Canadian band Suuns sets in the East
It's anything goes as genre-bending Canadian band make their first foray in Asia, writes Richard Lord
Suuns play everything. The hipster-tastic Montreal four-piece, who will perform at Hidden Agenda this month, have been likened to everyone from The Velvet Underground to Radiohead - their music categorised as everything from psychedelic to prog to krautrock to industrial to post-punk to electronic.
"I think all those terms describe it pretty well," says Suuns (pronounced "soons") drummer Liam O'Neill. "The band's sound is pretty eclectic, but I like to think about it like different gears of a larger, musically conceptual car."
Suuns' music doesn't give the listener anything too obvious to grab onto; it requires your attention, and then hooks you without you realising.
The music runs a wide gamut but is always underlaid with a gritty low-end throb. Traditional rock instrumentation is spliced with a distinctly non-rock approach to composition, with constant tangents - both sonic and structural - which, as O'Neill says, push the band into some surprising territory.
"There's some plasticity to the band's identity, which I think will ultimately give us longevity," he says.
The band's name is a whimsically pluralised version of the Thai word for "zero" (Suuns were previously called Zeroes, but decided to change it as other artists have had similar names). The name lived on, however, in the title of its experimental first album Zeroes QC in 2010.