Today, respected Canadian avant-rock band SUUNS announced The Breaks, their sixth studio album will arrive September 6th. 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 in the depths of electronic abstraction, the other anchored into their instincts as a band. On 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 who have 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.
