As a band who has been around for thirteen years and toured all corners of the world, there comes a point when the veil of mystique must be fully lifted. Up until now, experimental rockers SUUNS have revelled in mystery like a silhouette disappearing into the mist, releasing albums that rest comfortably in ambiguity, detachment and innuendo. But lately, the band appears to be more comfortable coming clean with their own inner workings. That newfound sense of ease is undeniable on SUUNS’ fifth full-length album The Witness – their first for Joyful Noise Recordings.

Self-recorded and self-produced over the majority of 2020 – a year of strife, solitude and reflection –The Witness finds the band holding a magnifying glass over their own default state of playing and performing. It’s a swift departure from previous album Felt, which harvested haphazard ideas in their embryonic, demoed versions, as if letting loose a glorious fireworks display into the heavens. The Witness, meanwhile, pours SUUNS’ music into a more intricate mold, compelling the band to embrace the vibrancy of their live performances and urging vocalist Ben Shemie to approach his lyricism with unabashed directness.

“There’s something interesting about the idea of a collective witness, being a witness to the time we’re living in now,” Shemie reflects. “And the connectedness of what we all have in common. But also, literally: bearing witness to all sorts of things and how that desensitises you. There’s a recurring line that comes back on the record: ‘I know that you’ve seen it too.’ It kind of comes down to being true to yourself and acknowledging what is and isn’t real.”

Perhaps unintentionally, SUUNS have always been a strangely intimate band, and with The Witness, they themselves became aware of the extent of this. Though the world is becoming a more distorted, confusing place, The Witness extends a sonic lifeline to latch onto, one bolstered by years of friendship, chemistry and trust.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: 'The Witness' is without a doubt, Suuns' springboard into mainstream consciousness. While their previous outings were undeniably well done, it's here we get to see their inventive leap into soaring synthpop and scattered electronica, while still hearing myriad elements of their original sound.

TRACK LISTING

Third Stream
Witness Protection
C-Thru
Timebender
Clarity
The Fix
Go To My Head
The Trilogy

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Suuns are pleased to announced their new album, Felt, coming out March 2nd on Secretly Canadian. Singer/guitarist Ben Shemie says, “This record is definitely looser than our last one [2016’s Hold/Still]. It’s not as clinical. There’s more swagger.” You can hear this freedom flowing through the 11 tracks on Felt. It’s both a continuation and rebirth, the Montreal quartet returning to beloved local facility Breakglass Studios (where they cut their first two albums [Zeroes QC and Images Du Futur] with Jace Lasek of The Besnard Lakes) but this time recording themselves at their own pace, over five fertile sessions spanning several months. A simultaneous stretching out and honing in, mixed to audiophile perfection by St Vincent producer John Congleton (helmer of Hold/Still), who flew up especially from Dallas to deploy his award-winning skills in situ.

Complementing O’Neill are the ecstatic, Harmonia-meets-Game Boy patterns unleashed by electronics mastermind Max Henry. Eschewing presets, Henry devised fresh sounds for each song on Felt while also becoming a default musical director, orchestrating patches and oscillations. Quietly enthusing about “freaky post-techno” and Frank Ocean’s use of space, he’s among your more modest studio desk jockeys: “Yeah, I sat in the control room while the others played – hitting ‘record’ and ‘stop’. It also gave me the flexibility to move parts around and play with effects. I do have a sweet tooth for pop music.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Darryl says: Hypnotic synth throbs, dusty percussion workouts and flickering kosmische bass meet with ambient downtempo before thrashing forwards into dark dystopian minimal wave. Superb.

TRACK LISTING

1. Look No Further
2. X-ALT
3. Watch You, Watch Me
4. Baseline
5. After The Fall
6. Control
7. Make It Real
8. Daydream
9. Peace And Love
10. Moonbeams
11. Materials

Hold/Still, the third studio album from Suuns, is an enigmatic thing: an eerily beautiful, meticulously played suite of music that embraces opposites and makes a virtue of cognitive dissonance. It is a record that does not give up its secrets easily. The 11 songs within are simultaneously psychedelic, but austere; sensual, but cold; organic, but electronic; tense sometimes to the brink of mania, but always retaining perfect poise and control. "There's an element of this album that resists you as a listener, and I think that's because of these constantly opposing forces," says drummer Liam O'Neill. "Listen to the song 'Brainwash', for instance, "It's a very soft, lyrical guitar song, existing alongside extremely aggressive and sparse drum textures. It inhabits these two worlds at the same time."

