It has a lot of competition, but the most overused word in music may be “supergroup,” since that term projects a degree of fame that few purported supergroups every actually live up to. So what do you call a band featuring talented but not necessarily well-known players from a bunch of other projects you may or may not be familiar with? Because that’s the category that Milwaukee’s Sundial Mottos fall into.
The band is the collaboration between Midnight Reruns frontman Graham Hunt, who has been on an absolute songwriting tear lately, and Alisa Rodriquez, the visionary behind the “no really you’d enjoy this even if you don’t think you enjoy ambient music” project Apollo Vermouth. The group is rounded out by Hunt’s Reruns bandmate Brady Murphy and, on bass, Charles Markowiak of the perennially underrated emo power trio Estates. And for their debut EP Sundial Mottos, they’ve recorded five songs of woozy, witty, often-dreamy alt rock that nods to a moment in the ’90s they were all just a little bit too young to experience firsthand.
While some of Midnight Reruns’ signature disenfranchisement creeps into the EP, the sound here is more varied and expansive than that group’s tightly controlled power pop. The world will probably never get to hear a second volume of DGC Rarities, but in the meantime Sundial Mottos are doing their part to help fill that void.
You can stream the EP below.
