The Sunday Review Announce New Single “Truth & Lies (Balls To The Walls),” Featuring Drummer Brian Dunne Of Hall And Oates

THE NEW YORK PROJECT LED BY MICHAEL CERDA AND CHRIS PHILLIPS PUSHES FURTHER INTO SYNTH-POP, YACHT ROCK AND MID-’80S STUDIO-POP

THE SUNDAY REVIEW WILL PERFORM JUNE 17, 2026 AT THE CUTTING ROOM IN NEW YORK CITY

The Sunday Review, the New York-based project led by singer/songwriter Michael Cerda and guitarist/producer Chris Phillips, announce “Truth & Lies (Balls to the Walls),” a new single featuring drummer Brian Dunne of Hall and Oates. Built from stuttered rhythm, slap bass, arpeggiated guitar, Jupiter-8 synth tones and a wide-open chorus, the track follows the band’s 2024 debut, Get Back Home, and the 2025 single “Coming Around (For You),” while pointing toward a second album that leans further into synth-pop.

Cerda and Phillips built The Sunday Review around what Cerda characterizes as a constraint: mid-’80s-sounding songs, written now. The frame comes from the radio, movie soundtracks and guilty pleasures that shaped both musicians, but the writing began in the present tense, through tracks passed back and forth between California and New York.

“If you were alive in the mid-’80s, this is going to take you there,” Cerda says. “For us, that was the John Hughes era: first romance, first explorations, summer, discovery, aspiration. Roxy Music, Don Henley’s ‘The Boys of Summer’ — those melodic lines ruled the day. Songs had purpose. They had a life. They were soundtracks. This is the soundtrack of 1987.”

Phillips hears “Truth & Lies” as the clearest arrival yet of The Sunday Review’s sound. “What MC brings out in me is a different approach than I normally take,” he says. “‘Truth & Lies’ has become a favorite because of that. It feels like the culmination of everything we’ve been trying to do. It reaches into Roxy Music, Kajagoogoo, that very specific ’80s air I had always wanted to touch.”

Michael Cerda & Chris Phillips of The Sunday Review, The Bowery Electric Nov. ‘23

Cerda and Phillips first connected in New York through Yellow House Orchestra, Cerda’s Latin jazz/pop crossover project, when Phillips played on one of its records. During the pandemic, with Cerda in California and Phillips in New York, they began trading songs at a distance: Cerda sent raw fragments, sometimes straight from his phone; Phillips sent back 30-second sketches that showed what the songs could become.

“We started sharing guilty-pleasure songs that we were writing,” Cerda says. “Guilty pleasure meaning mid-’80s-sounding stuff, but written now. That became the bit. That became the constraint that became The Sunday Review.”

Get Back Home arrived in 2024 on Circle 9 Records, with Dunne, Andrew Gould and Chevy Chevis joining Cerda and Phillips across nine tracks. “Coming Around (For You),” released in 2025, pointed toward the synth-pop direction of the forthcoming second album. For the live band, Cerda moved off bass and brought in players who could keep the songs locked to that mid-’80s feel.

“Truth & Lies (Balls to the Walls)” grew out of a destabilizing professional chapter for Cerda and Phillips, when both found themselves asking what came next. Phillips says “balls to the walls” captured the approach: no giving up, constant motion. Cerda points to the opener: “Balls to the walls / You make the calls / You had the gall / That says it all.”

“It was a motivating song, almost self-reinforcing,” Cerda says. “The energy was, ‘You got this. Go.’ It comes down to owning your outcome. Nobody gets behind you before you do. But there’s noise along the way, and that’s the payoff in the chorus: there’s truth and there’s lies. Everybody wants black and white, but it’s never black and white. It’s always somewhere closer to the center.”

Elsewhere, the lyric keeps its language clipped: “Hands on the wheel / You cut the deal / No time to feel / It’s all too real”; “Eyes on the prize / You burned the skies / In your disguise / With your lies.”

Phillips built the track around contrast. The verses ride an offset, syncopated pulse with slap bass; the chorus opens into a smoother, more melodic two-chord release. The track began with programmed rhythm — a Drumulator skeleton — then grew around synth arpeggios, the project’s signature Jupiter sound, real guitar and an arpeggiated figure inspired by the lift of Tears for Fears.

“What supports those words is this unusual, stuttered drumbeat,” Phillips says. “It’s syncopated and offset, with slap bass underneath, and it sets up a real contrast with the chorus, which is smooth, melodic and direct. The song has three parts, and each one has its own identity. There wasn’t much overthinking. It just came to be.”

Dunne’s drums brought the final version to life. Cerda and Phillips already loved the programmed version and debated whether live drums would disturb what they had. Dunne’s playing sharpened the impact without crowding the track, especially near the end, where cymbal-bell accents nod toward Stewart Copeland.

“We already loved it,” Cerda says. “Part of us thought, ‘Let’s not mess it up — it’s too good.’ Then Brian played on it, and he crushed it.”

Phillips calls “Truth & Lies” part of the band’s second chapter. The first Sunday Review album moved through yacht rock, classic rock, punk edges and R&B polish; the new material leans more decisively into the synth-pop sound that “Coming Around (For You)” began to reveal.

“It feels like we hit our stride,” Phillips says. “The first album was a melange of different things. This feels like the sound we were trying to find: what MC brings, what I bring, our histories, our tastes, the things we both love. There’s Roxy, The Police and Steely Dan in this, and it came together and formed its own thing. If we have a stadium song, this is it.”

“There are moments in this song that feel like every Rocky movie,” Cerda says. “The inspiring music comes on, he’s training for the big thing, he’s gone through the slump, and he’s on his way back up. There are moments where I feel like doing one-handed push-ups. It’s that feeling: go.”

The Sunday Review will perform Wednesday, June 17, 2026 at The Cutting Room in New York City, on a bill with Eliezer Nebot and Cassette Unlimited. More music from the band’s forthcoming second album will follow.