The Sunny Smiles Three – Some Everyday Hazards (2025)
Following their warmly received 2020 debut, Fireman Spaceman Mermaid, The Sunny Smiles Three return with Some Everyday Hazards. The album is a quietly dazzling collection that deepens their strange, whimsical, and deeply human world. The trio, John Parkes (vocals, guitars), Alaric Lewis (bass), and Simon Smith (drums), describe their sound as “vaguely acoustic music for the vaguely thinking person”, though the self-effacement undersells the sophistication of what they’ve achieved here. Where the debut flirted with eccentricity through playfulness, Some Everyday Hazards feels more grounded yet more adventurous, an album where the ordinary rubs shoulders with the metaphysical, where folk storytelling collides with philosophical musings and sly humour.
Recorded mostly live in the studio with producer Will Jackson (noted for his work with Kaiser Chiefs and Pigeon Detectives), the record captures an immediacy rare in modern production. The live feel gives these twelve songs a breathing, organic quality: the soft creak of a chair, the hiss of a brushed cymbal, the slight hesitation before a chord change. These imperfections feel essential, echoes of a band deeply attuned to the fragility and beauty of impermanence.
The opener, ‘Enter Dr Beak’, sets the tone with a spectral, minor-key drift that conjures visions of plague doctors and forgotten rituals. Parkes’ voice, grainy but nimble, carries the lyric with a curious detachment, like someone paging through an old notebook of strange parables. The band’s rhythm section, Smith’s dry, jazz-inflected drums and Lewis’s melodic, unfussy bass, keeps things tethered while the acoustic guitar loops in hypnotic cycles.
From there, ‘Toys’ tumbles in with deceptive innocence. Its nursery-rhyme cadence is offset by lines about memory, decay, and the passage of time. The song recalls The Kinks in its English eccentricity, but with an undercurrent of melancholy reminiscent of Bill Callahan’s world-weary reflections.
‘Mr Fodgety’ and ‘Primitive Grasslands’ exemplify the band’s knack for folding the surreal into the everyday. The former is a rollicking shuffle about a man who “misplaces his shadow”, while the latter drifts into near-psychedelia, a pastoral meditation on evolution and entropy, punctuated by bursts of percussive clatter and distant harmonium.
At the record’s heart lies ‘Building’, perhaps the album’s most immediately gripping track. It’s a swaggering, propulsive number, folk-rock with an almost Beautiful South-like ear for a hook. The lyric reads as both literal and allegorical: a story of construction, collapse, and perseverance that could easily double as the band’s own artistic manifesto.
Then there’s ‘Sun Side On’, a song of exquisite restraint and slow-burning grace. It’s “slow-lolling mesmerism”, as one early reviewer put it, that calls to mind Skip Spence’s haunted minimalism and the bittersweet warmth of I Am Kloot. Parkes’s vocal delivery is half-sung, half-sighed, and hovers between comfort and resignation. Elsewhere, ‘Boxing Some Other Lifetime’ reveals the group’s philosophical bent, exploring the futility of perspective and the elasticity of time with an almost literary precision.
The title track, ‘Some Everyday Hazards’, distils the album’s thematic core: the small risks we take simply by living and loving, rendered in lines that balance irony and sincerity like tightrope walkers. Then, there’s a sly melancholy that’s ever-so-present, from the philosophical tangents of ‘Can’t See It All’ to the surreal humour of ‘Little Richard’, which closes the album with a wink and a sigh.
Some Everyday Hazards exists at a fascinating crossroads: acoustic psych-folk with touches of alt-Americana, flashes of 1960s psychedelic rock, and the literate intimacy of 1970s singer-songwriters. Yet for all its nods to the past, the record feels timeless rather than nostalgic. The Sunny Smiles Three have carved out a sound that’s recognizably their own, unpretentious, intelligent, and quietly subversive.
Find out more about The Sunny Smiles Three on their official website, Facebook, X, Bandcamp, Soundcloud and Spotify.
