FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Suki Waterhouse

FEATURE:

Spotlight: Revisited

Suki Waterhouse

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ABOUT four years…

after spotlighting Suki Waterhouse, I want to come back to her music, as she has a new album coming out. I will lead up to some new interviews with Suki Waterhouse. However, this DIY article discusses an album that will be among the standout from this summer:

“Singing and acting extraordinaire Suki Waterhouse has announced plans to release her brand new album later this summer.

The star has confirmed details of her third album - and the follow-up to her breakout 2024 album ‘Memoir of a Sparklemuffin’ - ‘Loveland’, which is due for release on 10th July via her new label home of Island Records.

Set to feature her previous single ‘Back In Love’, as well as new cut ‘Tiny Raisin’ - which you can check out below - the 14-track album has seen her work with a host of talented musicians including songwriter Amy Allen, The National’s Aaron Dessner, Joel Little, and Dan Wilson, as well as her longtime collaborators Jules Apollinaire and Natalie Findlay.

Speaking about her forthcoming full-length, Suki has said: “‘Loveland’ to me lives in the distance between a former self who felt most alive in romance, fantasy and momentum, and a present self reaching for something steadier, more intimate and more true. That split is deepened by motherhood, and by the strange feeling of becoming someone new while still carrying the shape of who you were before.”

Commenting on her new single, she adds: “‘Tiny Raisin’ is a love song at its core. It’s a song that stands by the fact that real love in its truest essence can be chaotic, ridiculous, and imperfect, while still being something that is absolutely worth choosing over and over again at the end of the day”.

Even though she has some tour dates coming in the U.S. that start in July, Waterhouse will be busy up until then. Making sure that everything is ready when her album comes out. There will be a lot of promotion to do but, for now, we are getting these incredible singles and insights into Loveland. I feel that it will get some huge reviews. One of those albums that will not get the same focus as mainstream artists’ work. However, Suki Waterhouse is such an incredible songwriter.

Before getting up to date, I do want to look back at a couple of older interviews. I will start out in 2024. NME spoke with Suki Waterhouse about her remarkable new album. They say how, on “Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’, the British musician is more confident and fearless than ever – and ready to write a new chapter of her tale”:

“Although she’s been writing her own music since she was 16 – the same age as when she was put on the path to it girl stardom after being scouted by a modelling agency in London – she was too scared to share her songs for years.

Instead, she focused on acting, scoring roles in rom-com Love, Rosie and Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, although she is now best known as Karen in 2023’s Daisy Jones & The Six adaptation. Eventually, she started drip-feeding tracks in 2016 with ‘Brutally’, but it wasn’t until 2021 that she really stepped into the spotlight as an artist with the double threat of ‘Moves’ and ‘My Mind’ – and a Sub Pop record deal.

Her 2022 debut album, ‘I Can’t Let Go’, was a big step forward in the process of claiming authorship over her life, its incredibly personal songs exhuming old relationships and their effects on Waterhouse. Even so, she still had a way to go – a journey that she perhaps completes on her second record, ‘Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’, released earlier this month.

More confident, more fearless and more resilient, the new record contains songs she’s said that she would previously have been too scared to write – like ‘Lawsuit’, which details a group of women bonding over the same shitty man – and others that knowingly, cheekily nod to her past work and the preconceptions that people could form from it. Her latest single, ‘Model, Actress, Whatever’, falls into the latter camp, but in it, Waterhouse also embraces her whole path as part of who she is today. “Call me a lover, disaster, whatever,” she shrugs. “Other half of my story is with me forever.”

Now 32 and, recently, a new mum, the artist points to her baby as another factor in her feeling more at home with herself. “There’s something about having a daughter of my own that has allowed me to feel less…” She trails off and restarts on a slightly different thought. “I can look around at my life and absolutely love what I do and be so dialled in and want to be over ever single detail. I’m really in love with my project and my family and it’s been a very special time of feeling like both things are very nourishing.”

