Suuns - Hold/Still

Three albums in for Montreal’s Suuns and they’re still not making it any easier. Once again, on ‘Hold/Still’ they slink through their characteristic mix of bubbling synths and hypnotic guitars - that’s their trademark.

It’s an album that boasts all the tools, from impenetrable denseness to intimidating stillness, but tends to shapeshift as ideas and intents dictate. It’s united under a banner of eeriness, but somehow they find eleven different ways to weave the same tales of terror. Genres fall by the wayside as krautrock melts into a studied and dense electronica, and pulls either towards the tenseness of post-punk or the hazy surrealism of shoegaze.

Opener ‘Fall’ is largely three minutes of cacophonous thudding, before ‘Instrument’ crawls out of the cracks to make a much more palatable low key introduction. The Canadian four-piece repeatedly prove masters of the slow build, and through the undulating synths ‘UN-NO’ rises out tense siren-like squalls before cascading down into a broken ‘No, no, no, no…”. Constantly challenging, vocalist Ben Shemie, implores the listener to “Resist, resist, resist” before slipping into a psychedelic breakaway on ‘Resistance’. At times it’s deceptively simple, ‘Mortise and Tenon’ forming the basis of a standard, downtempo track. Suuns don’t let the air of predictability linger long, upping the tension with the urgent ‘Translate’ and letting loose a snarling wolf of a synthetic bassline midway through the up-to-that-point vulnerable acoustic tune, ‘Brainwash’. “I just want to touch you, and feel you with my hands. Give in…” is the sinister message, of even more sinisterly-named ‘Paralyzer’, as the album finds a These New Puritans-style scale and menace towards its end.