European Sun is a Bristol-based indie pop project led by songwriter Steve Miles, best known for his work with The Short Stories. He also writes an occasional guest column for PennyBlack Music. The band brings together Miles with cult indie figures Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey, known for their work in groups such as Talulah Gosh, Heavenly and The Catenary Wires and includes drummer Ian Button. Formed out of a long-distance but creatively natural collaboration, European Sun blends Miles’ songwriting with Fletcher and Pursey’s production, arrangements, and multi-instrumental performances. Their sound grows out of the quieter, more reflective direction Miles pursued after stepping back from the fuller-band ambitions of The Short Stories. Their debut single, The Future’s Female sets the tone for the project: sharp, witty, and politically engaged. Through a series of personal and social vignettes, the song critiques toxic masculinity, nationalism, and intolerance, while ultimately offering a hopeful message that the future lies in more compassionate, progressive values. European Sun’s music balances seriousness with humor, aiming to respond thoughtfully to the cultural and political climate of the post-Brexit era. The eponymous debut album (out in 2020 on Wiaiwya) continues this approach, combining melodic indie pop with socially conscious storytelling. Miles’ second album under the European Sun name, When Britain Was Great (out now via Skep Wax Records and featuring Elin Miles as additional vocals) expands this vision, through songs that combine political critique, personal vulnerability and playful, genre-spanning indie pop, delivering a pointed yet melodic rejection of “masculine energy” culture, of nostalgia for an imagined past where men were men, and racism was de rigeur, of fetishisation of a World War by patriots who are too pumped up to realise the war was a fight against Nazism.
Because Steve Miles is not only a musician, but also a keen observer and an elegant storyteller and, certainly, an original and distinctive person, his Mixtape is composed of many words and a single song!
Indie Sunset in Rome 