Suss

Counting Sunsets is a quietly expansive continuation of SUSS's slow-motion Americana, tracing new lines through the terrain they've been mapping across their run of albums for Northern Spy. As with earlier releases, the band leans into wide-open desert horizons, kosmische drift, and noir-ish pedal-steel laments, but this time an end-of-day stillness permeates. Counting Sunsets feels episodic and reflective: a sequence of small, neon-glowing moments that pass like light changing at dusk. Each piece arrives with the calm assurance of a band attuned to negative space, tone, decay, atmosphere, and melody. A quiet preoccupation with memory and the slow erosion of time. Light fades and the air carries sound.

Suss: Ghost Box (Expanded) [CD]

Suss: Promise [CD]

High Line represents a new path into the high country for the NYC ambient country quintet known as SUSS. The follow-up release to their acclaimed album Ghost Box (Expanded) on Northern Spy Records, High Line explores the horizon line where the cosmic meets the landscape of the American West. Drawing on influences such as Ry Cooder and Bruce Langhorne while forging new paths alongside fellow travelers like Daniel Lanois and Boards of Canada, SUSS uses a combination of acoustic guitars, pedal steel, harmonica, mandolin and synthesized sound manipulation to take the listener on a blissful and mythic trip into the unknown.

Pioneering ambient country trio, SUSS “perform with an effortless sense of synchronicity,” according to Stereogum. This quality is as vividly on display as ever throughout their latest full-length, Birds & Beasts. SUSS’s recordings have garnered much praise for effecting a sense of long drives through desert landscapes, a context famously ripe for such synchronicities: slow motion pedal steel guitar, dobro and near-subconscious synthesizer rumbles and sweeps seem to operate via the same logic as that which dictates the interactions of a road-weary mind and a cloud of migrating birds. While SUSS’s previous records have dealt in these kinds of scenes, Birds & Beasts –– though instrumentally more spare –– deepens the sense of meaning and meaning projected.