sunnbrella is the creative project of the London-based musician and producer David Zbirka. Zbirka grew up in Prague to a musical family. He attributes his interest in pop music originating in his father’s prodigious record collection. As a teenager he was deeply influenced by emo subculture, after which, as he put it, he ‘went into the more alt stuff: hardcore and metalcore’ through which he discovered the wider spectrum of 90s alternative music. Here he found grunge, post hardcore, and, finally, the pioneers of shoegaze, My Bloody Valentine. Zbirka described listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time as “a mindblowing moment”, which changed his musical trajectory drastically.
‘What I liked about shoegaze,’ says Zbirka, ‘was this idea of this harsh music that is almost damaging with this really romantic and beautiful sound underneath.” It’s this balance between harshness and beauty or experimentation and pop that sunnbrella is interested in exploring.
Soon after moving to London, Zbirka began recording lo-fi pop songs in his bedroom. These became the first demos released under the alias of sunnbrella. Over several years, Sunnbrella defined their sound, putting out a prolific back catalogue of EPs and singles. In 2023 the project released its highly anticipated debut album, Heartworn, which showcased a futuristic blend of computer pop and shoegaze. In 2024, two singles, ‘have your say’ and ‘kiss on credit’, were released in anticipation of Sunnbrella’s second full-length release, gutter angel, due for release in Spring 2025.
The sophomore LP is a departure from the strict shoegaze setting of the band’s debut. While still saturated in pitch-diving overdrive and walls of sound, gutter angel expands, and even deconstructs sunnbrella’s previous emanation of the genre. Where Heartworn was an album that found a voice and constructed an identity from it, gutter angel is rather a guide to getting lost. Finding solace in the unknown, this new direction arrives at a far more ambitious, deeply internal and thoroughly ingenious sound.
gutter angel for the first time forefronts Zbirka’s virtuosity in production as it evolves fluidly, incorporating far-ranging influences from trip hop, breakcore, hyperpop, to industrial and rave music. A collaboration with experimental producer Oliver Torr from Prague, whose substantial involvement helped develop a sound that is heterogeneous, polyvocal, never still, and always in a state of change. The pair is joined by vocalist and collaborator Claire Peng, who featured on a number of tracks on the project’s debut but appears much more prominently on the second full-length - namely on the album’s closer “see you” where Peng takes on lead vocal duties for the first time.
The sound of gutter angel moves, reiterating itself in flows over the course of the album; as the album progresses, its conceptual framework emerges. In ‘pinkin lark’ a trashed out tremolo guitar becomes a gated hi hat or snare which in turn becomes an oscillating rave synth only for the entire track to swerve or disintegrate into a new emergence. At moments it brings to mind MBV, Nine Inch Nails, Linkin Park, Portishead, 100 gecs, but at the same time there is an element entirely different, outside any influence, something new and intense.
The vagaries of mood and register in the vocal performances of gutter angel move away from the washed out inaudible characteristic of shoegaze taking on greater emotional scope. It ranges from the deep confessional voice of ‘have your say’, and the psychological darkness of Sparklehorse in ‘bloodline’, to melodic ethereal melody of ‘omnimori’ and even highly processed hyperpop reminiscent of AG Cook or Aldn in ‘nothing forever’. Despite the radical evolutions that give way to one another, what remains is a sensitive, profoundly inquisitive sound – individualistic, lonely, sorrowful and yet always alive and moving. In gutter angel, Zbirka has deconstructed shoegaze into a sensibility of contrasts. The sound is liquid, swerving like a sine wave, bending as the tremolo arm of a guitar bends a note out of key only to lift it again; it oscillates between harness and sublimity, industrial and ethereal, speed, rush, noise and harmony, space, depth, melody. In Heartworn sunnbrella found an identity, but in gutter angel the project finds its essence.
