Over the last two years, she’s walked in six shows and turned heads in two campaigns for the luxury label, but music is her priority. ���I was a musician before I was a model,” Cumming, 20, tells The Post (she joined the folk-pop outfit Supercute! when she was just 13). “Being a model has an expiration date, and I know I’ll be a musician after I’m a model too.”
Judging by the trio’s debut album, “Human Ceremony” (which they’ll play next Thursday at Bowery Ballroom), she’s making the right career choice. It’s a dense mix of psychedelic melodies, rock riffs and dreamy vocals. It confidently defeats any notion of this being Cumming’s pet project.
“I enjoy the skepticism about me — and proving people’s preconceived ideas wrong,” she adds.
The band formed in 2013 when Long Island school friends Nick Kivlen (guitar) and Jacob Faber (drums) enlisted Manhattanite Cumming for a new group they were putting together. They immediately set out to earn their stripes by booking tours themselves. One tour consisted of buying cheap plane tickets to Los Angeles, and then cold-calling friends, asking for gigs.
“One time we played a house party in Long Beach,” says Faber. “Windows were getting broken, the door money got stolen, and the cops broke it up. It was a s–tshow … but it was fun.”
Now, the group (all three are 20 years old) have a live reputation that is taking them around the world, and it’s this longer route that may eventually bring Sunflower Bean success at home. Recent sold-out tours of the UK have opened up the possibility of the band following in the footsteps of the Strokes and the White Stripes by becoming famous across the pond first, then conquering the US.
“It’s definitely easier for a rock band to get into the mainstream in the UK than it is in America,” says Kivlen, who admits to being floored at seeing British fans singing the lyrics from their album at shows, despite it only having come out earlier in the month.
But the best way to know you’ve made it is when the smack-talkers pipe up, and Sunflower Bean are getting some of that too.
“I’ve seen people online saying things like ‘that guy [Kivlen] looks like Bob Dylan! F–k that!’” laughs Faber. “We’ve got to that point where people don’t think of us as humans anymore. But that’s good!”