SUSS
SUSS is a New York City based ambient country trio.
Jonathan Gregg: Pedal Steel, dobro
Bob Holmes: Mandolin, baritone guitar, acoustic guitar, harmonica, violin, Keyboards
Pat Irwin: Electric guitars, National guitar, eBow, harmonium, keyboards, melodica, loops
photo by Bob Krasner
MUSIC
Ghost Box (Expanded)
SUSS’s first album on Northern Spy Records, this 2018 LP includes the singles “Late Night Call” and “Wichita”
Chisholm Trail
b/w Aurora
The 2019 vinyl single on Northern Spy Records
High Line
On Northern Spy Records, the 2019 LP including the singles “Wetlands” and “Ursa Major”
High Line B-Sides
Unreleased Tracks from the High Line sessions
Promise
SUSS’s third LP, featuring “Home”, “Winter Light” and “Drift”
Night Suite
The 2021 EP featuring “Gallup, NM” and “Kingman, AZ”
Heat Haze
The 2022 follow-up to Night Suite, including “Heat Haze” and “Shimmer”
SUSS
The self-titled fourth double-album including the full EPs of “Night Suite”, “Heat Haze”, “Winter Was Hard” and “Across the Horizon.”
LIVE
News & Reviews
Birds & Beasts (review)
July 5, 2024
Daniel Felsenthal
“The interplay between wide, somber space and the staccato optimism of enduring life makes for the most thoughtfully structured record of SUSS’s career.”
Birds & Beasts (review)
June 29, 2024
Slow Music Movement
“it appears that there has been a shower or two over the cosmic plains. Some green shoots have emerged from long dormant seeds & the air is that bit fresher, injecting some cautious optimism into those long, inevitably introspective, horizon chasing trips.”
Birds& Beasts (review)
June 26, 2024
Ljbinko ZIvkovic, for Echoes & Dust
“the spaces between notes add that extra substance to an already seemingly simple, but quite complex sound”
Birds & Beasts (review)
June 26, 2024
Joseph Neff
“Often gorgeous but always substantial, the seven tracks alternate calmness and tension, grabbing the attention and then maintaining a hold. Birds & Beasts is smartly conceived and sticks in the memory. It’s one of the stronger new releases of 2024.”
Birds & Beasts (review)
June 25, 2024
Andy for Raven Sings the BLues
“The songs are cool, humid, vaporous, eventually burning off their haze for moments at at time as songs stretch into the early morning light.”
Birds & Beast (review)
April 20, 2024
Nick, for Third Eye Psychrock
“As always, the music is relaxing and expansive, conjuring images of wide-open spaces that SUSS is known for. Its wide-screen instrumental ambiance”
Birds & Beasts (review)
June 13, 2024
Thomas Woodward-Massey
“SUSS boast a sound so representative that it’s effectively a preemptive manifesto at this point.”
BIrds & Beasts (review)
June 25, 2024
Simon Kirk
“and while SUSS may not immediately be considered a political band, Birds & Beasts is as close as they’ve ever come to being one. Just not in the way most people think.”
Birds & Beasts (review)
August Issue, 2024
Wyndam Wallace
“Like the rocks, they endure. Like inspiration, they have few limits. More timeless, than timeworn, then.”
Birds & Beasts (review)
June 14, 2024
Glenn Kimpton
“Beautifully considered, intricate and finely nuanced, Birds & Beasts is a great piece of work.”
SUSS Interview @ Big Ears
Echoes’ John Diliberto interviews SUSS about their latest self-titled double album, and how they’re dealing with the loss of founding member Gary Leib
SUSS (review 8/10)
December 2022 Issue
Wyndam Wallace
“…could be Eno’s Apollo Atmospheres crash-landed in America’s Sonoran Desert.”
Echoes Top 25
January 2023
John Diliberto
SUSS (7.6)
1/9/22
Brian Howe
“…into a sonorous desert where concepts like slow and fast and then and now become meaningless. Their music dilates the world to a high-lonesome point, a pastoral quintessence that doesn’t change so much as it gradually opens and closes, telescopes and recedes. That city boys are conjuring these mythic plains and wide Western skies makes it a double-glazed dream—the sort of outside that exists only in the cinema of the mind.”
