Sunset Sons were on the BBC’s Sound of 2015 longlist but the surfer-dude four-piece ended up finishing mid-table. That may have been a blessing, considering the prolonged raspberry blowing that has greeted runner-up James Bay and his hat. But if they’ve spent the past few months in a holding pattern, Sunset Sons – three Brits and an Aussie who started out as a covers band in the south of France surf spot Hossegor – look primed to carve into the mainstream.
They’re signed to Polydor, but they’ve retained the shaggy, Point Break vibe of sloppy T-shirts and the whiff of board wax (tins of which are also available to buy at their merch table). It’s easy to see why they’re considered a hot prospect: singer Rory Williams combines the beard, hair and fractured croon of Kings of Leon’s Caleb Followill with the louche keyboard skills of Brandon Flowers.
Williams’s distinctive growl, however, elevates the Sunset Sons from the pack. The strident Medicine sounds like Doves erased of all self-doubt, while Remember – a wounded-animal love song garlanded by spry funk-guitar doodles – seems to be the track most of the crowd knows word-for-word.
With their just-released third EP, The Fall Line, riding high in the iTunes chart, and the majority of this tour already sold out, momentum seems to be on their side – and presumably the group know a thing or two about marshalling such forces at speed. It would be easy to dismiss Sunset Sons as the ski-bum Reef, or perhaps the Red Hot Chairlift Peppers, but the way Williams stretches out their closer On the Road with claps, swells, chants and breakdowns, suggests they’ll be puppeteering much larger crowds down the road.
• At Leadmill, Sheffield, on 9 March. Box office: 0114-272 7040. At Dingwalls, London (0844 477 1000), on 11 March. Then touring until September.
