After nine on-and-off years, Emo-rock trailblazers Sunny Day Real Estate have called it quits. The band had been at work on the follow-up to last year’s The Rising Tide but, because of business woes, has decided not to continue.
According to the band’s statement on its official Web site (www.sunnydayrealestate.net), a “string of bad luck” with management companies and Arista Records ceasing to distribute the band’s label Time Bomb Recordings made a “European tour and advertising for a new album near impossible. As frustrations built, progress on the new album became stagnant at times. Not wanting to build personal tensions,” the post continues, “the band decided to split up indefinitely.”
This is not the first shop closing for Sunny Day Real Estate. Founded in Seattle in 1992 by guitarist Dan Hoerner, bassist Nate Mendel and drummer William Goldsmith – and soon after adding singer Jeremy Enigk – the group first parted ways in 1995, following a tour in support of their 1994 Sub Pop Records debut, Diary. Internal tensions caused by Enigk’s becoming a born-again Christian were often cited for the split, but the band did manage to release their already-wrapped second album, LP2 (or “The Pink Album”) in late ’95.
Mendel and Goldsmith subsequently joined Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters and Hoerner retreated to a Washington farm, while Enigk delivered a psychedelic-tinged chamber pop record, Return of the Frog Queen. With the band’s cult-status ballooning, Sunny Day Real Estate reconvened with bassist Jeff Palmer replacing Mendel, who chose to remain in the Foo Fighters, for 1998’s How It Feels to Be Something On. A tour followed, yielding the 1999 live set Live and the fourth and final studio effort The Rising Tide.
As for the immediate future, Hoerner plans to use some of the band’s new, unreleased material with a new band and Enigk is eyeing another solo album.