A brain quivers on a plate. A pair of hands appear and mush it to bits, cramming the mess into the mouth of a young woman in a mannequin's sharp blonde wig. She reappears with longer black hair, caresses a large egg, fondles a fern, then lays on her belly while wafting herself with a slice of cheap white bread. The visual world of Melbourne artist Sui Zhen is brilliant and uncanny, as if the girls from Dazed magazine shoots had lost their minds in their inert pastel surroundings, or “The Fuccons” starred in a spread for Maurizio Cattelan’s Toilet Paper magazine. The tactile nature of Zhen’s self-directed videos invites and repulses the viewer, and conjures the internal life of Secretly Susan, the namesake of her second album, originally released last year in Zhen’s native Australia.
Susan is meant to be a simulacra of social-media personae and the one-angle thinness of what we project online, a concept that may also repulse anyone who’s feeling justifiably tired of tedious art about the digital disconnect. But Zhen’s music, like her films, radiates humor and charm. “I am a creature without a tangible home,” she sings on opener “Teenage Years,” which also works as a nod to *Secretly Susan’*s global palette. Across its 10 songs, Zhen blends bossa nova, dub, ersatz pop hooks, and Japan’s ’90s shibuya-kei sound (led by artists such as Takako Minekawa and Pizzicato 5). There are some undeniable similarities to chillwave, but Zhen approaches nostalgia from a position of perfect clarity, as if discovering those bejeweled synthesizers anew rather than on some chewed-up VHS tape. Also, the tunes are miles better.
Despite the obvious depth of thought behind Secretly Susan, it doesn’t wear the concept heavily. It’s lilting and light, but hypnotic from start to finish, shifting nimbly from pop (“Dear Teri”) to funk (“Walk Without Me”) and Drive-indebted glitter (“Take It All Back”). Zhen sprinkles her songs with neat little musical winks, like the odd burst of Phil Collins drums, and the whisper of Spandau Ballet's “True” that adds soul, rather than irony, to “Going Away.” She's also a charming performer, singing sweetly and up-close about communication breakdowns and relationships caught just out of sync. “Nonchalant/Nonchalant for you/Nonchalant is all I can do,” she sings on “Hangin’ On,” finding her groove amid the pattering hand percussion and exotic birdsong synths, and sending up yé-yé devotionals all at once.
Like all good avatars, Susan reaches her limit towards the end of the record, attempting to drive off into the sunset on “Infinity Street,” but short-circuiting against the horizon. “There are people who do this out there/Like it’s a new form of video game,” she laments, echoing Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere.” “It's killing me.” Japanese lovers’ rock jam “Safari” hits the Truman Show wall in its search for exotic climes: “Safari can’t find the internet,” she sings, making the prosaic error message sound much more forlorn than it has any right to. The closing song, “Alter Ego,” captures the breakdown of the character in refracted funk guitar and demonic squawking birds, leaving Zhen asking, “When will I see you again?”
The closest thing to Zhen's Secretly Susan going right now is probably PC Music’s QT, another female pop avatar whose presentation is all about aestheticizing shallowness and artifice. But whereas QT’s music relies on her consummate and turbo-charged visual identity, it’s the fragility of Zhen’s creation that makes it endearing. Secretly Susan stands up without any of Zhen’s (wildly enjoyable) visuals, using lounge-pop innocence to bring intimacy and playfulness to technological alienation, a subject that was already starting to feel overdone at the literal dawn of its impact on humankind. Plus, there’s clearly a future to Zhen’s music beyond this particular concept. “I’m grieving still/And I’ll be grieving all my life,” she sings on “Never Gone.” “But nothing really ever ends/It just moves on.”
