Bright Shining Lights Take Fans On An Orbit With "The Sun Is A Star"

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Issue #4

While playlists reign and albums increasingly are heard these days in snippets, Bright Shining Lights have done the opposite. Their sophomore full-length album, The Sun Is A Star, is not an assembly of songs. It's an aural-image trip of music and narrative, a concept album that is like listening to a movie. Dropped solo on DistroKid this September, the record is an ode to a time when listeners stayed put, let the lights grow low, and let the music take hold.

Art C. Gusmano and Rob Maru, the two men behind the project, have a background. Both were members of 90s New Jersey group Wellcurbs, a local legend for their misty mix of guitar-scorched despair and melodic sensibility. Having spent years writing in solitude, the duo came together as Bright Shining Lights and dropped their own debut, This Is Where We Start, in 2020 on Deko Entertainment. That drop foreshadowed the widescreen scope that will characterize The Sun Is A Star—but not this time, they left nothing in their back pocket.

Listening to The Sun Is A Star is like stepping into a world of its own. The album begins with "Go For Launch," a thudding, ambient song that might soundtrack the beginning of a great science fiction epic. The album then unspools across sixteen tracks that chart both a literal and figurative route: discovery, loneliness, community, purpose. It's music constructed from human queries, in starry terms. Gusmano and Maru do not use space as a place of fantasy, but as a reflection of what it is to be alive and looking.

"Everything started with a single song, actually," Gusmano said of Go For Launch. "It was the foundation for all the rest of it. Space is a good place to start because it's all about the unknown. From there, we wanted to see if we could take all these ideas of isolation, and purpose, and having to belong to something greater than yourself." 

There's a build-creep sense to the sequencing of the album. Early tracks glow with energy and propulsion, and subsequent tracks lean towards introspection and emotional depth. There is a point at which the guitars sound like they might have emanated from Dark Side of the Moon, then another in which they evoke the ghostly sadness of OK Computer. There are echoes of The Cure's retro design and Arcade Fire's sweep and grandeur, but there isn't anything that feels like copying. The group proudly flaunts their influences but uses them as points of departure of orbit rather than anchors.

The music is lush and cinematic. Synths ascend like solar gusts, drums drop with carved heat, and vocals drift on a plane of confession and incantation. The songs are easy to envision as part of a film's soundtrack, which is no accident. The inspiration of cinema drives how the duo composes music. They're not creating singles for instant listen—they're composing music for the score of a non-existent film. The listener is the protagonist.

Maru views the scope of the project with the kind of exhaustion that only occurs after decades of building. "These types of projects take time," he said. "You work on version after version until words and sound finally come together and form something that is meaningful. You can't speed it up. You just have to be in it."

And that is what distinguishes The Sun Is A Star. They are inviting you to slow down. When musicians today struggle to compromise 15 seconds of someone's attention, Gusmano and Maru struggle for an hour and half—and and they're worth every moment of it. The album is like an artifact from the past, when listeners wore out CD booklets and stayed up nights deciphering lyrics.

Fans of M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, The War on Drugs’ Lost in the Dream, or even Interstellar’s score by Hans Zimmer will find plenty to love here. It’s a record that rewards immersion, best played from start to finish with the lights down and maybe a little stargazing out the window.

There's also a thematic affinity between films such as Solaris or Ad Astra—films which take the chill of space to stretch towards human feeling. As with those films, The Sun Is A Star isn't concerned with flight; it's concerned with looking in. Each synth wave, each reverb-drenched chord, sounds like a hushed conversation between what's out there and what's in here.

The chemistry of Gusmano and Maru is what holds the album together. They share the history that reflects how the songs breathe. They play like old friends finishing each other's sentences, or movie directors knowing precisely when to hold the camera and when to cut.

The Sun Is A Star isn't easily slotted into the stream culture of today, but that's exactly the point. It's in the same tradition as Pink Floyd's The Wall or Radiohead's Kid A—albuns that demand work and faith, that reward those who persevere. It's a work of some kind of modest bravery, the sort that doesn't seek permission and pursue a trend.

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