songs, but in the final demos we demoed that whole record before we went and recorded it, and that song that was on there should’ve made the record, and we were like, “Fuck man, why don’t we go and re-record this song? Maybe we should actually go and re-record this track soon?” That could happen. I’ve been playing around with a bit of stuff in my studio with SUNK LOTO in mind, as like, “OK, I’m writing some music for this possible new record that may happen.” Who knows, man. These conversations obviously have happened, and it’s very exciting, but at the same time, we’re just taking it one day at a time. We’re focusing on getting through this first little batch of shows after such a long break, and then we’ll sort of see what’s in front of us from there.
Can you see, just in terms of where you are creatively, pursuing the much heavier sound of towards the latter half of SUNK’s career? Can you see yourself returning to that very nu metal styling that first defined the band, given that the appetite for nu metal is apparently still there?
Yeah man. Personally I think, if another record were to happen, it would be a beautiful combination of those two. We’d take a bit from column A and a bit from column B. One, because fuck me, Between Birth & Death nearly exploded our brains with how hard it was to make [laughs], and I don’t think I could put myself through that again at thirty-nine years of age … that sort of brain-melt. But two, because … I wouldn’t be doing it because nu metal’s back in. I’d be doing it because I fucking love that groove sort of stuff, combined with a heavy feel. It’s where we started, and our roots lie there, but it also lies in that wild, technical sort of chaos that Between Birth & Death brought. I think you would get, organically, the meeting between those two sounds.
Tickets are on-sale right now via moshtix.com.au
Pictured: L-R Luke McDonald, Sean Van Gennip, Jason Brown + Dane Brown – SUNK LOTO
Photo by: Luke Henery