Opening Your Third Eye to the New Wave of Cosmic Americana (AllMusic)
1/23/23
Dustin Krcatovich
“To their growing cult following, the trio — Bob Holmes, Pat Irwin and Jonathan Gregg — represent the vanguard of a surging underground subculture that explores the notion of "Cosmic Americana" from a variety of creative angles.”
SUSS (review)
Feb 2023
Daniel Shaw
“…both gently diaphonous and cinematically grand - head music of the highest order that wouldn’t sound out of place alongside the most transporting moments of The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld.”
Raven Sings the Blues
12/9/22
Andy French
“SUSS once again prove that they inhabit the ambient country sound, exemplify it, and let it seep into the ether around them. These EPs are imbued with a sense of dread that’s woven like a silver thread through woolen grey blocks of calm, a record that’s searching for solace in a world that won’t let us rest.”
The State of Ambient Music
1/26/23
In this episode of the Pitchfork Review podcast, our critics talk about why seemingly everyone is listening to so much ambient music nowadays, and also answer a few burning questions from readers.
Petal Motel Albums of the Year 2022
12/30/22
Lara Bennett
10 Great Albums You May Have Missed in 2022
12/.20/22
Annie Parnell
“SUSS’s soundscapes draw from Brian Eno, Hank Williams, and Ry Cooder, layering pedal steels with soft guitars and synths to create the perfect soundtrack for long stretches of highways and neon lights.”
A Green Man Review
12/15/22
Gary Whitehouse
“I’m instantly reminded of Calexico’s engrossing 2001 album AeroCalexico, one of my favorites of that decade. Lots of warm acoustic guitar strums, long, languid electric guitar twangs, pedal steel swooshes, and always a sense of forward motion.”
New Sounds NPR
12/9/22
John Schaefer
“Then, there’s ‘ambient country music’ by New York band SUSS, that makes atmospheric use of pedal steel guitar, and could evoke the feeling of spending a night under the stars in the American Southwest in the desert.”
SUSS Interview
12/13/22
Chip Midnight
“You’re talking to a guy who grew up in Columbus, Ohio and was in high school in 1973, so if I said I wasn’t listening to Pink Floyd, I’d be a liar.” (Bob Holmes)
The Year in Review
12/10/22
“a majestic double album, full of slow motion twang, suspended synth drones, and gorgeous swells of pedal steel. This is country music mutated and stretched along a vast horizon, open music for open souls. “
Make it stand out
12/8/22
Joseph Neff
“The music can either be soaked up a side at a time, engaging with the foundational four EPs, or all together, as the whole easily holds up of repeated listens. In short, SUSS has made a masterful record.”
The Guardian
12/9/22
John Lewis
“The eponymous album by Suss (Northern Spy Records) is a piece of windswept ambient country music, where the pedal steel and e-bowed guitar manages to sound icy rather than sun-bleached”
The Blurb
12/2/22
David Edwards“Taken as a whole, this work represents how wide the scope of ambient country music can be while also showing the journey of personal change that the band has undertaken over the last couple of years — the loss, the searching, the challenge, and, finally, the new hope on the horizon.”
Best of 2022
12/9/22
Evan Sawdey
“With nary a word, SUSS deftly slow-shuffles through numerous emotions and beautiful textural detours, those swells of pure sonic capturing our attention in a way few other groups can.”
CD Hot List
12/7/22
“ The music represents a continuation of their ongoing exploration of ambient soundscapes in the context of country-music conventions: lots of shimmering/twanging Telecasters, lots of eerily moaning steel guitar, very little in the way of rhythm. But the twanginess is atmospheric; the steel is like smears of orange sunset; the production is spacious and abstract… no one right now is doing anything like what SUSS is doing, and it really sounds amazing.”
Spill Magazine
12/4/22
Ljubinko Zivkovic
The results are simply brilliant and are certainly best representative of why Suss has become such a critical favorite…leading the way in creating some of the more astounding ambient movements, whether you attach the country tag to them or not.”
Americana UK
12/2/22
Richard Parkinson
“SUSS’ latest ambient country record is well played, atmospheric and conjures images reflective of its themes.”
Song of the Day
12/14/22
Jack Anderson
“Like a sans-dialogue Gary Paulsen novel, this six-song suite will transport you to a bleak and trying tundra of arctic arrangements, warmed only by fond memories and our primal need to survive.”
