It’s a gorgeous Sunday, and you have your favourite chocolate dessert in hand, all ready to savour.
The “wide-eyed excitement” before you sink your teeth into that sweet treat is the exact vibe that Sunwich hope to bring with their music. The rising Jakarta indie pop unit’s name is an abbreviation of “Sunday with chocolate” – “two things that can make people happy”, they point out to NME. Their latest milestone in this mission: their debut album ‘Apophenia’, ten songs that tell cheerful coming-of-age tales through a young girls’ rose-coloured lenses.
But the story of Sunwich did not start with sugar and spice and everything nice. Sunday With Chocolate is actually the name of a Blink-182-influenced pop-punk band founded by Sunwich bassist, Raflie ‘Ibek’ Arbiantara, circa 2014. The band found nowhere to go other than playing for their own pleasure, until their drummer introduced Aliefia ‘Fia’ Augustine to Ibek around 2019.
“At the time I liked to cover songs and uploaded them on social media,” Fia says. “After watching my singing videos, Ibek thought I fit the mold as the band’s vocalist.”
As Fia entered the fold, the band made dramatic changes, swapping early 2000s melodic punk influences for the 2010s guitar pop of Boy Pablo and Alvvays. They found other band members who would commit, and eventually rebranded themselves with a new name as playful as their new music: Sunwich.
“We hope our music and our stage can create a safe space for all – for girls to crowdsurf and other marginalised groups to have fun”
Fia took the helm as the main songwriter, turning Sunwich’s music into her “emotional dumpster”. She writes heartfelt, relatable songs about falling in love with the wrong people, feeling exhausted by the pressures of being a young adult, and getting lost in astrological prophecy. Add singalong hooks and crunchy guitars and you have the recipe for sugar-rush earworms.
The band released their debut single ‘Énouement’ in 2019 to a surprising widespread acclaim. A year later, they released their first EP, ‘Storage’, which earned them more buzz in the scene; a single from the project, ‘Twenty’, racked up 10,000 streams in only three days.
Having found the perfect formula for their music, Sunwich spent the slow pandemic years being productive with workshops and songwriting. Towards the end of 2021, they were picked to play at Emerging Showcase, a post-pandemic activation debuting new talents at M Bloc Space, a hip creative compound in South Jakarta. The small show opened several doors at once for Sunwich, introducing them to key people in the indie community and a wider audience. When music festivals came back with a vengeance after COVID-19, they found themselves flooded with offers to perform.
In the years that followed, they released crowd-pleasing singles such as ‘The Bended Man’, ‘False Expectation’, and ‘Don’t Get to Know Me Too Well’, all of which made it to ‘Apophenia’. “[This album] documents whatever we went through in life in the past two years,” Fia says. “I felt like there’s a lot in me that changed during the writing of the album. Sometimes I read the lyrics that I wrote back then and cringe,” she laughs. That said, spilling her guts in English is still “less cringey and blatant” than in her mother tongue of Indonesian.
Ibek, who has a degree in English literature, sprinkles memorable words like “apophenia” and “anathema” in the band’s lyrics. He also made the decision to use a fictional character as a band mascot: Wendy, a young girl with pigtails, who represents the band on the album cover and in music videos. The cover of ‘Apophenia’ is a tribute to the fictional nurse on the cover of Blink-182’s ‘Enema of the State’, he says: “I want to show my true colours as a pop-punk fan.”
Aside from Fia and Ibek, the band now consists of Hafiz ‘Apis’ Alfaiz (guitars), Mahardhika ‘Dhika’ Irsyam (guitars) and Rifki ‘Jibon’ Handani (drums). The five of them are friends from the same neighborhood of Priok at the north tip of Jakarta – a fact that might raise eyebrows for those who understand the cultural divides within the Indonesian capital.
For many Jakartans, Priok is often painted as a working-class port area where giant intercity cargo trucks jokingly dubbed “transformers” roam. Generally uncharted territory for the indie pop scene, Priok youths are generally more drawn to hip hop and hardcore punk. The district is often seen as the polar opposite of South Jakarta, the seat of trendy districts such as Blok M, Kemang and Cipete – the area populated by cool kids who speak fluent English, wear curated thrift, and listen to music like Sunwich’s.
Regardless, Sunwich are now signed with Demajors, one of Indonesia’s best known indie record labels with an outstanding roster that includes White Shoes & The Couples Company and Efek Rumah Kaca. They’ve also gotten to travel more: In 2023, they played Vietnam’s Monsoon Festival in Hanoi and were part of the musical programming at Singapore’s F1 Grand Prix.
With things going so well so far, Sunwich hope that one day the band can be their escape from their current day jobs, which have limited their ability to tour. “It’s impossible to jump on a van and do consecutive shows in several towns, just like a ‘normal’ tour,” Apis, a salaryman at a bank, explains. “We only can travel and play on a weekend, and then go back to Jakarta to work, and go to another town to play the next weekend.”
“It would be nice to be full-time musicians. Spend our life playing, making 50 albums, until we’re in our 70s!” Jibon says, jokingly. “There’s a lot of things we wish can come through with this band,” Fia adds. “More stages. More cities, more countries to visit.”
The vocalist also hopes Sunwich can help change their music scene for the better. Though Jakarta’s music community has evolved over the years, “I feel that the music industry here is still unfriendly towards girls and to other marginalised groups, such as queer people,” she says, pointing out that hypocrisy, prejudice and victim-blaming still endure.
“So it really makes me happy when we’re on stage and we see girls crowdsurf to our songs. I feel like we have succeeded in creating a safe space for these girls.
“We hope our music and our stage can create a safe space for all – for girls to crowdsurf and other marginalised groups to have fun.”
Sunwich’s ‘Apophenia’ is out now
