Suuns - Nostalgia for the Future

The beginnings in Montreal and the first albums

The new millennium in Canada has thrown open the doors to two decades of great bands. In the same span of time, it's hard to find scenes able to pull such a wide array of projects out of the hat, all carrying healthy ideas applicable to rock in its broadest sense. Behind Arcade Fire, the true standard-bearers of the Canadian resurgence, lies a host of great groups with perhaps less ecumenical ambitions, but no less relevant for that — quite the opposite: think of the post-punk of Viet Cong/Preoccupations, the deviant indie-rock of Ought, the noisy psychedelia of The Besnard Lakes, and the experiments of Suuns. A genuine "renaissance" thanks to which the North American country has established itself as one of the world's epicenters of independent/alternative rock.

Montreal, in particular, rises up as the capital of this new Canadian wave. The city in Quebec is the birthplace of the Butler brothers, but also of the musicians who in 2007 formed Suuns: Ben Shemie on vocals and guitar, Joe Yarmush on bass and guitar, Liam O'Neill on drums and Max Henry on keyboards (over time he would actually become just a studio instrumentalist, with the band shrinking to a trio).

From their very earliest efforts, the quartet's focus was on building a repertoire of original material. Even before that, though, Suuns' aim was to craft an aesthetic as free as possible from any resemblance to other projects: expressive originality, as far as it could go, went hand in hand with a recognizability of sound that would become ever more evident as their various records came out.

Indeed, right from the start the four of them could already count on the right ingredients to hit the mark. Zeroes QC came out in 2010, when Suuns were already under the wing of Secretly Canadian, which despite its name isn't actually a Canadian label, but is nonetheless among the sharpest at catching the best coming up from the musical underground. What's more, production of the album was entrusted to Jace Lasek of The Besnard Lakes, with recording sessions held at his Breakglass Studio in Montreal. Even before getting started, in other words, our band was already well embedded in the local scene.

Zeroes QC is already, in effect, a kind of manifesto of Suuns' intentions, albeit still in a “simplified” (and thus more accessible) form, though no less mature for that, of what the Canadians would go on to unleash in the following decade. The sound already revolves around the idea of obsessive repetition, a feeling achieved by weaving guitars and synthesizers into psychedelic spirals that seem to want to musically reproduce the seriality of the contemporary world, but also — implicitly — its frenzy, and at the same time the vacuity of modern life. Its inherent inscrutability. The sound that emerges, together with Shemie's use of his voice, evokes results that might recall certain contemporary bands, though none quite so closely as — in flashes — Radiohead, who some ten years earlier had leapt over the millennium and laid claim to new imaginative territory.

If from the very next record onward the Suuns' sound would gradually expand or fragment into invisible pieces, as if to amplify this sense of postmodern disorientation, on Zeroes QC it's the rhythmic component — more obsessive and “straight-ahead” — that hurls the material, often but not always (as we'll see), toward uncharted territory. Emblematic in this sense are “Gaze” and the lengthy “Sweet Nothing”, two tracks that look more toward contemporary garage-rock than toward anything experimental. Just as strong are songs like “Arena”, “Armed For Peace” and “PVC”, proof of a talent already taking shape both in songcraft and melodic instinct.

Indeed, within the Suuns' debut every track resembles the others, yet each is built differently, as if the album were nothing more than one grand exercise in style. Elsewhere, the Canadians seem to be planting the seeds of their near future sound. “Organ Blues”, in closing position, already represents a bridge to what's to come: a track that moves over a fragmented, almost slow-motion rhythm section, built around an organ — indeed — that sketches a slight unease, amplified at various points by guitar noise. Equally “forward-looking” — or ahead of its time — is “Pie IX”, in which that mechanized repetitiveness emerges that would become the leitmotif of their later work.

Somewhat “alien” chapters, poles apart from the rest, are the delirious “Marauder” and the almost out-of-tune litany of “Fear”. Two tracks that speak volumes about the sonic boundaries of “early” Suuns.

The acclaim earned with Zeroes QC evidently wasn't enough for Suuns, ever more intent on exploring the possibilities of their sonic spectrum. So, in 2013, the release of Images Du Futur represented a somewhat necessary evolution for the Canadians. Signed to Secretly Canadian, the band reinvents itself on this second album, offering listeners a far more expansive sound capable of crossing new sonic frontiers. Images Du Futur is a confident walk into new territory: moving without hesitation and with precision through the crevices of slippery experimentation is a difficult feat, even for more seasoned, longtime professionals.