Record Crates United
11/30/22
Kith Hadad
“…a bittersweet climax of dusty guitar meditations and cinematic soundscapes made up of things like ghostly piano, mirage-like waves of pedal steel and even the occasional mandolin. There’s a feeling of reflection and acceptance in these songs.”
THE 10 BEST AMBIENT ALBUMS OF 2022
11/28/22
Evan Sawdey
“SUSS continues to be not only the kingpins of country ambient but also one of the best bands working today.”
SUSS “Winter Was Hard” – rest of the year no doddle either…
11/16/22
Jonathan Aird
“…what we like to call Americana UK’s sit down and just stop worrying about it ambient psychedelic alt-country Wednesday afternoon Instrumental piece.”
2021 Year in Review
12/13/21
“Washes of synth linger with pedal steel, loops, and guitars, suggesting the lonely and uncanny beauty of headlights shining down a dark desert road.”
Best Ambient/Electronic Albums of 2021
12/29/2021
John Diliberto
December 2021
Emily Pothast
“… an expanse of drifting synth pads, glowing pedal steel and string sounds that shimmer like cricket songs… where sweeping guitar chords linger like desert clouds over gently sloping hills.”
Best Albums 2021
12/28/21
Ryan Schreiber
“Low-pitched drones rumble like radials on asphalt and twanging guitars fire off bolts of rippling electricity. Pedal steel twists and ricochets off flatland buttes, while ebow and dobro conjure whirling vortex energy.”
POP Matters 11 Best Ambient Albums of 2021
12/1/21
Evan Sawdey
“…a quiet, powerful set of songs that, like the EP’s title invokes, seems perfect for driving at night…”
Year in Review: Best 50 albums of 2021
1/1/2021
Evan Sawdey
“It's a gorgeous set of recordings that are designed as a travelogue of locations they've hit up on tour, and tracks like the aching opener "Gallup, NM" and the warm "Kingman, AZ" are some of the affecting songs the group has yet created.”
Top 50 Albums of 2021
12/08/21
Jay Boucher
A Green Man Review
“ It’s perfect late-night listening, whether you’re on the road or not. It’s music that evokes a particular landscape. The desert Southwest of the United States. The gritty towns that you pass through late at night on your way from somewhere to somewhere else.”
Best Ambient Albums of 2021
01/01/22
20 Best Albums of 2021
12/27/2021
Daniel Bromfield
“…suggestive of decaying machinery, abandonment, sparsely populated expanses harboring old secrets. Is this the Dust Bowl or the fall of the American empire?”
Albums of the Year 2021
12/28/21
Eerie and melancholy, Night Suite captures life on the road as the songs move in windswept aimlessness.
Songs of the Year 2021
12/04/21
Lara
Raven Sings the Blues
11/22/2021
Andy French
“The band offers up a soundtrack to a stretch of 66 between Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Los Angeles, drenched in a twilight sense of serenity and open spaces.”
Desert Cadence
10/23/2021
James Reeves
“The desert offers a promise: drive a little further, keep racing through nothing and you might see something grand, something that will help you make sense of the world. A tragic ghost town. An abandoned gag shop that sold alien beef jerky during the UFO craze in the summer of ’71.”
Independent Clauses
12/07/2021
Stephen Carradini
“like the heavens opening up a blanket of stars, as reported by someone reverent. A truly lovely collection.”
LA Review of Books
“I’m Going to Make a Fire”: The Transmogrifications of Gary Leib
October 14, 2021
Peter Catapano
“…I took note: here was evidence that Gary was truly loved during his time on earth. His mourners were actually celebrants. They resurrected a man with a prolific, uncategorizable imagination, an unstoppable creative energy, but an eager, loving, childlike one whose motivation for all of it seemed to be enjoyment. Fun.”
Echoes
Best of 2021 … So far
POPMATTERS
BEST AMBIENT ALBUMS OF 2020
December 2020
Evan Sawdey
"There's a reason why New York City's SUSS has landed on PopMatters' Best Ambient/Instrumental Albums list for the past two years running. The reason is simple: their incredible country/ambient hybrid is nothing short of peerless."
The Aquarium Drunkard
2020 Year in Review
December 2020
"NYC-based quartet Suss continue to refine their slow drifting and expansive landscape ambience on their third album, Promise. Guitar, pedal steel, harmonica, and harmonium intertwine to create a Western ambient twang, but one that ventures beyond its own horizons into rugged synth terrains and electronic string dirges. A meditative, but adventurously immersive listen."
