Hank Sullivant

Upon returning to Kuroma in 2008, Sullivant originally opted to have no personalized web presence, (MySpace, Facebook, or band website) but managed to get Kuroma reviewed in print and Internet magazines. His initial reticence stemmed from a sense of revulsion at the marketing of music and bands.[9] Sullivant says that Paris’s sound was primarily influenced by the Love, Peace, and Poetry compilation series of obscure international 60s psychedelic music.[10] Paris received good reviews, and the live band was praised early on by NME and Spin Magazine.[11][12] In 2008/2009, the band opened for Jarvis Cocker, Primal Scream, MGMT, and The Walkmen, and performed at the 2009 Bonnaroo festival.

In February 2009 Sullivant and fellow UGA graduate Alejandro Crawford put on a performance art show at Athens Cine entitled “Homeopathic Grafting: This Awakening Dream of Communication.”[13] The title is a direct quote from Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation.[14] Crawford, a poet and visual artist, identifies “Transmutilation” as the technique behind his long-form poem Morpheau.[15] In a video interview in 2009 Sullivant describes Kuroma’s music as “transmutilation.”[16]

In November 2008, Kuroma put on a two-part performance at The Georgia Theatre. Part One featured a 15+ minute cover of Spacemen 3’s “Big City;” the intermission was a screening of the late 1960s psychedelic art film The Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda; and Part Two was a set of Kuroma songs. Formal playbills were passed at the door.[17]

Green Label Sound, a one-off video/single label funded by Pepsi/Mountain Dew, approached Kuroma in early 2009. Sullivant submitted “In New York Everything Is Tropical,” a song he describes as “soulless.”[18] Sullivant elaborates, “There’s a celebratory part of the song, but also a cynicism, and when you combine both of them, you’re left with nothing.”[19] In contrast to the quiet release of Paris, GLS heavily promoted the single, and the video itself shows a barrage of graphics on top of rapid-fire shots of Sullivant walking overconfidently through famous sections of New York, including the Marcy Projects and the financial district. During the publicity run, Sullivant hosted MTV2’s Subterranean, and MTV2 routinely played the video for two months.

Sullivant identifies Kuroma’s following video/single, “Get The Gunz,” as a companion to “In New York Everything Is Tropical.”[18] Directed collaboratively with Ash Sechler, the video features Sullivant dancing in rollerblades, stabbing water, suggestively being “curbed,” and killing his bandmates and himself with cartoon-like liquid after-effects as blood.

Sullivant, Joaquin Cotler, Alfredo Lapuz, and Nick Robbins tracked songs for Kuroma’s second album Psychopomp at Chase Park Transduction in December 2009. Eric Gorman, a mixing engineer from New York, co-produced with Sullivant. The songs were mixed at Echo Mountain Studios in Asheville, NC, in February 2010. Psychopomp was released on iTunes in October 2010 before Kuroma’s fall tours with MGMT and Tame Impala. The 8-minute track “Get Quick Got It” was licensed for a Cinemax upcoming movies advertisement in February 2011. The lineup was Sullivant on guitar, Lapuz on keyboards and synth bass, Robbins on drums, and Stan Walker on synths.

As of 2013, Kuroma’s lineup was Sullivant, Simon O’Connor, James Richardson and Will Berman. The band made its third album, Kuromarama, produced by Ben Goldwasser of MGMT, and opened for MGMT on its North America tour in the spring of 2013. Sullivant filled in on guitar at several summer festivals for MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden, who was recovering from shoulder surgery.[20] He subsequently re-joined MGMT full-time and toured, along with Kuroma, on the album cycle for their third album "MGMT" through 2014.[21] He left the band again in 2016.