Release Radar: Montreal band SUUNS share the new single Clarity

Montreal band SUUNS - Ben Shemie, Joe Yarmush, and Liam O'Neill - share the new single, “Clarity,” from their forthcoming album, The Witness, out September 3 on Joyful Noise. The track follows previously released single “C-Thru” with an excellent music video and “Witness Protection.”

“Clarity” represents a pulling-off the veil and revealing things for what they truly are. “We worked on 'Clarity' after we had set the stage with its sister songs, 'Third Stream' and 'Go To My Head,' and we were feeling so comfortable in that slow, expansive sense of time that this song felt comparatively spritely, easy and hands-off,” says O’Neill. “We let the drum machine play, we let Mathieu Charbonneau's DX-7 do its thing, Erik Hove's saxophone the ineluctable cherry on top; we weren't afraid to leave space and let the melody guide the song. It's the most natural sounding expression of what we were going for on this record."

The Witness marks SUUNS’ most generous, stripped-down and affecting work to date. It marks a shrewdly offbeat left turn, and shows the band in their most comfortable, candid state. Self-recorded and self-produced over the majority of 2020, a year of strife, solitude and reflection, The Witness finds the band holding a magnifying glass over their own default state of playing and performing. More than any other SUUNS record, The Witness employs a jazz mentality of designing a continuous vibe over the notion of separate chapters. There’s a level of relaxation, of accepting the band’s primal instincts, and a concentrated attempt to maximize and revise said instincts. The Witness exults in harvesting haphazard ideas in their embryonic, demoed versions, as if letting loose a glorious fireworks display into the heavens.