“Everyone loves being trusted with a secret. The real test is whether they can keep it to themselves. The Sunmills take that very familiar trope and turn it into a cheeky alt-rock tale with ‘Secret To Tell’.”
There’s something absolutely delightful about the premise of The Sunmills’ “Secret To Tell”. The Utah alt-rock outfit take a very common human trait (the inability to keep a secret) and take it to the absolute extreme. It’s the sort of person who will listen to you confide in them, promise to keep it all to themselves and then go and tell the very next person. The song imagines what would happen if the person you’d confided in was a priest who specialised in blackmail. A very familiar subject, but given a rather more sinister and funny twist by The Sunmills. The idea came from a children’s rhyme: “Secret secrets are no fun, secret secrets hurt someone.” The band reinterpreted it as “Secret secrets are no fun, if you never get to tell someone.” That’s the essence of it really. For some people, just knowing a secret isn’t the end of the story. The real fun is in being the person who gets to tell it. The Sunmills are very much in tune with the odd pleasure that can be derived from having information that no-one else does, particularly if it’s a very nasty secret. They don’t see gossip as a benign thing to do, they take it to the extreme and make it into a character who just can’t help themselves when it comes to spilling the most intimate details.
The ‘blackmailing priest’ concept takes it even further. The confessional is the place where you go to be heard, to be understood, to be forgiven and to be completely discreet. The person you’re talking to is in fact relishing every detail and thinking about how they’re going to use it. The humour comes from the sheer contrast between the solemnity of confession and the rather self-serving glee of gossip. “Forgiveness is free. Discretion costs extra” is the perfect encapsulation of the whole thing and is a perfect example of how The Sunmills use the device of satire to expose the less attractive aspects of human nature. That sense of humour is absolutely fundamental to the band’s identity. They’re a hard-edged alternative rock band with a lot of funk in the grooves and the guitar work is very much in the Jimi Hendrix and the Red Hot Chili Peppers camp. A lot of their music is a bit ironic in its approach to modern life and modern behaviour, taking aim at people’s fixation on image, on success and on the way they go about constructing and maintaining their own identities. “Secret To Tell” is very much in that vein, using an over the top character to look at something that we all come across in our day to day lives. It’s not just a funny story, it’s a story which enables you to see a character type you’ve probably all come across and to perhaps question your own involvement in the gossip game.
The release comes at a time when the band are in a very productive phase. Their debut album *The Art of Burning Bridges* was released in 2025 following an extraordinarily long recording period. What was supposed to be a one week studio session ended up taking almost eight years, with the pandemic and a complete rebuild of their studio being major interruptions. Since then they’ve found a much quicker creative pace, having written five new songs between June 2025 and March 2026. They’ve also been working very closely with producer Jed Jones (who’s had the Killers and Post Malone amongst his credits). As The Sunmills continue to develop their sound they’re becoming increasingly willing to go down the route of following the oddball idea and building a song around a very particular character. “Secret To Tell” (out 27th October 2026) is a case in point. The central conceit might be rather extreme, but the behaviour it’s based on is very much something we can all relate to. We’ve all known someone who can’t keep their mouth shut and The Sunmills have found a delightfully absurd way of turning that person into the focus of a song. It’s a song with a very sharp sense of humour and one that just gets more and more ridiculous the longer you think about it. Another opportunity for the band to show their character.
English