“Early on, our art was pretty stark, with black and white imagery,” says Suuns guitarist and bassist Joe Yarmush. “Classic French and Italian cinema mixed with 80s punk. Beautiful and dirty.”
He’s discussing the gritty artwork style that characterized the Montreal art rock band’s early albums and music videos, but he could well be describing the music itself, too. Arriving in 2010 with their first album, Zeroes QC, a sinister study in electronic music meshed with punk, Suuns displayed a special prowess for stark yet unhinged compositions.
The band got their start when Yarmush met vocalist and guitarist Ben Shemie in Montreal in 2007, and the duo began writing songs. Their original name was Zeroes, but for copyright reasons they switched it to the Thai word for zero, Suuns (pronounced ‘soons’), keeping the original name alive in the debut album title.
“I wanted to bring back some attitude and a punk approach that was missing in the music from Montreal at that time,” Yarmush says of the band’s origins. “There was lots of folk and rootsy music happening. While that was fine, we were not into making that. We wanted to be Suicide and the Stooges.”
'Pie IX' from Zeroes QC.
Those references are apparent on Zeroes QC, though woven through with dark electronics and a cold industrial touch. Later efforts, especially their 2016 record Hold/Still and its album of remixes, caused the band to be categorized as ‘psychedelic,’ but Yarmush says it’s not a label he thinks about much. The description seems to fit especially well, though, when paired with much of their later visuals, especially for the 2016 track ‘Brainwash,’ which Yarmush calls “the weirdest video and perhaps song we have.”
“If you know too much, it can kill the mystique.”
The video in question depicts a glitchy animated beach populated by abandoned buildings as Shemie croons: “Do you really know how the other half lives?” The camera then descends into a yellow and black cyberpunk underworld as the industrial beat drops.
The way Suuns discuss their own music is much more stark than psychedelic or freewheeling, however, and they shy away from elaborate explanations of their songwriting process and themes. In 2016, drummer Liam O’Neill published an eloquent plea against packaging and over-explaining art for music blog The Line of Best Fit.
“Making music is largely a wandering process, and talking about it is typically not very interesting,” he writes. “It’s a process of endless repetition, dead-ends, anchorless exploration, conflicting ideas. What’s amazing about music, to me anyway, is how musicians arrive at places of beauty and cultural relevance in spite of all this drudgery.”
Yarmush agrees, pointing out that, “[the article] was spurred by reading about musicians and how if you know too much, it can kill the mystique and aura that adds to one’s appeal.”
The band’s latest record, Felt, dropped earlier this year, and is notable for a looser and more fluid take on their breed of pitch-black art rock. An album cover of a plaster hand poking a black balloon on a sickly green background hints at the band’s pushing of their own boundaries while staying in-tune with their signature twisted sound.
'Make It Real' from Felt.
Felt has an expansive, melancholy feeling. The single ‘Look No Further’ opens with church bells before launching into a warbling electronic beat, with a simple music video depicting schoolchildren passing an afternoon in a bleak industrial apartment complex, coloring on their hands and discussing how magic is “all a big lie.” Even so, the band sounds almost upbeat on a few songs, like the feverish ‘Daydreams.’
Despite his distaste for over-explaining, Yarmush reveals that for Felt the band was “more concerned with getting the right feeling on the record, and less concerned with getting perfect performances. So, we really took our time completing the record, to focus on the songs themselves.”
Suuns are taking Felt on a China tour through Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen this month – their first foray onto the mainland. Since the band is known for putting on an especially engrossing live show, bewitching audiences with their unclassifiable compositions, it’s apparent the music will speak for itself.
Shenzhen: Jun 21, 8.30pm, RMB147 presale, RMB167 door. B10 Live, see event listing.
Shanghai: Jun 22, 8.30pm, RMB147 presale, RMB167 door. Yuyintang, see event listing.
Beijing: Jun 23, 8.30pm, RMB147 presale, RMB167 door. Yue Space, see event listing.
0 User Comments