Falling for someone is not the hard part. Everyone falls. The hard part is when you stop performing for them and the actual you starts showing up, the chaotic real version, and you find out whether they’re still interested. Most people aren’t. That’s just the math of it. Then every once in a while someone sticks around for the real version and specifically tells you they prefer it, and that is genuinely one of the more destabilizing things that can happen to a person. Desperately Seeking Suki’s debut single ‘Suki’ is about that person. Sibling duo Natassa Zoë and Danny Pugh (who records as SIG SALI) wrote it across continents, trading demos between Australia and the UK before reuniting to release, and what they made together is a synthpop song that is beautiful and kind of fucking hard to recover from.
The way ‘Suki’ is built is what gets you first. Natassa talks the verses at you, low and close, and it has the quality of someone telling you something they’ve been sitting on for a while. Then the chorus opens into full warm synth pop and the shift between those two modes is where the song earns all its drama. Wolf Alice and Yeah Yeah Yeahs are in the DNA. Arcade Fire’s scale is somewhere in the bones of it. Fans of Santigold or Lykke Li will recognize the territory. What Desperately Seeking Suki do with all of that is their own shit, and it’s the harder trick to pull off.
Advertisement
The first verses are painting you a picture before they go anywhere emotional. “Apricot sky as the sun wakes up / Bird’s-eye view / You held me so tight / The pine tree broke in two.” Four lines and you are somewhere specific, in a real place at a real moment. Then “Latitude thirty-three / Where the moon swings upside down / It’s a hot, hot breeze” gives you the coordinates and the climate. You can actually feel the damn temperature of this. By the time the chorus arrives you’re already inside whatever world she’s building, which is where she wants you.
The chorus is where she puts the whole thesis down. “Suki, suki / I like you on a bad day / Suki, suki / I like you when the light fades.” She picks ‘like’ over ‘love’ and puts it on a bad day specifically. That’s a whole fucking thesis on what real affection actually looks like. Anyone can love someone when things are easy. Choosing them when things go dark and they’re not being their most appealing version of themselves, that’s the declaration. The band name itself nods to the 80s Madonna film Desperately Seeking Susan, and Natassa says ‘the idea of searching for love in some form felt like something most people could relate to.’ She’s right. The fact that she put the hook where she did proves it. I wish I didn’t understand this immediately.
The second set of verses goes right to the edge of the fear underneath all of this. “Don’t say the words / It’s easier to leave this way / Into the sea / You breathe so easily.” That’s the threshold. The moment where saying the actual thing out loud makes it real and opens you up to someone being able to wreck you if they want to. My ass has stood at that ledge before and chosen the easier exit, and Natassa knows what that moment feels like down to the molecule. Then “Don’t hesitate / Emerald eyes, pistachio jade / Into the deep / You love so easily” turns to look at the other person in this, the one for whom none of it is hard. Someone who loves that easily when you’re someone who doesn’t is a genuinely unnerving thing to be around. She gets it. Natassa delivers all of this with an economy that tells you she knows how much force these lines carry on their own.
Advertisement
The place where ‘Suki’ fully breaks open is in three lines. “I can handle your darkness she said / And then I wept / With this rock beneath my feet.” Being told your darkness is welcome is rare as hell and staggering when it arrives. Natassa delivers this with the weight you recognize when someone has actually said those words to you and meant them. That sentence just ends everything. Then the outro: “This fever / Burn it down / Believer / Turn it around / Reliever / Soothe this hound.” The synths open fully here and the whole track crests into something that feels like release. That’s where the whole thing was always going, and it earns every second of the journey.
Natassa Zoë is a sponsored Fender artist and session guitarist for Hayley Mary of The Jezabels and GRAACE, with stage credits alongside Keith Urban and Liam Gallagher. She’s also a filmmaker whose work screened at Cannes and the Berlin International Film Festival, and her short film Cheap Choice won the London Independent Film Awards before running on MTV. A random pub show led to a song for ABB and a whole music video after that. This is someone who’s been building something for a long time. Danny Pugh holds down Bristol, her brother on the other side of the planet, and they launched Desperately Seeking Suki trading demos across continents before reuniting to release their debut EP. When Natassa says the song is about “embracing the light and dark in yourself,” she follows it with the part that’s been living rent free in my head: “and finding love that holds through the chaos.” She actually wrote through something to get here, and you can hear it.
The version of love that’s worth anything survives contact with who you actually are. “Now our letters a distant memory / As the ink fades / The sun casts down a new shade / I think I’m ready to be free.” She came through something and knows what held through it. Desperately Seeking Suki wrote a debut about the kind of love that stays when things go sideways, the kind that sees the mess and doesn’t quietly update its availability. That person exists. Natassa wrote the hell out of what it feels like to find one.
