The online dichotomy of Sunnbrella

“A friend of mine described it as shoegaze-influenced computer pop,” shares David Zbirka with a laugh, scrolling his laptop for the exact “well-written” phrasing once used to describe Sunnbrella’s sound. “I thought [it] was really funny and kind of accurate because a lot of the sounds are influenced by a lot of online microgenres and subcultures.”

He’s currently at home in North London, sat in a space that's recently transformed from a second bedroom to a self-described "disaster storage room.” Among the clutter of clothes, guitars, merch, and vinyl, there are hard drives filled with musical projects amid a rough plan to create a bit of a home setup away from his primary studio in Hackney. But, as he notes with a grin, “it’s in a bit of a transitional state.”

It’s seemingly one of many things facing transition. As Sunnbrella’s second album enters the world, it finds the project in the midst of its own digital evolution. While 2023’s debut record Heartworn offered up a collection of grunge-tinged, shoegaze-leaning tracks, the Prague-born, London-based musician/producer’s sophomore effort delivers a directional change in sound. The ambition, Zbirka explains, was to blend many of the genres he loves and finds influential, “be it shoegaze or jungle, 90s club music in general [and] modern electronic music, like soundcloud rappers all the way to experimental electronic music producers.”

In its heavier lean on abrasive noise and genre-melding electronic production – spanning industrial to breakcore and hyperpop to name a few – the resulting record gutter angel is a release that embraces a myriad of influences in Sunnbrella’s reinvention. “I consciously kind of wanted it to sound like it was made on a computer,” he notes when comparing the new album to its predecessor, “it was the type of music I was listening to more and more in recent years.”

He nods to a life lived in online spaces as a direct influence for the album’s development, pointing to his own screen time being reflected in the music he makes. “I just very much love a good doomscroll, I’m very much into meme culture whatever that means – being into meme culture,” he laughs. “Even growing up, having a profile on pretty much every social media platform you could think of, from early Facebook to very late MySpace, Bebo, Vampire Freaks… I think both musical and aesthetically in general, cultural nostalgia is there for sure.” Although describing his work as stemming from a retrofuturistic approach, he’s quick to clarify that “it’s not retrofuturism in the sort of way where people would maybe do the 80s style of retrofuturism or something, it’s a bit more, I guess, of the recent past.”

Discussing recent shifts in the way music is being consumed online, he contemplates where gutter angel and its many touch points fit within the online world he’s become so fond of. “I think there's a lot of people that, because of the streaming digital age, have either grown up or kind of pivoted to consuming music in a much more ADHD type of way,” he suggests. “Maybe you're not just part of one subculture and not just interested in one genre, but maybe you have a playlist for different moods, different vibes, or maybe you have a playlist like me where there's everything all together all at once.”

With the rapid rise of microtrends and a social media-led push towards individualism, the pursuit of originality has seen a diverse mixture of new artists cherry picking influences from an increasingly wide spectrum. “I think we see it a lot with younger artists, where the genre lines are increasingly blurred and people kind of put sounds together that maybe shouldn't have gone together before [or] people would be scared to mix together,” Zbirka muses, nodding towards the influence of Frost Children and Jane Remover. “I also feel like I keep finding people that seem to be, in some ways, like spirit animals, at least in the approach of like, I don't care about genre as much as I care about making compelling music... I think as a result, [artists] are more open to those genres colliding. I think Sunnbrella kind of fits into the sort of landscape of the genre-clash artists.”

Returning to the release of gutter angel and his discovering of like-minded artists and fans that have, in their own way, fuelled its formation, he admits that the new record is “like almost doubling down on stuff that I was like touching on in the first album and didn't have the skills or the vocabulary or maybe even the guts to like fully get into.” While Sunnbrella may be a solo project, Zbirka also highlights its collaborative nature, most notably in the involvement of childhood friend and co-producer Oliver Torr. The pair’s close collaboration on gutter angel feels especially fitting for this record when he reveals that their introduction first came by way of the internet.

