Latest Release
- MAY 7, 2024
- 3 Songs
- Ghosts of the Great Highway · 2003
- Ghosts of the Great Highway · 2003
- Admiral Fell Promises · 2010
- Benji · 2014
- April · 2008
- Tiny Cities · 2005
- Benji · 2014
- Ghosts of the Great Highway · 2003
- Ghosts of the Great Highway · 2003
- Ghosts of the Great Highway · 2003
Essential Albums
- Mark Kozelek’s work with The Album Leaf’s Jimmy Lavalle on Perils from the Sea gave the Sun Kil Moon leader (formerly of Red House Painters) a new outlook on lyric writing. Kozelek discovered that if he shifted his approach, he could deliver a conversational narrative as personal and as rambling as anything since Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac cataloged what was on their minds. In Kozelek’s case, he pays tribute to his family, whether it’s “Carissa” (a second cousin he barely knew who passed at age 35 in an accidental fire), his uncle who died on his birthday in an eerily similar fire, or his mom (“I Can’t Live Without My Mother’s Love”) and dad (“I Love My Dad”). He recounts details, big and small, and finds a way to thank Ivo Watts-Russell (the 4AD founder who discovered him in 1992) in a song about watching the Led Zeppelin movie The Song Remains the Same. Even Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie (“Ben’s My Friend”) has a breezy-tune/serious-lyric written about him. There aren’t many artists who discover new voices in their songwriting after 20+ years, but Kozelek’s done it a few times.
Music Videos
Artist Playlists
- Exquisite acoustic melancholy enlivened by plainspoken detail.
Appears On
More To Hear
- The band pick the 5 Best Songs on Apple Music.
About Sun Kil Moon
Sun Kil Moon is the increasingly experimental folk-rock project of singer-songwriter Mark Kozelek. Originally composed of Kozelek and the members of his previous band, indie rockers Red House Painters, Sun Kil Moon were launched in San Francisco in 2002. The band were named after Korean boxing star Sung Kil Moon, and their stately 2003 debut, Ghosts of the Great Highway, features a gripping trilogy of tracks devoted to other boxing legends. Beginning with his critically acclaimed Benji (2014), a laceratingly powerful monument to death and self-examination, Kozelek acquired a penchant for long-form monologues. Subsequent Sun Kil Moon albums, up to and including 2021’s Lunch in the Park, focused on ever more raspy spoke-sung soliloquies—consisting of riffs on Kozelek’s favorite writers (especially Henry Miller and John Fante), blow-by-blow accounts of earlier performances, seemingly impromptu political rants, and the sort of banter other artists might reserve for between-song onstage interludes—often accompanied by stylized hip-hop beats.
- ORIGIN
- San Francisco, CA, United States
- FORMED
- 2002
- GENRE
- Rock