With the infectious single “Supersad” climbing up the Triple A charts and spinning heavily on WRLT, WFUV, The Spectrum and others, British songstress Suki Waterhouse has unleashed her new double album, Memoir of a Sparklemuffin, via Sub Pop. Suki’s star rose quickly in 2022 after releasing her full-length debut, I Can’t Let Go, as well as the Milk Teeth EP later that year. Between headlining shows and touring with Father John Misty, her song “Good Looking” surged online, generating nearly a billion streams and going RIAA platinum. With two releases under her belt in one year, Suki’s life and career both shifted into overdrive. She absorbed inspiration from a wealth of experiences, such as playing a set at Lollapalooza 2023, performing on multiple continents, closing out the Gobi Tent at Coachella in 2024, and becoming a first-time mom, all in a short period of time.
While navigating her way through this whirlwind, she carefully assembled the songs that would become Memoir of a Sparklemuffin, an 18-track effort that runs the gamut from dreamy Pop to Alternative to Indie Rock. The album opens with “Gateway Drug,” a song that sounds like a ‘90s alt-pop anthem that’s laced with Suki’s ethereal vocals and distorted guitars. Other highlights include the moody and melodic rocker “Big Love,” the electronic/gothic vibe of “OMG,” and the beautiful acoustic tones on the ballad “Model, Actress, Whatever,” for which she recently released a video.
Many of the lyrics are focused on finding love and weathering dysfunctional relationships - things that Suki has gone through in her own life. She found that these themes loosely fell into a concept that was well-represented by the Australian Sparklemuffin spider.
“I always put the past into what I make because I feel like you need to keep exposing darkness to sunlight. When it’s exposed, it heals,” she explains. “I wanted a totem of metamorphosis, but I didn’t feel like a butterfly. I felt more like a scrappy spider. I came across the Sparklemuffin, which is wildly colored, does this razzle-dazzle dance, and its mate will cannibalize it if she doesn’t approve of the dance. It’s a metaphor for the dance of life we’re all in. The title felt hilarious, ridiculous, and wonderful to me.”
The Sparklemuffin Tour kicked off at the end of September, and will continue until December 21 in Atlanta. Along the way, Waterhouse will continue to connect with fans through the personal and relatable storytelling in her songs.
“I just hope this can be the soundtrack to somebody’s life,” she says of the new album. “Whenever I’m making music, I always try to remember why I started writing in the first place and continue to do so. If I truly capture something pure that I’ve gone through, I know it’ll resonate with other people.”
Photo by Tyler Falbo
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