From the beginning, Suuns (you pronounce it "soons", and it translates as "zeroes" in Thai) have sought to do things differently. They formed in Montreal 2007, when singer/guitarist Ben Shemie and guitarist Joe Yarmush got together to work on some demos, soon to be joined by Liam, Ben's old schoolfriend, on drums and Max Henry on synth. Their group's first two records, 2010's Zeroes QC and 2012's Polaris Prize-nominated Images Du Futur – both released on Secretly Canadian – were immediate critical hits, and Suuns soon found themselves part of a late '00s musical renaissance in the city, alongside fellow groups like The Besnard Lakes, Islands and Land Of Talk. Still, at the same time, Suuns feel remote from the big, baroque ensembles and apocalyptic orchestras that typify the Montreal scene. "We write quite minimal music," thinks Ben. "They're not traditional song forms, sometimes they don't really go anywhere – but they have their own kind of logic." Or as Joe puts it: "It's pop music, but sitting in this evil space."

After two records produced by their friend Jace Lasek of The Besnard Lakes at his Montreal studio Breakglass, Suuns decided Hold/Still demanded a different approach. In May 2015, they decamped to Dallas, Texas to work with Grammy- winning producer John Congleton (St Vincent, The War On Drugs, Sleater- Kinney). For three intense weeks, the four recorded in Congleton's studio by day, the producer driving them to capture perfect live takes with virtually no overdubbing. At night, they returned to their cramped apartment and stewed. "Recording in Montreal, it's more of a party atmosphere," says Joe. "Here it felt like we were on a mission. We were looking for something to take us out of our element, or that might seep into our music." Luckily, the effect was galvanizing. Under Congleton's instruction, 'Translate' and 'Infinity', songs the group had been reworking for years, suddenly found their form.

The result is undoubtedly Suuns' most focused album to date, the sound of a band working in mental lockstep, crafting a guitar music that feels unbeholden to clear traditions or genre brackets. From the haunted electronic blues of 'Nobody Can Save Me Now' to throbbing seven-minute centrepiece 'Careful', Hold/Still foregrounds the work of Max, a synthesizer obsessive who builds hisown patches and confesses to using cranky or budget equipment as well as top-of-the-range kit because "[good gear] does all the work for you, and that's not always fun". Certainly, this is a band as inspired by the dark groove textures of Andy Stott, the flourishing arpeggios of James Holden or the serrated productions of Death Grips as anything familiarly rock. "Things don't feel right until they've been touched or cast over in an electronic light," elaborates Liam. "It's rare that acoustic drum kit, guitar, and bass comprise a finished product for us. For a song to be Suuns, it has to be coloured by electronics".

Certainly this remains a band in love with the aesthetic of obscurity. The album cover is an image of Ben's former workmate Nahka, who was captured by photographer Caroline Desilets using a pinhole camera with a four-minute exposure time – Hold/Still, indeed.

In another contradiction, this record finds Ben's vocals far more enunciated and upfront than before. If there are themes that tie Hold/Still together, says Ben, they might be investigations "about sex... perhaps not the act specifically, just [themes] of a sexual nature. But there's also a spiritual undertone that points to another kind of searching." The sexual is illustrated in the dark romance of 'Careful', while longing becomes both sexual and spiritual in the thirsty pleas of 'Instrument': "I wanna believe/I wanna receive..." The spiritual takes over on the back half of the record. 'Nobody Can Save Me Now' evokes artist Tracey Emin's ghostly invocation For You at the Liverpool Cathedral: "I felt you / and I knew that you loved me", while side B opener 'Brainwash' wonders: "Do you see, all seeing? / Do you know, all knowing?"