Then-impending motherhood had a big impact on ‘Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’. Waterhouse had already finished the record and was ready to hand it in, leaving a couple of months for her to sit back, enjoy the remainder of her pregnancy and get ready to welcome her daughter. Or so she thought. When she listened to the original ten-track album again, she realised it wasn’t done. Instead of being able to faff about, she knew it needed to be finished before she gave birth. So she built a makeshift studio in her home in Los Angeles, knuckled down and turned it into the 18-track double LP that’s out in the world now”.

Although ‘Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’ feels like the work of the artist who made ‘I Can’t Let Go’ – just evolved and elevated – it also bears a striking difference. That debut album often spoke of darker experiences in love; this record sweeps you away with stories of beautiful, world-beating romance. “Now I found myself this kinda love, I can’t believe it,” Waterhouse sings over the Mazzy Star jangle of ‘To Love’. On ‘Big Love’, she traces her path from shadowier times to the present: “Thought I would die, but my body resisted it / Stared at the sun til I found it / Big, big love.”

The latter is the song she’s currently most excited for people to hear. “That one is probably one of my favourites on the record,” Waterhouse says, getting distracted for a second. “Sorry, my baby just walked out,” she explains, turning back to the camera. “I love the idea of that song – going through all this treachery to find a person I really love. I really love the imagery”.

Another interview to get to before coming to this year. DIY spent time with Suki Waterhouse in 2024 and spoke about the stunning Memoir of a Sparklemuffin. The new mother and extraordinary actor, model and artist. This exceptional talent that can do it all, DIY spent time with a woman “who’s negotiating the fame game her own way”:

“Waterhouse says the idea of writing autobiographical songs is “very appealing”, but she often has to change details to create a protective layer of ambiguity: a trick that must have been necessary when writing ‘Lawsuit’, a melancholy, mid-tempo gem from her new album. “I heard all about you from the girls in line in the bathroom,” Waterhouse sings over ringing guitar chords. “If what they say is all true, good luck with that lawsuit, baby.” Given the rarefied worlds Waterhouse has moved in – she and Pattinson attended the Met Gala last year – it’s a song that will surely make people speculate about its protagonist. “It’s not my lawsuit, but it’s definitely about a dark underbelly and the things that go on,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “It’s about something I’d probably never be able to discuss in public, but it’s more than just, ‘Fuck this guy!’ It’s about a bunch of women connecting who’ve had a similar experience. And there’s this feeling of, ‘Yeah, everyone’s really got each other’s back’.”

For Waterhouse, writing songs is about more than catharsis - it’s also about self-knowledge. “I wrote my first album in a very specific state of mind and I called it ‘I Can’t Let Go’ because I felt like I was doomed to feel a certain way forever,” she says. “But writing that album really did change my life. Maybe it was writing the songs, maybe it was releasing them and singing them live, but it was like I was needling myself. I was almost able to see myself as a viewer, which changed my perspective a lot. I was able to see my own faults and see where I was [mentally]. And that was really healing.”

When it was released in May 2022, ‘I Can’t Let Go’ saw Waterhouse stride out as a melodic and evocative miner of gloomy glamour; a fully-fledged singer-songwriter after more than half a decade of baby steps. Her musical journey had started in 2016 when she dropped debut single ‘Brutally’, a tender acoustic ballad about a relationship that was “always on borrowed time”. It was clearly intended as a soft launch, but because of Waterhouse’s celebrity, the tabloids pounced on the track’s supposed lack of commercial success, trying to bring the project down before it had even begun.

Eight years later, Waterhouse is enjoying the last laugh. Her second single ‘Good Looking’ - a swooning dream-pop tune originally released in 2017 - blew up on TikTok a couple of years ago thanks to footage of Waterhouse dancing hypnotically while performing it live. Today, she “still can’t really process” the fact it’s racked up 425 million Spotify streams, particularly because ‘Good Looking’ was initially greeted with a shoulder shrug. “I used to show it to [potential] labels and managers when I was trying to break down doors, and no one ever gave a shit,” she says. “And then when I signed [to Sub Pop in 2021], they were like: ‘Can you delete that song and all of your old stuff? We want to have a clean slate’.”

