Suss

Suss: Birds & Beasts (Yellow & Pink) [Vinyl LP]

Suss: High Line (Coloured) [Vinyl LP]

Suss: Promise (Cirrus Sky) [Vinyl LP]

While their first two albums Ghost Box and High Line, explored panoramas that evoked the American West as well as the cosmic beyond, Promise, the third and latest album by SUSS on Northern Spy Records, takes a more personal journey that maps out the rocky terrain of the American dream. Writing, recording and mixing during the pandemic quarantine, the members of SUSS used their music to come to grips with concepts such as promise and hope and what they could still mean in this day and age. Drawing on influences from their younger years, SUSS has created music that evokes early psychedelic Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk and the seminal soundtrack work of John Barry. The results, which they call “pastoral psychedelicism,” is a music that is beautiful, haunting and challenging.

Suss: High Line (Wetlands Green) [Vinyl LP]

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.