In a cultural centre like Montreal, bands can get too comfortable playing to their peers. Suuns, though, feel like a band always looking to the nearest border. They found early audiences in France and in Belgium, where they curated the Sonic City Festival in 2012, booking acts as diverse as Swans, Tim Hecker and Demdike Stare. Meanwhile, the last couple of years have seen them tour as far afield as Mexico, Morocco, Beirut, Taiwan and Istanbul – sometimes with friend Radwan Moumneh of the multimedia project Jerusalem In My Heart, with whom they released a brilliant collaborative record, Suuns And Jerusalem In My Heart last year.

"We tour a lot as a band and we've been all over the map at this point," says Ben. "There is a concerted effort on our part, when the opportunity arises, to do that. It's like, this time, let's try to go further east, let's try to go further south. You find yourself playing in front of people who don't get bands playing in front of them often, and that can be really fun." In short, good things happen when you venture outside of your comfort zone – a truth that you could equally apply to Hold/Still itself: an album which derives its eerie power from simmering tensions and strange, stark juxtapositions, and in doing so, directs rock music down a new, unventured path.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Hold/Still is a chaotic and jagged foray into the recesses of thought. Distorted synth pulses underpinning cracked drums and glitched pads. Hypnotic repeated guitar loops bringing things back to earth before exploding into a rain of percussion and psych-drone chanting. Exhilarating and deep, the appeal of this grows with every listen and it is more than worth the time.

TRACK LISTING

1. Fall
2. Instrument
3. Un-No
4. Resistance
5. Mortise And Tenon
6. Translate
7. Brainwash
8. Careful
9. Paralyzer
10. Nobody Can Save Me Now
11. Infinity

Beginning in November 2012, Suuns and longtime friend Radwan Ghazi Moumneh of Jerusalem In My Heart rented a studio in Montreal for seven days. The idea was to collaborate on rough sketches of song ideas and to complete as much recording as possible without discrimination. The session was successful, yielding many vibe-laden songs featuring heavy analogue synths, Arabic influences and electronic sensibilities.

After the session the recordings laid dormant. Both bands were releasing individual albums; touring was to ensue shortly. Some editing time was squeezed in between tour dates but a full year passed before the songs were heard by an audience. The collaborative band did a live show at Pop Montreal 2013 and then another the following March. At that point the project was kickstarted into gear. The band over-dubbed and re-worked the songs in the summer of 2014 and finally, whilst on tour in October, finished the vocal overdubs and mixing. Radwan Ghazi Moumneh of Jerusalem In My Heart did the tracking and most of the mixing while Max Henry of Suuns handled some mixing as well.

Montreal’s Suuns spent the winter and spring of 2012 writing and recording ‘Images Du Futur’. Their sessions were concurrent with the Quebec student protests that started in February of 2012 and continued through September of this year. Set against a backdrop lead singer Ben Shemie calls “a climate of excitement, hope and frustration,” Suuns aimed for an expansion of the musical ideas on their critically acclaimed first record, ‘Zeroes, QC’.

‘Images Du Futur’ builds upon the intensity of their debut, but often does so through new textures and subtler dynamic manoeuvring. Album standout ‘Edie’s Dream’ begins with a single bassline repeated from which layers build and rise - first drums, then a wash of white noise; echoes of guitar, then chanted vocals. The song’s clever shifts are jazz-touched and delicate, almost subliminal. It all makes for a stark, skeletal boogie - more an astral projection than a song. ‘Edie’s Dream’ exemplifies the restraint of which Suuns is capable and works to make the unhinged moments all the more devastating.

Lauded by Pitchfork and NME - the former saying “few bands this young are operating on quite this scale, and fewer still have the brass - and the patience - to pull off a big, glitzy, complex record like ‘Zeroes, QC’”, and the latter declaring them 2011’s Best New Band - Suuns have deepened their approach, using minimalist techniques to create maximalist works.

Produced once again by Jace Lasek from Besnard Lakes. Shemie says of the process, “As a band we were trying to look at our music from further and further away, seeing more details in the picture as we expanded the landscape.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Darryl says: The sophomore release from Suuns builds on their excellent debut with a restrained and minimal intensity that threatens to boil over with washes of unhinged noise, but rarely does. A brooding classic!

TRACK LISTING

1. Powers Of Ten
2. 2020
3. Minor Work
4. Mirror Mirror
5. Edie's Dream
6. Sunspot
7. Bambi
8. Holocene City
9. Images Du Futur
10. Music Won’t Save You