Suki Waterhouse: Diamond Girl

The bridging manoeuvre worked for the London-born multihyphenate. After establishing herself as a fine singer-songwriter with gorgeous 2022 debut album ‘I Can’t Let Go’ – all mellow reverie and dusky Americana – Waterhouse is readying an excellent follow-up, next month’s ‘Memoir of a Sparklemuffin’. Before that, she’ll open for Taylor Swift at Wembley Stadium on a date of the Eras Tour, and then play buzzy London festival All Points East alongside Mitski. “There aren’t many festivals as cool as All Points East,” says Waterhouse, who is now based in LA. “I can’t wait to be around English people in the park, drinking and having fun again.”

Waterhouse is speaking over Zoom, lying on her bed: an unusual interview position, but an entirely understandable one given that she’s just touched down in London and is currently getting “three or four hours” sleep a night. She and partner Robert Pattinson welcomed a daughter in March, just days after she put the finishing touches to ‘Memoir of a Sparklemuffin’. The album’s ear-snagging title reflects the playful way Waterhouse identifies with an Australian spider known for its iridescent scales. “I came across the Sparklemuffin – which is wildly coloured, does this razzle-dazzle dance, and will be cannibalised by its mate if she doesn’t approve of the dance,” Waterhouse says. “It’s a metaphor for the dance of life we’re all in. The title felt hilarious, ridiculous and wonderful to me.”

Set for release on 13th September via revered indie label Sub Pop, Waterhouse’s sparkling second album is filled with scuzzy stompers inspired by her indie heroes Bloc Party and The Raveonettes, and offbeat, nonchalant pop with echoes of Sheryl Crow. “I can hardly wait to tell you all the shitty things that you’ve done when you’re blackout drunk,” she sings over hand claps and girl-group backing vocals on ‘Blackout Drunk’. Lead single ‘OMG’, which Waterhouse wrote with Jules Apollinaire and Natalie Findlay of London psych band TTRRUUCES, sounds like a lost classic from the so-called “indie sleaze” era of the late 2000s.

The unpolished, somewhat chaotic fashion of this time – think Karen O in a ripped tee and fishnets, or Pete Doherty rocking a trilby – has recently enjoyed a major revival on TikTok and Instagram. No one called it “indie sleaze” back in 2007; the term was popularised a couple of years ago by its new, Gen Z exponents. Waterhouse, who experienced this scene the first time around, says she can understand their clamouring for its grungy glamour and IDGAF attitude. She draws an astute comparison between the breezy hedonism of “indie sleaze” and Charli XCX’s similarly messy ‘Brat’ aesthetic. “It’s not ‘Brat’ but there’s something kind of adjacent to ‘Brat’ about it,” she says. “I think people want that freedom of wearing a fedora hat and skinny jeans and smoking a bunch of cigarettes.”

Jennifer Blowdryer’s book got Waterhouse thinking about “the arc of an ingénue”, where “they get into modelling, they get into acting; there’s this huge rise and then this inevitable fall”. It’s an all too common narrative for young women in the public eye, who can end up feeling “very scorned” as a result, and one Waterhouse says she relates to. “It already feels like I’ve had big ups and downs in my life,” she says, presumably alluding to the ghoulish way her so-called “dating history” has been dissected in the press, with previous partners including Luke Pritchard of The Kooks, The Last Shadow Puppets frontman Miles Kane, Hollywood A-lister Bradley Cooper and Star Wars actor Diego Luna.

Without mentioning any names, Waterhouse told Vogue in July: “I really will say that I’m pretty strong at this point, but when something very public happens to you and the story behind it is dark and difficult, and you’re actually not doing well, and you can’t explain yourself to the world, that’s very isolating and disorientating.” However, writing songs is one way in which she now can explain herself, albeit obliquely. On ‘Faded’, a beautifully bruised ballad from her new album, she looks back at a past relationship and sings knowingly: “I was still in primary school when people thought your band was cool / It’s hard to imagine being so fucking naive.”

We’re living in an era of pop culture where fans love to play detective – and artists fill their lyrics with easter eggs designed to be decoded. Does Waterhouse worry about how her own songs might be interpreted? “I feel like there are songs that I want to write that I haven’t yet because I’m like, ‘Are you prepared to have a lot of headlines written about this?’” she says. “And sometimes I do just think, ‘Yeah, maybe it’s not worth it’.”