The album's narrative is a climax toward the hope of serenity. The opener “Powers Of Ten” is rough, tense: Ben Shemie offers vocal laments, whining alongside his two-string, three-chord guitar which, through obsessive movements, allows Liam O'Neill's drums to steer the track's rhythm, loosening or tightening the grip at will; at the opposite end, the closer “Music Won't Save You” is emblematic: music won't save us, but it can certainly help, through a gentle guitar arpeggio and a keyboard that bounces around like an amused ball: the sound, marked by steady electronic drums, an icy snare and Shemie's voice overdoing its homage to Yorke's lesson from “The Eraser”, crystallizes the band's vision — namely, escape from reality — with an audible sneer at the paying audience.

Within the second Canadian chapter we find pages steeped in paranoia, dark atmospheres, celestial visions: Suuns again refuse to grant permission to be filed under a genre like neo-psychedelia or generic alt-pop; what we have in our hands is something else.

When the new classic of the catalogue, “2020”, kicks in, the pages are framed by guitar halos in the style of The XX, and Shemie's soft voice, backed by the full band, teaches us it's not so hard to share an artistic kinship with contemporaries Django Django and forefather David Crosby: in “Minor Work” and “Mirror Mirror” the album's psychedelic chapters take flight, hypnotic in their keyboards and bass, yet soft-voiced on the other hand. Drowsy, we float through “Edie's Dream”, introduced by a dripping bass and liquid guitar notes. It really does feel like hearing Radiohead from the “Amnesiac” era.

With “Sunspot” and “Holocene City” the roads appear less murky, and their blues, reworked through an electro-pop lens, allows the mind to wander freely, since it's the guitars, bass and keyboards steering the wheel.

“Images Du Futur”, the title track, is the view of the horizon at journey's end, the difficult distinction between sky and earth, where keyboard carpets in the style of Eluvium blur the senses, while still allowing us to imagine the “Future”.

Collaborations and explorations: the mature years

Images Du Futur is proof, first and foremost to themselves, that daring is possible, and perhaps necessary. The timid yet already significant experiments of the debut find here a development that's not yet definitive, but the direction has certainly been set, and there's no turning back. Proof of this comes a couple of years later with the offbeat collaboration the Canadians put together with Jerusalem In My Heart. More than a meeting, the Suuns' album with Radwan Ghazi Moumneh resembles a collision between two worlds: an ascetic, nomadic musician of Lebanese origin and a group devoted to experimentation between rock and electronics don't seem to have much in common beyond their place of residence — Canada, of course. Suuns' apocalyptic psychedelia applied to rock evolved without too many hitches. On the other hand, Lebanese producer and musician Radwan is exactly the right person to pull the band's most atmosphere-rich elements toward multicultural fusion.

Three years of sessions and recordings allowed the musicians to let this unusual sonic fruit mature at leisure, titled simply Suuns & Jerusalem In My Heart, which aims for creative simplicity rather than cerebral intoxication. The seven tracks don't carry the scent of ethnic music married to modern sounds, but instead resemble earthly civilization's last desperate attempt to make contact with a higher intelligence (“2amoutu I7tirakan”). Having sent out the SOS, Radwan and his new travelling companions stage a dervish dance, with a crisscrossing dialogue between bass and guitar that simulates an attempt at reconciliation between East and West. Not even the more folk-world leanings of “Seif” manage to find a glimmer of hope, and the cryptic, leaden tone of “In Touch” puts an end to any illusions, invoking through a post-electronic-futurist mantra a new cosmic alliance that vibrates on notes of metronomic electronic trance.

What accompanies the album's evolution is a human and artistic escape. The flapping of wings in “Gazelles In Flight” sets in motion Suuns' will to free themselves from the aesthetic obsession of “Images Du Futur”, while Radwan breaks free from the past, growing ever more fascinated with electronics, leaving behind all the nostalgic connotations of his Lebanese identity. That awareness runs through the record's most romantic and delicate track, “Leyla”, a ballad barely grazed by a timid vocal that precedes the furious finale of “3attam Babey”, which, quoting Godspeed You! Black Emperor, sweeps away despair and opens the doors to the cosmic journey of Suuns & Jerusalem In My Heart.

The collaboration with Jerusalem In My Heart is certainly an apocryphal, standalone chapter in Suuns' career, but at the same time it reveals their insatiable urge to experiment and seek new sonic horizons. The following year, in 2016, the Canadians were no longer looking to find something new, but to consolidate the foundations laid over the preceding years: the result goes by the name of Hold/Still.

