ABOUT
Fronted by singer-songwriter, Drew Harris and guitarist Tim Campbell, the Naked Sun has been a staple of the Philadelphia music scene since forming in 2011. After spending the mid-aughts in the Baltimore, MD, eclectic and robust music scene, Harris moved home to his native Philadelphia to start a rock band with a little more edge than the folky “streetgrass” stylings of his previous bands. Harris and Campbell met in Campbell’s South Jersey home, exchanged tunes, and started making music together. Soon after, the Naked Sun would go on to win the WXPN Beta Hi-Fi Festival, the band recorded their first EP, “Space, Place, and Time,” and started playing shows. Flash forward to today, Harris and Campbell are joined by Dylan Mulcahy on drums, Tom Tusler on bass, and Bradley Moser on lead guitar. The follow up record to their debut LP, War With Shadows, is a 6-song record record entitled, Modern Life, released on January 27th, 2023. The Naked Sun mixes sounds familiar to bands like Wilco, the War on Drugs, My Morning Jacket, Drive-by Truckers and the Jayhawks in an indie-rock stew they have coined “honest-rock.” Harris explains, “We make music for people who like to really dig-in to their music.”
RELEASES
Modern Life is a 6-song, not-quite-EP-no-quite-LP, so let’s call it a record. Recording for this record started way back in 2019, but we all know what happened in 2020, so Harris and Campbell squirreled away into various home and independent recording studios (Reluctant Nudist, Gradwell & 4th Street) to make the bulk of this record. The current lineup can be heard on two tracks recorded in April 2022 at Uniform Recording with Jeff Zeigler, “Abracadabra” & “Dead God.” This genre-fluid and sometimes genre-defying record starts with a 90’s era garage rocker, slides into early aughts indie, stretches out with a surreal eastern-influenced psychedelic jam, jumps into a soul-rocker, gets classy with a horn-driven ballad, and is punctuated with a Black Sabbath influenced exclamation point. For fans of everything.
Sun Rising is a 4 song EP that sees the band relishing their roots as a folk-rock band, but also stretching into new genre territories like Gospel, roots-rock, and lo-fi bedroom-gaze. Think Wilco with hints of Youth Lagoon.
In November 2019 The Naked Sun released the French titled EP, Avec la Verite’, Vous Avez le Droit d’Aimer (With the Truth you Have the Right to Love). Their moodiest sonic landscape to date, the title is inspired by the words of the best-man at Harris’s wedding.
The debut LP from the Naked Sun, War With Shadows, was released on January 27, 2018. It was produced by Brian McTear at Miner Street Recordings (The War on Drugs, Matt Pond PA, Sharon Van Etten).
The band released the self-recorded, self-produced Pickled Hearts EP in May 2015 and their first studio EP, Space, Place, and Time, in 2013.