POST-BURNOUT
Aury Livingstone grew up in Durban, South Africa. Initially inspired by acts like Audioslave, AC/DC, and Guns N’ Roses, he took up the guitar at age nine. As a teenager, he began playing in local bands, and, in college, he started an acoustic singer-songwriter venture that incorporated looping and textures to expand the parameters typically permitted by the limitations of a solo arrangement.
While Aury saw some success as a solo artist, he eventually stepped away from music to focus on his studies, but his itch to create had no antipruritic. With a backlog of tracks that he thought would be great to work on with a band, Aury moved to Cork to start again. “My impression when I arrived was that there were a lot of singer-songwriters,” Aury tells Post-Burnout of moving to the Rebel County.
“I think that was only just because I came in during COVID, and a lot of the performance aspect of music in Cork was through livestreaming. There were these guys who started this livestream recording thing called Troubadour Distillery, and a lot of singer-songwriter-y-type musicians would have gone there, and that’s what I would have been exposed to, not having seen any live music or what was happening at the time.
“Then, when it started opening up, I realised, Cork is amazing. It’s got jazz nearly every hour of the week, and all across the city. There’s rock groups. There’s great cover bands in Cork, playing some pretty cool stages. There’s all sorts of other scenes that you find along the way, and a lot of stuff that’s not super flashy and advertised, but if you know the right places to go, the right people to talk to, you realise how dynamic the scene is. I think it’s brilliant.”
Once lockdowns began easing in 2021, Aury ensconced himself in the city’s offerings. “I started going to open mic nights at the Brú Bar, which is in Cork City,” he says. “And that’s where I met quite a lot of people that I play with in the local scene here, in Cork.
“And I actually started my own open mic at a place called the Atlas Bar on Marlboro Street. That kind of drew people to me, then, rather than me going and trying to find groups and open mics; people were now coming. That’s when it really started to snowball into meeting lots of people and forming new groups.
“I’ve been playing in a band since that era with the guy Jorge Kachmari, whose band are The Underscore Orkestra. They’re quite well known in Cork, and for the past three-and-a-half years, I guess, I’ve been playing in that band, as well, which has been a great [education] for me, and I’m still playing in the band. So, that’s a nice project that I’m doing, as well.”
The sets that Aury was doing around town would lead him to being introduced to Stephen McGrath, the bass player for the longtime Clonmel blues rock band Crow Black Chicken. “Well, it was my partner, Rebecca, who met Aury at a jam session,” recalls Stephen on how they met. “I was looking for someone to play on my master’s recital, and I was kind of at an end.
“She said, ‘Oh, this guy was at the jam. He’s really good,’ but I had already tried a few people, and they didn’t even turn up! I was getting stressed, and was like, ‘Oh, I hope he is good!’ [Laughs] So, we arranged a session, anyway. Six songs, and he had them all learnt, perfect. It was like, ‘Wow. This guy is awesome.’
“So, then I was like, ‘Well, what do we do now? He’s already learnt all the songs for the recital.’ So, we just started passing riffs back and forth. That was it, wasn’t it, Aury?” “Yeah, exactly,” Aury affirms. “I remember, at that time, I was doing quite a lot of the open mic scene, and that’s, obviously, how I met Rebecca, and then how Rebecca introduced us.
“So, I was actually at an open mic night before I went to the first jam with Stephen, and I was actually practising the songs in front of the other people, and was like, ‘I have this opportunity!’ Like, I definitely did treat this like it could be something, and I’m really glad I did, and I think it worked really well.”
Aury and Stephen immediately bonded and continued to jam long after the recital. “I’ve had all these ideas in my head for years to try a new project,” Stephen says. “I tried a bunch of times to get it off the ground, but I never had an Aury to kind of work with. [Laughs] I had other fellas that weren’t as organised, but Aury’s really reliable and he comes up with brilliant ideas.
“So, it’s just been easy. It’s just been so organic. Even for the recital, we did two originals when we were only supposed to really do covers, but they started coming easy. Actually, we’ve got too many ideas, really; we’ve got an album’s worth of songs, and we’re still writing songs. I don’t know what ones we’re going to put on the album! We’re just working away, like.”
