There are very few interviews of Suzy Sheer online. The enigmatic electronic duo, made up of producer boysinblush and vocalist Tuchscreen, have remained mostly under the radar, despite collaborations with buzzy underground stars like fakemink and Snow Strippers. One of the rare interviews you can scavenge comes from a Substack apparently themed entirely around nighttime bus rides; in it, boysinblush describes an imagined 2 a.m. ride home. In minimalistic, impressionistic responses, he notes the minutiae surrounding him: the dirt and scribbles on the seat in front of him, a coffee crisp wrapper in his bag, a kid onboard coughing. “I’m not making eye contact with anyone because I am either too shy or insecure (not sure which),” he writes.
The piece isn’t really about Suzy Sheer’s music, yet, inadvertently, it totally is. On their debut album, Pure Pulse, Slow Decay, Soft Release, Suzy Sheer’s languid, atmospheric dream-electroclash unfurls like a gentle 5 a.m. comedown on the way home. The production, which features assistance from Playboi Carti and FKA twigs collaborator DJ Heroin, is blissed-out, fuzzy, and glacial, suspended somewhere between Clams Casino, the Hellp, and Beach House. On “Sent,” Tuchscreen’s vocals are so hazy they dissolve into postverbal wisps, vaporous as a cloud of condensation. And on “Last Year,” boysinblush and Chandler Moss’ voices flicker and melt, their duet as smudged and phantom-like as reflections in a glass pane.
While there’s a clubbish electroclash banger or two on Pure Pulse—“Safety” sounds something like “Blackout” reimagined for the irony-pilled strawberry vape generation—most of the album is located in the dawn after a night out, when life’s uncertainties and yearnings are suddenly inescapable in the diffuse violet light. Love, in Pure Pulse’s telling, is all wasted time, missed connections, and hopeless stagnancy. “I don’t wanna take this time away from you,” Moss sighs on “Slow Decay,” mourning a relationship that has no chance of working out. Her voice floats over a slow-burning bed of synths before breaking into a ghostly, glitchy chopped chorus, incessant as a mind obsessed with regret and lost chances.
These melancholic, nostalgic instincts come to a head on highlight “No Surprise,” which also features fellow electroclash enfant terrible damon r. The crew tally life’s shortcomings over gentle guitar strums; when boysinblush mumbles, “If you hit me, better hit me twice/’Cause I don’t wanna stay half alive,” you believe him completely, if only because his voice is so gravelly and exhausted it sounds like his forehead is already pressed against the wall as he leaves a late-night voicemail confession. Soon, the song sputters into a snowy blitz of chopped vocals, as if all language has been lost; no one knows what to say anymore, or what they want.
Suzy Sheer’s dream-electroclash calibrations don’t always land—“Pure Pulse,” despite Moss’ ethereal vocals, is more sleepy than sensuous, and closer “Soft Release” is mostly electronica backwash. But at its best, the gritty electroclash makes the soft dream-pop production feel icier, harsher, and more unreal; its artificiality serves to highlight a molten core of feeling. On “The One,” bulbous, deep-fried bass and a pounding four-on-the-floor beat secure the ground beneath Moss’ distant, dreamy vocals, sweeping in like wind over a flat landscape, work through life’s strange ambivalences: “Still think I’d feel the same if we’re not in love.” The song promises, like any long ride home, a moment right on the edge of transcendence.