Stereogum
SUSS And numün Find Hope In The “High Lonesome” Of Ambient Country
Arielle Gordon
November 19 2020
“…finding magic in the ineffable yet shared melancholy of Brian Eno and Glen Campbell.”
I Thought I Heard a Sound
December, 2020
“You will be hard-pressed to find another album as beautifully textured, that has as strong of a sense of contentment about itself while still mustering the energy believe that the world can change for the better.”
Low Light Mixes
BEST AMBIENT ALBUMS 2020
December 2020
“"I've been stuck working from home for almost 10 months and would have lost my mind without music to get me through it.”
Medium
The 100 Best Albums from NYC 2020
December, 2020
Daniel Offner
“Despite all the heaping piles of crap that 2020 seemed to throw our way, the music never stopped. Thankfully so many amazing artists have shared their music this year.”
Benzine
Benoit Richard
December, 2020
“An album of pastoral ", psychedelic ", music, as the band says. A superb and enchanting record that will in any case make us travel through the great spaces of America.”
NEW YORK MUSIC DAILY
Flickering Nocturnes and Big Sky Atmospherics From Suss
December, 2020
Delarue
“glacially unwinding big-sky tableau…, twangy reverb guitar finally puncturing the enveloping, misty layers…hypnotically twinkling…”
Aquarium Drunkard
Cosmic Pedal Steel Situations :: Winter 2020
December, 2020
“And speaking of beautiful, don’t sleep on Promise, SUSS’s positively luminous third album.”
Heavy Rotation Playlist
December, 2020
Raven Sings The Blues
Andy
December 3, 2020
“The whole record feels like finally being able to exhale after a day of holding it tight in the chest. In a crop of country outliers that excel in shivers (see Barry Walker Jr, Bobby Lee, Luke Schneider, John Jeffrey) SUSS prove that they're still innovators of a sound that's been their engine all along. Absolutely and essential 2020 release”
Recommended Listen
November 2020
“Promise is arguably one of the year’s most entrancing musical anomalies. The color and the shape-shifting ambiance within Promise’s air is one which evokes the palette of this hard year, carries through the dark air long, heavy sighs of solemnity before breakthrough through tiny particles of light.”
WIRE
Antonio Poscic
December 2020
Realer than reality, their music emanates and absorbs spectres of contemporary America, sharing a fondness for impressionistic ambience. At times, it possesses charmingly optimistic pastoral patterns. At others, it embodies haunting and haunted drones.
Opuszine
October, 2020
An album like Promise, its songs full of wide-open spaces untainted by pandemic, can serve as a welcome release and respite. Pull it up on your phone, put in your earbuds, go for a walk in your neighborhood, and just see if you don’t find yourself feeling a little freer than you did before.
Avant Music News
October 2020
Overall, Promise explores more melancholy moods and sparse textures than SUSS’s first two releases. Given that the album was recording during the 2020 pandemic, this is not terribly surprising. But these tracks also exhibit a few much-needed rays of hope.
Brooklyn Vegan
October, 2020
powered by otherworldly pedal steel… pastoral psychedelicism
Raven Sings the Blues
Andy
October, 2020
Somber but also a bit humid in its hang, with pedal steel circling like a specter and the slow tap of drums over the hills fading like a distant memory on their gauzy tones.
The Guardian
'A reconsideration of the white male cowboy': the rise of ambient country
June 9, 2020
April Clare Welsh
Suss is part of a new crop of artists who emphasize abstract expression over linear narrative and conventional structures. These musicians continue a legacy that joins the dots between country and post-rock, experimental music and world-class pedal steel pioneers such as Susan Alcorn, Robert Randolph and Sarah Jory.
Pitchfork: 7.1
January, 2020
Allison Hussey
On the New York ensemble’s second album, their arid ambient-country landscapes take on a different tone, sounding less like a vacation than a dinner bell for the apocalypse.
NPR
The Endless Potential Of The Pedal Steel Guitar, An Odd Duck By Any Measure
January 7, 2020
Jesse Jarnow
An often misunderstood mechanical artifact from another time, the pedal steel remains odd in nearly every way. Its high lonesome moan can float over, or inside, pretty much anything; it can bend notes and blend chords in ways no other analog instrument can; and it sounds like nothing else — even the pedal-less steel guitar, for which it's frequently confused.