In optics, the term refraction is used to describe the deviation an wave undergoes when, passing from one medium to another, its propagation speed changes. Something similar happens to the sound formula of Suuns on “Hold/Still”: the (long) wave is the same one from the previous “Images Du Futur”, but it has been immersed, or rather deflected, into a deeper place, where light struggles to break through and the pulse becomes irregular, certainties crack, and the psychedelic component takes on the shape of a post-industrial hallucination.

Having returned home after the one-off collaboration with Jerusalem In My Heart, Suuns continue their personal exploration of a synthetic, obsessive contemporaneity in its chaotic and unpredictable motion. They carry on, indeed, but at the same time they manipulate, revise, rewrite: because yes, there's a thin but tenacious thread tying together the current and previous chapters of a discography that is finally starting to take on a defined shape, but there's also an equally evident need for discrepancy, fracture, self-estrangement embedded in the genetic code of the Montreal combo. A need to put on the brakes, they'd say, which doesn't however mean giving up on taking new steps forward, with all the risks and uncertainties that entails.

To move forward, at this point, Suuns decide to cut the umbilical cord tying them to the increasingly surprising Montreal scene. No more Jace Lasek of Besnard Lakes in the producer's chair; in his place, John Congleton, a producer who specializes in helping indie scene up-and-comers fully mature. Secondly, the approach itself changes: no more polishing and overdubbing in pursuit of perfection — here the goal is to find the spark that ignites the magic, and to find it there's nothing left to do but capture everything live.

The language spoken on Hold/Still is an unprecedented idiom straddling post-punk, electronics and the kraut imaginary: at times fragmented by rigorous punctuation, elsewhere free to develop in a more outgoing way, yet never able to reach a climax – as the arc of “UN/NO” illustrates well. One can still hear echoes of third-millennium Radiohead, but this time that legacy is only a small, if significant, part of the whole: the pulsing beats of “Mortise And Tenon”, and even more so “Brainwash”, which swims in the same placid waters as the old “Pyramid Song” before crashing into those electronic blasts that, from the midpoint on, harness its trajectory into a sort of assembly line never so dark and dissonant.

The noise-making of “Fall” is also subject to pauses and restarts, as if holding back just an inch from total chaos. But also carving out space within the folds of Hold/Still is a hieratic approach that finds its ultimate expression in “Instrument” and, even more, in the obsessive “Resistance” (with Ben Shemie reciting “Resist!” over and over as if in a trance).

A central hinge between the two halves of the record, “Translate” opens up to a melodic imprint that draws its energy from an ascending, progressive motion, propelled by motorik drive and a nocturnal imagery borrowed from Suicide. The melodic component will return in “Nobody Can Save Me No”, but in a decidedly more measured electro-acoustic guise. And that the ending of “Hold/Still” is more inclined to indulge the Canadian combo's avant-garde instincts becomes fully clear in the long (over 7 minutes, the longest of the whole set) arc of “Careful”, which floats suspended between soundscape and muted homages to James Holden, while the following “Paralyzer” takes on cadences that are at once hushed and sinister, inviting the listener to be ensnared in its weave. The shifts in pace of “Infinity” close out, with fresh shadows, the most ambitious, difficult and accomplished album by Suuns, pervaded by a black light that radiates without burning.

Having found their footing in terms of style and sound, Suuns' output also became more frequent. In 2018, the release of Felt marked the end of their nearly decade-long relationship with Secretly Canadian.

It must be said that the band's fourth album inherited a baton that wasn't easy to carry across the finish line from Hold/Still, a work in which the fragmentation of the material, the ambiguity of its motions well represented by the dualism between muffled calm and the electronic blasts of “Brainwash”, and a fundamentally dark, unexpressed soul were all elements that, combined together, gave rise to instrumental and melodic solutions of real value. Felt picks up the same threads, moves through the same murky art-rock waters (that, ultimately, is what this is), but adds to the mix a mechanical, hieratic seriality stamped by the rhythm section, which in previous records had remained mostly in the background, an occasional episode. The compulsive repetition – which at times turns into gradual transformation – of the theme, essentially unresolved, is one of the main traits found in these eleven new tracks, where the synths once again merge with the guitars. A mechanism that finds a sort of magical balance in “Watch You, Watch Me”, a psychedelic, alien bacchanal that reconciles Kraftwerk with the Air of “10.000 Hz Legend”.

The choice to return to Jace Lasek (The Besnard Lakes), with John Congleton adding the finishing touches, is meant as a signal of both continuity and a search for new sonic avenues. Essentially new is the krautrock boogie of “X-ALT”, with a sax solo breaking, with dissonant intent, the sequence of a track that could have been written by Cavern of Anti-Matter.