Waterhouse says the idea of writing autobiographical songs is “very appealing”, but she often has to change details to create a protective layer of ambiguity: a trick that must have been necessary when writing ‘Lawsuit’, a melancholy, mid-tempo gem from her new album. “I heard all about you from the girls in line in the bathroom,” Waterhouse sings over ringing guitar chords. “If what they say is all true, good luck with that lawsuit, baby.” Given the rarefied worlds Waterhouse has moved in – she and Pattinson attended the Met Gala last year – it’s a song that will surely make people speculate about its protagonist. “It’s not my lawsuit, but it’s definitely about a dark underbelly and the things that go on,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “It’s about something I’d probably never be able to discuss in public, but it’s more than just, ‘Fuck this guy!’ It’s about a bunch of women connecting who’ve had a similar experience. And there’s this feeling of, ‘Yeah, everyone’s really got each other’s back’.”

For Waterhouse, writing songs is about more than catharsis - it’s also about self-knowledge. “I wrote my first album in a very specific state of mind and I called it ‘I Can’t Let Go’ because I felt like I was doomed to feel a certain way forever,” she says. “But writing that album really did change my life. Maybe it was writing the songs, maybe it was releasing them and singing them live, but it was like I was needling myself. I was almost able to see myself as a viewer, which changed my perspective a lot. I was able to see my own faults and see where I was [mentally]. And that was really healing.”

When it was released in May 2022, ‘I Can’t Let Go’ saw Waterhouse stride out as a melodic and evocative miner of gloomy glamour; a fully-fledged singer-songwriter after more than half a decade of baby steps. Her musical journey had started in 2016 when she dropped debut single ‘Brutally’, a tender acoustic ballad about a relationship that was “always on borrowed time”. It was clearly intended as a soft launch, but because of Waterhouse’s celebrity, the tabloids pounced on the track’s supposed lack of commercial success, trying to bring the project down before it had even begun.

Eight years later, Waterhouse is enjoying the last laugh. Her second single ‘Good Looking’ - a swooning dream-pop tune originally released in 2017 - blew up on TikTok a couple of years ago thanks to footage of Waterhouse dancing hypnotically while performing it live. Today, she “still can’t really process” the fact it’s racked up 425 million Spotify streams, particularly because ‘Good Looking’ was initially greeted with a shoulder shrug. “I used to show it to [potential] labels and managers when I was trying to break down doors, and no one ever gave a shit,” she says. “And then when I signed [to Sub Pop in 2021], they were like: ‘Can you delete that song and all of your old stuff? We want to have a clean slate’.”

Thankfully, Waterhouse defied their advice and ‘Good Looking’, a highlight of her live sets, now “feels like a wave to the past when I was kind of putting out one song a year”. Waterhouse isn’t overstating her initial cautiousness: she released just five songs between 2016 and 2020 before signing with Sub Pop, the iconic indie American label that gave us Nirvana and Sleater-Kinney. Being cast as laser-focused Karen Sirko in Daisy Jones & The Six, and then spending a year learning to play piano for the role, however, was “pivotal” in building up her confidence. “I had all these songs [written] but booking that show made me think: ‘I’m gonna put out a record myself,” she says.

Waterhouse believes the character’s single-mindedness rubbed off on her. “Karen had something I didn’t have, which was a total ‘Fuck it, I’m doing it [attitude]’,” she says. Releasing her debut album in 2022 was a “huge jump” but, having taken the plunge, she has no intention of looking back. Recently, alt-rock overlord Beck gave her some sage advice: “Be as prolific as possible at the beginning of your career, because that’s usually when you make the best stuff.” For this reason, she held firm when her label suggested cutting some songs from ‘Memoir of a Sparklemuffin’, which is being released as an 18-track double LP. “I was in a different place mentally making this album – I didn’t have as many hang-ups as when I was making the first one,” she says.

Instead, she’s pushing forward and relishing each fresh milestone. She’s attended All Points East “many times as a punter” and recalls walking past a poster and thinking, “Oh my goodness, it has the best lineup this year… and I’m on it!” Opening for Swift on her “history-making” Eras Tour is another “mind-blowing moment,” she adds. The question Waterhouse least likes answering, she explains, is: “What does it feel like to be an ‘it’ girl?” She never knew what the expression meant during her teenage modelling days, “and now I can’t remember the last time I even went to a club”. Fortunately, ‘Memoir of a Sparklemuffin’ should help to render the term redundant for Suki Waterhouse: model, actress, and most certainly a musician. No whatevers necessary. 

‘Memoir of a Sparklemuffin’ is out 13th September via Sub Pop.

Suki Waterhouse plays All Points East alongside Mitski (18th August) where DIY is an official media partner. Tickets are on sale now. Visit diymag.com/festivals for more information.

Tags: Features, In Deep, Suki Waterhouse