Thankfully, Waterhouse defied their advice and ‘Good Looking’, a highlight of her live sets, now “feels like a wave to the past when I was kind of putting out one song a year”. Waterhouse isn’t overstating her initial cautiousness: she released just five songs between 2016 and 2020 before signing with Sub Pop, the iconic indie American label that gave us Nirvana and Sleater-Kinney. Being cast as laser-focused Karen Sirko in Daisy Jones & The Six, and then spending a year learning to play piano for the role, however, was “pivotal” in building up her confidence. “I had all these songs [written] but booking that show made me think: ‘I’m gonna put out a record myself,” she says”.

I will finish off with a new interview from Vogue. You can pre-order Loveland here. This is an album that you will want to get. I have been following her career for years now. It is always wonderful when a new album comes out and you get to hear fresh stories from Suki Waterhouse. I do feel that everyone needs to follow this wonderful artist:

“I can’t put out a record that doesn’t have truth on it,” Suki Waterhouse says.

The 34-year-old British model, actor, and musician is at home in Los Angeles, just three weeks shy of announcing her third album, Loveland, out this summer. “And I definitely can’t put out something that’s just like, ‘Oh, every day of my life is just this magical, fantastical dream.’”

When she recorded the new album, she was in New York, where she braved one of the harshest winters the city had seen in years. “I did find it really fun, though,” she says of being caught in not one but two historic nor’easters. “All the power shut down in the apartment, and we had to move out. It was fun to be actually in the elements.”

That attitude perfectly aligns with the mix of romance and stark reality at the heart of Loveland. “I’m talking about dreams coming true for my partner and me and also having a baby in the middle of that,” she says. “There are some moments on the record where I went into the studio and it was very much just writing down exactly what I felt, word for word, and dealing with those feelings of, Everything is so great, and we’re both having dreams come true, but that takes us really far away from each other. We have a new baby. We’re not always at home together for long periods. We’re moving every few months. There are those moments on the record as well as these very joyful moments.”

Indeed, a lot has changed for Waterhouse over the last five years. Of course, she’s had a child, but music has taken a front seat in her life too. In 2022, she released her first full-length album, I Can’t Let Go, before touring for three years, opening for Taylor Swift, releasing another record, and doing the festival circuit.

With Loveland, she was looking to expand. She worked with her longtime collaborators Natalie Findlay and Jules Apollinaire of Ttrruuces again, but this time around she also tested the waters with new partners. Ever the romantic, she likens this process to dating and seeing if you fall in love—which she ultimately did with The National’s Aaron Dessner at his famous Long Pond Studio in upstate New York.

Waterhouse was “going through quite a tough time” in the middle of her last tour when she drove up to work with Dessner, but there she and her collaborators wrote “Seasons,” an atmospheric pop song that blends her soft-rock vocals with Dessner’s signature melodic-pop sound. “I think [‘Seasons’] opened us up to a new sonic palette,” Waterhouse says.

Of the whirlwind that is being on tour, Waterhouse says that “when it’s approaching, I yearn for it, and I also am terrified every time.” Onstage, she’s earnest, often wearing big Penny Lane–style coats with chunky boots and bralettes, harkening to a ’70s California aesthetic with a 2000s indie twist. “It’s about so much more than just your performance,” she reflects. “It’s also where all the people who love it come, make friends, and find something in common. And that’s such a beautiful part of it to me, seeing how these communities grow through music”.

Anyone who has not discovered Suki Waterhouse needs to follow her now. I do hope that there are some U.K. tour dates. Four years since I spotlighted her, she has had this amazing period. Incredible Acting projects and music that grows stronger and stronger. I don’t think she gets all the recognition that she deserves. When it comes to Suki Waterhouse, she truly is…