Allowing the project to grow at an organic and leisurely pace, Aury and Stephen have accrued a songbook that spans over three years. There was some stop-and-go with what they were trying to develop, mainly due to nailing down a drummer, but, thankfully, they have that position filled with the addition of the Cork-based musician Jamie Ryan, whose studio they use to practice and record in.
The influence from the loose and improvisational origin of what is now known as Sun Merchant permeates into their sound and structure. “The way that our project is set up, we’re very open to things,” Aury says. “We’re not trying to, necessarily, drive a certain direction, and say, ‘This is exactly what we want to get out of the band, and anything that veers from this, we’re throwing out, because we have a specific sound.’”
For some indication of what they’re doing, Aury credits some influence on the project to Balkan music and seminars he took at the Labyrinth Musical Workship, while Stephen adds, “The three of us are kind of just driven to get it done now. Aury was listening to a bit of Gojira when [he] was back in South Africa, and [his] mate played some Gojira for [him].
“And I’m a massive Gojira fan, so I’d love to get some of that stuff in there. And Jamie’s a big metalhead. And Aury’s the least metalhead in the band! [He’s] been listening to good stuff while [he’s] been away. Now, I wouldn’t want as heavy as that, but even Aury got some ideas from them; the way they write their songs, the way they move the drum parts around, and the riffs are awesome. Yeah, we’re just a whole mishmash of genres, so you never know what we’re going to do.”
Now that Sun Merchant is solidified and confident, the members are jonesing to do what kicked it all off: playing live. The band made their debut gig at the Where Next We Meet music festival in Clonmel back in June, but they realised that they would need their music out to get any kind of traction from promoters, venues, festivals, and fans.
So, the band chose one song from their many, many options and went with “Hold My Sober” for their debut single, which came out last week at the time of publishing. “It just stuck out, really,” Stephen says when explaining their choice. “Aury worked on the lyrics, but it started from an Instagram reel of me doing that riff. So, it was a reel on Instagram, and Aury was liking the riff.
“It came together super quick. Just two practices and we had all the parts of the song pretty much done, and Aury brought the lyrics. Because I’m fairly dyslexic, I think I read the lyric…it was ‘Hold my silver,’ and I was like, ‘“Hold my sober?” I like that! I like the sound of that!’ That was it, Aury?”
“That’s exactly it,” Aury confirms. “Yeah, it was ‘Hold My Silver,’ and it was supposed to take on a different meaning, and then you mentioned ‘Hold My Sober,’ and then I think when Rebecca heard it, she was like, ‘Oh, I really like that song, “Hold My Sober!”’
“So, I was like, ‘OK, cool. That’s the song name now,’ but the meaning kind of morphed into something a little bit different, I guess, and it’s not perfect grammar or anything like that, but it’s a catchy name and I think it suits the vibe, so that’s how we landed on it, I guess.”
With their debut single out, Sun Merchant are going to be performing sporadically across Ireland for the remainder of 2025. When it comes to what to expect after, it should come as no surprise that the members have a very nonchalant and measured attitude toward their future.
“We’re kind of just doing what we want to do,” Stephen says. “At this stage in life, I don’t really give a shit about music. […] You know what it’s like with the landscape now, I’m not expecting the world to go crazy when we drop the single; there’s too much music and people are overwhelmed with it, but I think we’ll get a good response and it will be a good building block for what we do next. All the singles we’ve got lined up are different genres, so it’s kind of hard to pick which one, really, like. We don’t really know what we’re going to do next.”
Sun Merchant’s debut single, “Hold My Sober,” is out now. You can keep up with the band through their Linktree.
You can catch Sun Merchant live at:
Sep. 26th – Clomel – Applefest
Oct. 24th – Cork – Guinness Cork Jazz Festival
Nov. 1st – Dublin – Arthur’s Blues & Jazz Club
Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… tonight at 21:00 (IST) to hear this interview in full. Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music Podcasts.
Aaron Kavanagh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Post-Burnout. His writing can also be found in the Irish Daily Star, Buzz.ie, Totally Dublin, The GOO, Headstuff, New Noise Magazine, XS Noize, DSCVRD and more.