Years End with Sonny and The Sunsets (live album recording)

The Sunsets coalesced in 2007 around prolific Bay Area songwriter, author, filmmaker, and visual artist Sonny Smith. With a rotating lineup made up of San Francisco regulars, including multi-instrumentalist Kelley Stoltz, Tahlia Harbour (the Dry Spells), John Dwyer (Thee Oh Sees), Tim Cohen, and Shayde Sartin (Skygreen Leopards), The Sunsets gave Smith a perfectly sloppy, immaculately informed backdrop for his wry love songs and touching moments of all-too-real weirdness. Following a debut EP, Hypnotist, the band released its debut, Tomorrow Is Alright, in 2010. That year, The Sunsets also participated in Smith's 100 Records show in San Francisco, where nearly 100 artists created fictional jackets and labels for a series of fictional 7"s created by Smith. Smith then recorded songs to match their covers, presenting his recordings in the form of a working jukebox, including one credited to The Sunsets. By the time of the 2011 release of Hit After Hit, the band had solidified into a core of Smith on vocals and guitar, Stoltz on drums, Harbour on vocals and guitar, and Ryan Browne on bass. Smith returned a year later with Longtime Companion, a country-styled record about and written during the breakup from his girlfriend of ten years. The next Sunsets record signaled a change back to the group's original sound. Inspired by the murder of their Austin-based patron Esme Barrera and Smith's psychic contact with another dead friend, the melancholy yet oddly uplifting Antenna to the Afterworld was released by Polyvinyl in the early summer of 2013.