The Breaks

SUUNS is an experimental band from Montreal formed by Ben Shemie, Liam O’Neill and Joseph Yarmush. They’ve put out six critically acclaimed full-length albums and one EP, which have been nominated for the Polaris Music Prize, the ADISQ Awards and the GAMIQ Awards. They’ve toured the world and played in many festivals including Pitchfork Music Festival (France), Glastonbury (UK), Primavera (Spain), Iceland Airwaves, Les Inrocks (France), Le Guess Who (The Netherlands) and many more. They’ve sold-out headlining concerts in Berlin, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Barcelona, Montreal, Toronto and many more. Their music has been heard in films such as Ant-Man and Only God Forgives and in TV shows such as Blacklist. Their last album The Witness received praise from Uncut, Consequence of Sound, The Fader, Brooklyn Vegan, Exclaim!, Loud and Quiet, La Presse, Le Devoir and many more.

On their new LP The Breaks, SUUNS find themselves lost in limbo. 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 Shemie, O’Neill and Yarmush gleefully experimenting with loops, synths, samples and MIDI instruments like a post-millennial Tangerine Dream messing with downtempo triphop beats.

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 – like on the stunning ballad “Doreen” – are allowed to branch out into the vast glacial dreamscapes of the album’s majestic title track. 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 on spinning.