Prior to his move to London, Zbirka grew up in Prague surrounded by his musical father’s expansive record collection. At 10 years old and wanting to start a band, he turned to the internet. “I just put up an ad on a website, like a Gumtree-type website I guess, a Czech version of it,” he shares with a smile. “It was something like ‘looking to start a kids band’, and Ollie's guitar teacher basically replied to the ad and set up a meeting between myself and my mom and Ollie and his mom and his guitar teacher and yeah, we kind of hit it off immediately.”

While a variety of short-lived musical outfits followed, including a stint together in the school band (“we covered the School of Rock song… Our science teacher was the leader of the band so it was very School of Rock-coded in general”), for Zbirka, gutter angel marked the pair’s first proper collaboration.

“He was there throughout the whole process,” he explains, reeling off track names the pair worked on together: “Flow State”, “Ghoul” and “Parasomnia”. “Some of it was done remotely, some of it was done in-person in different countries… I can’t remember the exact credits but yeah, [Torr] was definitely a fully-fledged co-producer and co-wrote a bunch of the songs on the album.” Having a close friend to work alongside also helped in fine-tuning the tracks he admits, adding “Oliver also needed to like it which is helpful. If you have a co-producer, if they like it, then hopefully other people will as well.”

This experimentation and the pair’s decision to bounce ideas around played a significant role in the evolution of Sunnbrella’s sound. “Some songs did not want to work,” Zbirka confesses. “I think ‘Ghoul’ was quite a tricky one because it started out as a very incoherent idea of just like a drum beat and some noisy guitars, and then it took bouncing ideas back and forth between me and Oliver to figure out what the song actually is.” He runs through a number of changes that they made together: “Nothing Forever” started with a different drum beat, “omnimori” took time to find a balance between its clashing genres, and “Ghoul” originally began with a metalcore breakdown. Trading thoughts between themselves, Zbirka remains hopeful that the pair eventually did find the middle ground between “ridiculous, unlistenable, and what actually works.”

Although the tracks that form gutter angel may borrow from a plethora of influences and mark an audible evolution in Sunnbrella’s once shoegaze-centric sound, Zbirka pauses to consider the common thread that ties the songs together. “Thematically,” he starts, alluding to the album’s name as a signpost, “a lot of the album’s about the contrast between beauty and decay, and I guess like beginnings and endings in some way.” He’ll freely admit that the new release feels more hopeless in mood than Heartworn, but to him, it better chronicles some of the events that happened while working on the debut album.

“It all comes from personal experience,” he shares, though notes his preference in keeping the lyrics as poetically vague and open to interpretation as possible. “There’s a lot of like death in the family over the last few years and that definitely changed what I wanted to hear musically coming out of me. I had a lot more dark feelings to get at, I think.” He points to “Ghoul” as a track informed by a violent assault, and nods to the ending of old friendships as a catalyst for some emotions poured into the release. “I had a lot of basically like anger and frustration that needed to come out,” he admits, “and I guess it came out in this album not sounding maybe as uplifting as the last one.”

While the writing of gutter angel may have been needed as a cathartic release for the musician, he adds that “the last song is a much more gentle vibe than a lot of the rest of the album,” clarifying that the new record shouldn’t feel like a totally defeating listen. “There were definitely points where I was turning things up way too loud and listening to stuff way too loud and damaging my ears in the process,” he observes, looking back, “but it felt good to like, feel all that.”

With his sights now set on gutter angel’s impending release, there’s a near-palpable buzz of excitement for the future that’s hard to miss. “I have a headline show in London at the Lexington on the 24th May,” he enthuses, explaining that he wanted to give people time to digest the new album before playing a release show. “We’ll also be playing in Poland at a festival called OFF Festival where the lineup is insane. I can’t believe we’re on the same lineup with, like, James Blake and Kraftwerk,” he gleefully recites before dropping a few other upcoming festival names that haven’t yet been announced.

On the future of Sunnbrella, he’s confident that a third album lies ahead but it may take even more experimentation. “I definitely still feel like there’s unfinished business with the sounds that I’m playing with,” he muses, “but I’m deciding what the best approach would be.” Whether setting parameters or “throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks,” Zbirka isn’t yet sure, but he’s steadfast in confidence and ready to step into the digital unknown to see what fresh influences and inspirations await him.