Even in its brevity, the Montreal four-piece art-rock band stage a foray into something more instinctive and assured.
Suuns’ music sounds so twisted and squashed because it is usually the product of several competing influences. Guitars repeat like arpeggiated keyboards, crisp percussion jostles for space with drum machines, and vocals snarl and quaver like synthesizers. The frontman for the Montreal four-piece, Ben Shemie, once said, “I like this idea of pressure,” which is evident on their latest EP. Hyper-compressed lead vocals and instrumentation repel each other, with each element blooming and reducing like blobs of oil in water.
Fiction is clearly a direct descendent of Felt, Suuns’ 2018 studio album; “Death” even reuses part of “Moonbeams,” Felt’s penultimate song. However, the EP deepens and develops the band’s themes of dissociated helplessness introduced back in 2018. The songs here are underlaid with nervy, roiling sheets of babbling feedback. Austere arrangements are overlaid with warped electronics and distorted vocals, like if Gustav Klimt’s “Golden Phase” paintings were able to manufacture a car. Clearly defined, geometric images foreground muted backdrops in a way that gives a strange sense of physical perspective. Suuns tap into a specific mood: It’s not hazy, but faded.
With all but one song clocking in at around three minutes, the EP is, naturally, brief. However, it never feels insubstantial because the sound of the whole thing is so spectacular. The digitized vocal treatment is one of the most striking elements here. Though present on Felt, it’s now inescapable. Shemie’s melodies can feel improvisational to the point of being atonal, but occasionally a gorgeous pop cadence plops out. There’s such a focus on distorting the voice that the effects seem to direct Shemie’s voice rather than the other way round. It gives the feeling as if it has a life of its own.
Although the noisy, avant-rock EP feels dislocated from reality in a musical sense, Suuns end on a note of political anxiety. “Trouble Every Day” is a spoken-word piece lifted from a Frank Zappa lyric, backed by crashing jazz drums and a squalling guitar line. Originally written in 1996, the lyrics “I’m not Black but there’s a whole lots of times I wish I could say I’m not white” and references to “cops out on the street” are eerily prescient.
In the past, Suuns’ world has felt insular and meticulous. They make cold, brutal music with song titles like “Paralyser” and “Control.” Fiction disturbs this categorization. Of course, it’s tempting to want more, more clearly-defined songs, more beats, more aggression, more of that sublime bweebeebewboo guitar line; there are only two straight-up-and-down songs here while the rest feel like sketches. The abstract seethe of “Breathe” is barely more than one looped refrain, all ticker-tape snares and slack metallic string sounds. However, Fiction is still a marker for the noise-rock stalwarts: a foray into something more instinctive and assured.
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