Montreal rock band Suuns will be making their first Sled Island appearance this year at The Palomino on June 20.
Their stop at Sled Island comes during a long tour this summer to promote their latest album, Images du Futur which was released in March. The Suuns spent three weeks touring in Europe and the last couple of weeks in western Canada and the United States.
“We’ve already played well over 50 shows in the last three and a half months,” guitarist Joseph Yarmush says.
And they’ll be playing at over 30 more locations before the end of the summer.
Their music is an amalgamation of electronic, folk-rock and occasional jazz melodies that repeatedly alternate between throbbing bass beats with rising and falling guitar riffs and soothing vocal harmonies. At times it’s a hypnotic industrial electronic and at others a calming folk-rock drone. Their music puts a heavy emphasis on repetition but will change just as the listener thinks they know what to expect.
Yarmush says it took them a while to develop their sound and that it was smart for them to wait three years, after they formed in 2007, before putting out their first album, Zeroes QC, in 2010.
“By playing live, that’s how we knew the songs,” Yarmush says. “When we hit the studio, anything that we had that was extra — that we had never really played — didn’t sound right to us and so it didn’t make it on the record.”
However, Yarmush says the first album felt more like an archive of their songs. With their latest album they hadn’t played many of the songs live and they approached it differently, with a lot of work going into the arrangement.
“That’s where our strength has developed — the actual process of creating a whole album,” Yarmush says.
For the Suuns the work doesn’t seem to stop. They’ve released three music videos for their new album since last November and are working on a fourth.