SUUNS ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM “THE BREAKS” OUT SEPTEMBER 6
Respected Canadian avant-rock band SUUNS announced The Breaks, their sixth studio album will arrive September 6th via Secret City Records in Canada (Worldwide: Joyful Noise Records). The trio of Ben Shemie, Joseph Yarmush, and Liam O’Neill leans more zealously than ever into their pop instincts. Yet remarkably enough, with that same dauntless abandon, SUUNS have mined a more extreme sonic palette this time around, one that stretches far beyond their core fundamentals as a band. The Breaks finds the trio gleefully experimenting with loops, synths, samples and MIDI instruments like a post-millennial Tangerine Dream messing with downtempo triphop beats.
Lead single “The Breaks” embodies SUUNS’ bold new venture into dream pop territory – one side plunging into the depths of electronic abstraction, the other anchored into their instincts as a band.
In the accompanying music video, director Alexander Ortiz explains:
“The idea for the video is basically to match the slow moody feel of the song. It conjures movement with no destination in mind and analogue blends of images that you can almost touch. From bike rides and night drives to the passion of cha-cha dancing with a bouquet of flowers.”
On The Breaks, SUUNS find themselves lost in limbo. For some artists, being caught in flux may result in songs that are either naive, out of touch, or both, simply as a consequence of being cut off from human civilization. But for SUUNS, a band that has grown more than comfortable in the oblique and the intermediate, it actually had the opposite effect. The Breaks marks the Montreal experimental rock outfit’s most emotionally resonant and tonally rich collection of music to date.
“‘The Breaks’ became sort of the opposite of our last record. Nothing was really played together. We were caught in a little bit of a wormhole, trying new things, throwing different things against the wall,” multi-instrumentalist Yarmush adds.
Bands less experienced might have been forever trapped in said wormhole, but SUUNS’ mutual chemistry and trust turned out to be a reliable tether to explore these novel sonic ecosystems.
By fate and circumstance, O’Neill took point in the producer’s chair for The Breaks, arranging, structuring, and editing many of Shemie and Yarmush’s ideas from sporadic rehearsal sessions into Pro Tools, reimagining the songs over and over during a two-year time frame.
“We were making this album at a time I just didn’t really have a lot going on in my life other than music,” O’Neill says. “Sometimes we arrived at these moments of impasse and where we didn’t know what to do. And I just found myself really getting into it. Let’s try this and this! And just try everything. I had a lot of energy, and I felt really passionate about it.”
Forged between countless plane rides, road trips, van tours, and text threads, The Breaks became a product of endurance and a lot of trial and error. It’s a record composed in tight fissions of freedom, where spells of whispered intimacy are allowed to branch out into vast glacial dreamscapes. It captures SUUNS at their most panoramic, curious, and exuberant: a constant relay of being adrift and enlightened anew, geared up to eleven. And guess what: the wheels keep spinning.
Tour Dates
June 7 – Chicoutimi, QC, Canada – CEM
June 8 – Gatineau, QC, Canada – Pointelandia
September 12 – London, UK – Studio 9294
September 13 – Leffinge, Belgium – Leffingeleuren Festival
September 14 – Amsterdam, Netherlands – Indiestad Festival at Paradiso
September 15 – Lyon, France – Epicerie Moderne
September 16 – Marseille, France – Espace Julien
September 17 – Paris, France – Trabendo
September 19 – Liège, Belgium – Reflektor
September 20 – Rotterdam, Netherlands – Lantaren Venster
September 21 – Hamburg, Germany – Reeperbahn Festival
September 22 – Berlin, Germany – Lido
November 2 – Mexico City, Mexico – Hipnosis Music Festival 2024
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