The facts of its making are the stuff of bedroom-pop legend. A home studio built piece by piece, one secondhand purchase and one hard-won lesson at a time. Arrangement by Fisher H. Gallagher, a main sample from the producer ripvanwillow, and, by the artist’s own cheerfully unembarrassed account, a final ingredient he simply calls “LOVE”. In lesser hands, that sort of talk curdles into press-release treacle. Here it reads as a working method. The chopping and sampling are the tender part of the process, an act of salvage as much as construction, and the song has the lived-in warmth of a thing assembled by someone who has spent nine years learning where every cable goes.<\/p>
The lineage is easy to trace and pleasing to hear. Crystal Castles supply the frost on the windowpane, MGMT the sun-bleached psychedelic wink, Porter Robinson the sugar-rush heartbreak, with Ninajirachi, 2hollis and Snow Strippers adding the glitter and the grit. Yet suscie never plays curator. He doesn’t pin these influences to the wall like butterflies; he lets them bleed into one another until the seams vanish, and what remains is a sound that yearns for the past without wearing its costume. It’s nostalgia with its phone out, standing in the present tense.<\/p> That tension is the heart of the thing. The passenger princess of the title is a gorgeous piece of character drawing: broken, perceptive, maddeningly remote, the sort of person who finishes your unspoken sentences and then drifts off to look out of the window. suscie’s refrain, that love was never contemporary, is the line that lingers. It is a shrug and a eulogy at once, delivered with the weary tenderness of someone who has long since stopped expecting romance to keep up with the times and decided to write it a song anyway. The arrangement leans into that ambivalence, pulling close, then withdrawing, much as its subject does. Intimacy is offered and snatched back in the same breath, and the listener, like the narrator, keeps chasing it.<\/span><\/p> Plenty of electronic singles of this kind drown in their own atmosphere, all reverb and no spine. This one keeps its shape. The sampled core gives the track a melodic centre of gravity, and the production resists the temptation to over-decorate, leaving room for the vulnerability to breathe. Gallagher’s mix and master gives the whole a polish that never tips into sterility, which, for a record cut in a home studio, is no small feat. It sounds handmade, and it sounds finished.<\/span><\/p> It is also, quietly, a manifesto. suscie talks of “real success” as an illusion cooked up by the superpowers of the world, and of the only genuine victory being the best version of yourself. Such sentiments are easy to print on a tote bag and hard to live by. Set against this single, they feel earned: a record made without permission, without a budget to speak of, and without the slightest interest in chasing whatever the algorithm fancies this week.<\/span><\/p> Southern Utah may seem an unlikely launchpad for a cult favourite, but cults, by definition, form in unlikely places. suscie insists his following is out there somewhere, waiting to stumble across him. On the evidence of this lovely, wounded, beautifully assembled single, they won’t be waiting long.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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