Sundara Karma interview: On masculinity, festivals, and the album that was seven years in the making

They’ve yet to make it big enough to move out of Reading but frontman Oscar Pollock says the band are keen to tour America in ‘nice f***-off bus’

Frontman Oscar Pollock, second from left, with his bandmates – he puts their success down to a ‘crazy, eccentric fanbase’

Sundara Karma frontman Oscar Pollock examines his fingernails for chipped paint – red, yellow and green – between sips of gin and tonic, waxes lyrical about touring in San Francisco, despairs at the realisation that he may miss Aphex Twin at Field Day, and admits he’s a “bad vegan”.

“When I’m hungover I’ll slip up and eat a f***ing pizza. and being vegetarian for me, it’s not a health thing,” he says, gesturing at his lit cigarette. “But as long as people are thinking about where what you’re eating has come from – that’s f***ing cool.”

Sat outside a pub near the offices of the band’s label, Sony, the 21-year-old seems remarkably calm despite the rapid-fire conversation – most young artists with a debut album on the way give off a nervous energy but then Sundara Karma have already been together as a band for seven years – since they were 14 – so it’s not as though they haven’t had time to prepare themselves.

This week they finally released their debut album Youth Is Only Ever Fun In Retrospect – a title that will have some critics jumping at the chance to compare it to the 1975’s admittedly absurd I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It.

“Really?” Pollock says, smiling. “I think we’re always gonna get that because it’s more than three words.”

But that title, taken from a lyric on ‘Deep Lead’, tells you everything you need to know about this album; one that has already has critics divided over whether the band is trying to follow in the freshly trodden footsteps of the likes of Blossoms.

Youth Is Only Ever Fun In Retrospect is a great debut; a polished collection that captures feelings of youth, impatience, sex, love and nostalgia for lost time. While Pollock states that he doesn’t consider himself to be particularly intellectual, he has a deep interest in literature and philosophy; “Flames”, a standout track, riffs off of Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’, while ‘Love Blood’ is loosely based on Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.

And there’s no filler – each song sounds like a hit – because the band have clearly taken time putting each song on the record, rather than being pressured into churning out an album that attempts to cash in on short-term hype.

Pollock is certainly aware of how certain indie bands have pushed records out over the past few years – feeling rushed, pressured by their labels and the overzealous media attention on the back of one hit single.

“I’ve always loved albums and singles are not enough,” he says. “Singles are the shot of adrenaline but the album is the full hit – so it’s always been the dream to do the full album. But once you start a band you realise all the potential to do an album shines brightly on the horizon... and we had all these songs that have been great to put together into one body of work.

“We’ve never been a hype band,” he shrugs. “And we used to be a bit glum about that but I’m so happy about it now. And the fans are the ones who have made this thing happen – this crazy, eccentric fanbase that we have.”

Pollock is not keen to compare Sundara Karma to other bands so he tries to avoid it but says that a sense of competition can be healthy in art. And they are ambitious: the band can already claim slots at Reading and Glastonbury but still feel as though they’re only just getting started.

“Even though we’ve done it, it doesn’t feel like we’ve done it properly. Touring in America properly would be good, doing it in a nice ‘f***-off’ tour bus... so there are still goals to be reached. I’m writing songs for a second record already.”

Currently the band is still based in Reading but Pollock says they would move to London if it miraculously became affordable but like with “anything where you’re working with art – you have to have a day job as well.”

He and the other band members are interested in the idea of “guardian properties”, where buildings that would otherwise be vacant are offered at a low cost to young professionals, key workers and artists trying to move to bigger cities.

Single ‘She Said’ was the breakthrough moment for the band – probably one of the poppiest tracks on the record and certainly the catchiest – picking up that all-important support from the likes of Radio 1.

Radio can be vital to a band’s success, Pollock says, but then others can do just as well without any sort of mainstream support.

“Just look at Fat White Family,” he suggests. “They’re doing well without any kind of mainstream radio support. For us radio’s important though, and Radio 1 have been very supportive of us – they make a difference. But I don’t think I want us to be a band that ‘blows up’… and I don’t think we will be.”

Being signed to a bigger label means you begin to “see through the cracks”, he says, pressured by the support, particularly the money, they pump in. “They want to see a return,” he says, “so there’s a balance that has to be made”.

While Sundara Karma have been lumped into the same category as Catfish and the Bottlemen, Pollock is a far cry from the posturing, wannabe, Liam Gallagher attitude that the latter’s frontman seems so desperate to convey.

And with the deaths in 2016 of Prince, David Bowie and George Michael, the music industry could surely do with a few more frontmen who don’t aspire to a hyper-masculine interpretation of what it means to be a frontman.

Performing live gives Pollock the opportunity to be “more myself” – he favours shirts with bright patterns, skinny jeans and his shock of bleach-blond hair but offstage the band are still confronted with ignorance – in Birmingham they were hauled into a mild altercation after a member of the public took an unnecessary interest in a band member [Dom Cordell]’s pink shoes.

“We get that a lot on nights out – ‘are you a f***ing boy or a girl, mate’ – but you just have to carry on living your life,” says Pollock.

“But really it’s no longer a shocking thing to see a boy wearing nail varnish, or to see a man getting up on stage wearing a dress, or a girl with a shaved head,” Pollock says. “I think the threshold of acceptance has risen so high since the seventies, and that’s some sort of progress.

“I’ve never really been masculine so for me to behave like that would be inauthentic. And performing onstage is quite inauthentic in itself – getting up onstage in front of loads of people... and the whole set-up making it seem like you’re more important than the audience. So the more aware you can be of the fraudulence of it, the more fun you can have.”

“Youth Is Only Ever Fun In Retrospect’, the debut album by Sundara Karma, is out now via Sony Music