Nick Kivlen

Nick Kivlen’s journey into D.I.Y. music began in his teens, when Zachary Cole Smith invited him and high school friend Cal Fish to the first rehearsal for what would become @DIIV. During this period, Kivlen met Julia Cumming and Olive Faber; together, they formed @Sunflower Bean, an internationally acclaimed rock trio that spent the next 12 years carving out a central place in New York’s rock lineage. Opening for The Strokes, Interpol, Beck, Pixies, and Wolf Alice, Sunflower Bean became a defining band of the city’s underground in the 2010s and early 2020s. "Addicted to the Sunset," Kivlen’s first solo album, is intentionally esoteric. Entirely home-recorded and self-performed, it’s a psychedelic folk-rock labor of love built from wah-wah guitars, sun-bleached harmonies, and an aching fixation on the ecstasy of adolescent dreams. Recorded with a single microphone, the album embraces Kivlen’s “mound of sound” production style: reverb-soaked homemade percussion, acoustic arrangements, and blazing solos. In 2024 Kivlen moved to California to escape self-destruction in New York, “A lot of the lyrics reflect on the perspective I had when I was 20—the possibilities of the future, the yearning for a better world, and the fallout from chasing your dreams,” he says.