The sly gait of “Look No Further”, almost a false start, finds its full realization further on in the muffled psych-rock of “Make It Real”, which is also the most properly melodic approach of the bunch – as well as the one where Radiohead's ever-present influence resurfaces. The narcoleptic pace of “After The Fall” and the mild digressions of “Control”, with the rhythm section finally relegated to a secondary role, re-establish a solid bridge with past work, but it's only a brief pause before the material becomes concrete again to the point of obsession (“Daydream”) and finally dissolves into a noisy cloud (“Moonbeams”).

What Felt gains in concreteness, it loses in expressiveness, compared to a Hold/Still that was and remains the cornerstone of Suuns' discography. This isn't a step backward, though — quite the opposite: the Canadians keep stubbornly going their own self-sufficient way, continuing to evolve in order to stay essentially the same, until their next self-metamorphosis.

The move to Joyful Noise and the 2020s

The dawn of the new decade brought a change of colors. Suuns moved from Secretly Canadian to Joyful Noise, the label that from then on would release their albums alongside the label created by the band itself: Secret City. The 2020s opened for the Canadians with an EP titled Fiction, released in the final months of 2020.

In its brief run, Fiction launches into a sort of crescendo of decibels that starts from the at once sacred and unsettling incantations of “Look”, which gradually vanishes into a placid noise-filled sea, all the way to the irreparable chaos of “Trouble Every Day”, in which the words of Frank Zappa return from a now-distant past – yet never so close – to prophesy the bombardment of information we're subjected to daily, over a backdrop of guitars that fuel the confusion.

The contribution of the guests is anything but negligible: the presence of Rawdan Ghazi Moumneh of Jerusalem In My Heart – a genuine return after their collaboration years earlier – turns “Breathe” into a sort of desert ride that recalls the album written four-handed a few years prior. The other guest is Amber Webber of Lightning Dust on “Death”, with the female voice recreating another messianic, ethereal effect over backing tracks that stage a dystopian, postmodern ambient. In fact, it's the core of the record – made up of the diptych “Pray” and “Fiction” – that presents Suuns in their most recognizable form, with the first track letting the rhythm section surge out of electronic breakers and the second returning to move at the slow-motion pace that is something of a trademark for the Canadians.

If nothing else, these two tracks demonstrate Suuns' great potential in their most standard version, the one that accepts the conventions of the song form. On the other hand, the experimentation hinted at in the rest of the repertoire testifies to the band's ability to move into avant-garde territory as well. Which of the two paths will prevail over the other?

The answer arrives in short order. In early autumn 2021, the release of The Witness somehow reaffirms, and indeed makes even more evident, the Canadian group's trajectory toward a more pronounced experimentation. In the new tracks, sometimes long in duration and dilated in substance, there is - behind the screen of an apparent formal aridity - the beating heart of Suuns' music. Which has always been, by its very nature, experimental music, made of invisible edges, of depersonalized voices, of synthetic ghosts wandering in a kind of hazy, suspended trance. The Canadians' sound has always been trapped between invisible walls of solitude, and it's certainly no coincidence that the work conceived and recorded during the Covid era accentuates this particular trait. After all, if there's no salvation, if redemption is lacking, there's no trace of damnation in here either: everything is suspended in an electronic limbo, a labyrinth with no way out. A condition that, perhaps, pretty much everyone found themselves in amid the nerve-wracking uncertainty of the lockdowns.

Self-recorded and self-produced, the tracks on The Witness deliberately lack the melodic hooks of previous albums and, above all, the instrumental crescendos that often changed the fate of the songs, eventually settling into structures that gradually build up in intensity ("C-Thru"). Here everything is shifted into a minor key, without sudden jolts, and relies more on the forward motion of the beat than on the sparse lines that color its spaces. A beat that sometimes even ends up dissolving and then reconstituting itself, as in the subtle psychedelia of "Third Stream".

While "Timebender" even sketches out a funk meter, a melodic component of notable quality timidly peeks through on "Witness Protection", perhaps the closest thing to a single to be found on this tracklist. The arc of "The Fix" introduces a noise element with an industrial flavor, while "The Trilogy" sketches trajectories that could be described as spatial. But these are just sensations, echoes bouncing around as if in an empty space, devoid of matter and, at times, as in this case, even devoid of gravity.

A little over a decade on from their debut, Suuns seem more than ever intent on pursuing a formula that is anything but accommodating - dark and luminous at once, capable of looking to the future without forgetting to speak to the present.

Contributions by Stefano Macchi ("Images Du Futur") and Gianfranco Marmoro ("Suuns & Jerusalem In My Heart")

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