sunking is the experimental sights and sounds of Seattle natives Bobby Granfelt & Antoine Martel, an outlet for the duo whose music is “steeped in funk, fusion, and the dreamier end of the rock spectrum,” said Seattle’s The Stranger. The Stranger also went on to say that “this city needs more groups like sunking, who flit among genres such as hip-hop, jazz, and shoegaze rock while messing with the DNAs of each style they address.” Today sunking share two new tracks, ‘My Mind Is An Oven’ and ‘Uncle Kane.’ “My Mind Is An Oven is an attempt to simulate the emotional experience of being bursting at the seams with inspiration, but not knowing how to articulate it or capture it,” Granfelt said of the song, while Uncle Kane is the more frenetic track, with bright horns bursting throughout its quick one minute and twenty-four second run time.
sunking released their self-titled debut album in February of 2019 and it received praise from Earshot Jazz who said: “sunking’s self-titled debut exudes an abundance of uncaged creative accomplishment.” Martel said of the band, “since Sunking is just a duo, it invites us to take even greater leaps into the unknown, further from established genre and deeper into sonic dreamscapes, believing in our two-person mind meld to show us the way.” Both Granfelt and Martel are also members of High Pulp, a jazz collective that draws influences from punk rock, shoegaze, hip-hop, and electronic music. Also signed to ANTI-, their album ‘Pursuit of Ends’ came out in April of this year. “High Pulp blend old-school bebop with contemporary soul and electronica vibes, as though someone convinced the ghost of Duke Ellington to reinterpret a Chemical Brothers album,” said the A.V. Club.
“I think of High Pulp as driving a big huge bus with a lot of momentum and a lot of people going to a specific place, whereas sunking is like getting lost in the woods with your best friend,” Granfelt explained. “There’s a certain amount of experimentation that we are able to explore because our group is so much smaller, and within that I think we’re able to find the nooks and crannies of composition, sonics, aesthetic, whatever else.”
