Suki Waterhouse has announced details of her second album, ‘Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’, and shared another track from it in ‘Supersad’. Check it out below, along with our interview with the star.
The new album will be released on September 13 via Sub Pop and follows Waterhouse’s 2022 debut, ‘I Can’t Let Go’. Speaking to NME, she explained how the predecessor saw her “writing a lot about a sort of sadistic love or a love where you’ve been fetishised so you can’t ever be vulnerable because you’re met with punishment through that”.
“This one is when you pick yourself up from being broken for a long time, and you’re like, ‘OK, what are we doing tonight?’,” she continued.
Although ‘Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’ still contains moments of sadness and tension, across the board, it’s a much happier, brighter and more fun listen. While making the album, the singer-songwriter had an unlikely desire – going back to the first V Festival she attended in the early 2000s.
“I was thinking about a time where you basically wake up submerged in mud and piss, and you’ve probably had the same knickers on for three days,” she said. “You’re going into the trenches, but you’re enjoying yourself so much. It’s almost a part of my life that’s blotted out, and you go, ‘I don’t want to remember who that person was’, but now, I really want to see her and know her again.”
It wasn’t just the experience of that time in the musician’s life that inspired the record, but the music, too. “I was going back and listening to Bloc Party and The Raveonettes and The Teenagers,” she said. “There’s a hungover element element to this record. I love the feeling you get on a Sheryl Crowe record where it’s like, ‘Yeah, all this shit happens, but it’s OK’.”
‘Supersad’ – the latest track to be released from the record following a string of singles like ‘OMG’, ‘Faded’ and ‘To Love’ – encapsulates that irrepressible attitude on the album. Over a fuzzy guitar riff that recalls The Von Bondies draped in crushed velvet, Waterhouse sets the scene of a time when “everything is going wrong”, but she picks herself up and pushes through. “Could be the worst time I ever had / Lose my mind, always get it back,” she sings in the careening chorus. “There’s no point in being super sad.”
“I call it my ‘bed rot era’,” she laughed. “I’ve had to get better now I’ve got a baby, but my internal chaos was always so projected into the external for a long time. I would just basically live in a surrounding of a hotel room or my bedroom where it could really be so cavernous, like in the movie Sunset Boulevard – you’re stepping on makeup, or I’ve actually had the thought of, ‘Will I drown in all these clothes?’ I defend those messy times as me trying to create this world around me.”
She continued: “Something I love about myself that some I guess I’ve forgotten or wanted to rediscover is those silly goofy parts of yourself. Especially when you work in [the music and acting] industries, your ego is constantly under attack, and it’s those sweet things about yourself that you start to wall up.
“This record is a reminder to myself to bring yourself up and have that resilience. I always think of it as putting on a sparkling pink boa and still go out and not get hardened.”
That side of this album is reflected in the titular ‘Sparklemuffin’, a spider that was discovered in Australia in 2015. The arachnid’s lower half is coloured in bright blue and orange markings, and it “does this Bob Fosse razzle-dazzle dance”. “When I saw him, I was like, ‘I’m you; I am the sparklemuffin’,” Waterhouse said. “He also cannibalises his mate if she doesn’t enjoy the male’s dance, and I thought, ‘Yeah, I can cannibalise myself and others be this destructive thing, but I’m also this silly little spider that’s dancing for her life, who wants to wear nice hats and have fun at the party’.”
Taking on the character of the sparklemuffin doesn’t just represent two sides of Waterhouse’s nature, but a metamorphosis that could only have happened after she finally pushed herself to let go of her fears and make her debut album.
“The first record I did, I had so much to prove, and I kept it one world specifically because I was just putting my toe in and being like, ‘Is this even acceptable? Am I even allowed to do this?’” she explained. “Putting that record together was the bravest thing I’ve ever done in a lot of ways. Everything since has been like an insane rollercoaster.
“I would have been so happy just making one record – that was the biggest dream ever for a decade. So everything from here just feels like, ‘Fuck it, I’m just going to have fun and do whatever I want’.”
That liberated spirit shines across the tracklist, not least in the number of songs on this record. “I was definitely advised not to put 18 songs [on it] – I wanted to put more!” she said. “You only get to put out a record every couple of years and I’m in such a place where it’s so enjoyable to be in the studio, collaborate with new people and have other new people be interested in working with me. I just want to write as much music as possible, and I think listening to full albums is back, so I believed it was the right thing to do for the fans.”
Waterhouse’s joy around creating didn’t mean that making this album was necessarily smooth sailing, though. Two months before she was due to give birth to her daughter, she had 10 songs that she thought would make up the full record at the time. Then, just before her deadline, she sat down and listened to it through and decided it wasn’t done.
“It felt safe or like we’d be getting something quite similar to before,” she said. “When you’re making an album, you think it has to sound like one thing or one world, but I just decided to throw that all away because there were so many other songs I loved that maybe it doesn’t sound entirely the same the whole way through, but it’s still part of my world.”
So, she went back to the drawing board, the imminent arrival of her baby putting the pressure she needed on her to spur her on and get the album she wanted to make done. At that point, though, Waterhouse was “huge and didn’t really want to be in a studio so much”, so she set up a home studio in her living room and called up friends to come and help her record.
The final results are a glorious, free-spirited album that finds Waterhouse in glittering form, whether she’s trying to resist surrendering to love or paying tribute to all her dreams coming true. She acknowledged that she’s still “right at the beginning” of her journey as an artist but hopes that, even this early on, people can connect with what she’s making.
“Community is what I want more than anything with music,” she said. “My dream is always that one of my songs would become a soundtrack to a moment in somebody’s life.”
‘Memoir Of A Sparklemuffin’ is out 13 September via Sub Pop. Pre-order it here and check out the full tracklist below.
1. ‘Gateway Drug’
2. ‘Supersad’
3. ‘Blackout Drunk’
4. ‘Faded’
5. ‘Nonchalant’
6. ‘My Fun’
7. ‘Model, Actress, Whatever’
8. ‘To Get You’
9. ‘Lullaby’
10. ‘Big Love’
11. ‘Lawsuit’
12. ‘OMG’
13. ‘Think Twice’
14. ‘Could’ve Been A Star’
15. ‘Legendary’
16. ‘Everybody Breaks Up Anyway’
17. ‘Helpless’
18. ‘To Love’
She performs at London’s All Points East on August 18 alongside Mitski, Beabadoobee, Ethel Cain, and more. Visit here for tickets and more information.
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