Sun Kin is Kabir Kumar, an LA-based composer and restless soul who has traveled the Earth picking up sounds like stamps on a passport and who has now settled long enough to deliver an album's worth of nuanced nocturnal jams, which they are calling After the House. The album explores how to reify a nightlife while stuck in one's home. It accomplishes this by diving into a wake pool of house beats and releasing into it a cloud of tone tempering dark blues and lavender textured purples, inky compositional flares that have seeped into the musician's pores during his formative time in Eygpt and Turkey. After the House is a very colorful album, even if most of the shades it embraces have a similar, deep-toned crepuscular quality. One of the early highlights of the album is the dancing piano-led "Trying to Trust," which wraps itself in a gorgeous and sensual vocal harmony and a '90s house beat. It is reminiscent of the combination of influences that Hot Chip was playing around with in the late '00s and exudes a confidence that is becoming of a body-mover of the highest caliber. The following track, "Blue Light (Keeps Me Up at Night)" has a sweat-dampened, alluring guitar-line at its core, that jukes and swivels atop a brash clattering rhythm and a cooling, slightly sun-burnt synth melody, all of which combine to set the stage for a psychic play of longing that is propelled by an overwhelming desire to share the light of one's soul with another. Then there is the new wave-disco, hot-blooded, cool-tempered splash and heel-clap of "In the Cold" which feels like a Ric Ocasek-penned song brought to life by the studio wizardry of Nile Rodgers. The nights never have to end so long as you can get the feeling right, which Sun Kin indisputably does on After the House.
