Three years after their last album, and following last year’s collaborative album with Jerusalem in My Heart which was one of our 15 Picks of the Year, Suuns are back with their third album, Hold/Still. The Montreal quartet recorded the album in Dallas, Texas over the course of three weeks with John Congleton on production duties. Played as a suite of music, Hold/Still has no overdubbing with Congleton driving them to capture perfect live takes, as the press release explains.

Suuns are giving us the first taste of the album with the excellent and driving first single ‘Translate’. In the works for years and one of the last songs to be finished, it mirrors well the sound of the album – “the sound of a band working in mental lockstep, crafting guitar music that feels unbeholden to clear traditions or genre brackets”. ‘Translate’ comes with a video shot by longtime collaborator Charles-André Coderre, who’s also one half of Jerusalem In My Heart. This is the first of a trilogy of videos for the album, with the other two instalments set to emerge ahead of the album release on April 15th through Secret City in Canada and Secretly Canadian in the rest of the world. Coderre had this to say about the video:

“’Translate’, the first music video of a triptych series, is an incandescent vision. It was shot with thermal imagery. The concept was simple: film the band in their rehearsal space and transfigure the footage into something unusual and gorgeous. We experimented the different meanings of the word “translate” and explored a new film language by shooting what the human eye can’t see”.

Here’s the video.

To celebrate the album release, Suuns will embark on a world tour kicking off on March 13th at the Tremor Festival in the Azores Island, Portugal and including a London show at the ICA on May 24th.