Aquarium Drunkard
The Best of 2019
December 18, 2019
Desert vistas and moonlit skies rise and fall across the album’s twelve tracks, as they emerge in and out of mirages of bowed strings and synthesizer. Interchangeably tranquil and menacing, but always dazzling, the record is a mysterious and fully immersive soundscape that welcomes you to come get lost for a while.
Bandcamp
The Best Ambient Releases of 2019
December 20, 2019
Ari Delaney
Here, country textures are applied to ambient compositions. Washed-out guitars co-operate with synthesizers to create an underlying feeling of isolation and loneliness
raven Sings the Blues
RSTB Best of 2019
December 11, 2019
Andy
The album has a hermetic magic to it, lonesome, melancholy, but all consuming and engrossing in a way that seems to transcend more than just just feelings. Like a great work in sound design, Suss’ album seems to be narrating a journey, a wander through mystic corridors that’s beyond this plane.
Echoes
Best of 2109
December 15, 2019
John Diliberto
It’s deep ambient Americana expanses when we hear SUSS. They call their music psychedelic country. They are a quintet of guitars, violin, synthesizer and pedal steel guitar and they are going deeper with music inspired by Harold Budd and Lanterna. This collection of music-industry veterans comes in and performs live versions of songs from their new album, High Line, as well as their recordings Ghost Box and Aurora. It’s an excursion into atmospheric guitar twang.
New Sounds
November 4, 2019
John Schaefer
High Line calls to mind Dark Side-era Pink Floyd, the music from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, Brian Eno’s Apollo, the twangy guitar of Duane Eddy, and cinematic post-rockers like Stars Of The Lid, all at once.
Doom & Gloom From the Tombs
November 11, 2019
It’s ambient music but with roots firmly planted in the earth. Morricone in orbit? Something like that.
La tIMES
December 21, 2018
Chris Barton
An all-instrumental set marked by electronic textures, bent guitars and a far-reaching pedal steel, the occasionally Southwestern-leaning sounds will keep your imagination active as the miles add up on your sleigh.
Pop Matters
The 10 Best Ambient Albums of 2019
December 5, 2019
Evan Sawdey
It's hard not to love a band like SUSS, especially when they're two-for-two in making us yearn for something out there in the Western sky that we can't quite articulate yet.
Wire
December 3, 2019
Neil Kulkarni
Suss High Line Northern Spy CD/DL/LP 2018’s Ghost Box suggested that Suss were cinematic reimaginers of the American West, a sublime evocation of both the romance and realities of the western desert possessed of a pioneer idealism and weariness. High Line is even better – where Ghost Box did seem assembled as a snapshot of what the band could do, here they’re more focused on a singular idea, the instrumentals unfolding towards a cumulative ambience that recalls Calexico, Labradford, Stars Of The Lid, even Boards Of Canada. Out in the environment it details I imagine High Line would be almost unbearably suggestive – this is music with a horizon and a big sky and a sense of nature that inspires tremulous awe. Less music than an imaginative space to wander in forever.
Echoes & Dust
December 4, 2019
A cross between Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas soundtrack and any of Boards Of Canada’s explorations, and that could be a very tricky proposition, indeed. But it seems that SUSS is well versed in all musical tips and tricks because they pass the test with flying colors.
Pop Matters
The 10 Best Ambient/Instrumental Albums of 2018
December 4, 2018
Evan Sawdey
The "country ambient" sub-genre maybe as niche as it can get, but there's no denying that SUSS are already the undisputed masters of the form.
Pitchfork: 7.6
November 26, 2018
Allison Hussey
After the Western soundscapes of their debut album took hold through Spotify, the New York quintet return with an expanded edition of their meditative, magnetic debut
All About Jazz
November 30, 2018
Mark Sullivan
The original release of Ghost Box was short, but easily recommended to ambient music fans. This version is even better, a deeper dive into a special—and very American—sound world.
The Boston Globe
November 14, 2019
…moody instrumentals that manage to shimmer and twang at that same time, a soundtrack to a ghostly western that does not yet exist..
Avant Music News
January 13, 2018
Mike
In a time where the rural / urban divide in the United States is a point of frequent debate, it is refreshing for a bunch of New Yorkers to provide their take on a genre not usually associated with skyscrapers and latte-sipping. But any cultural significance aside, the music is just darn good and stands on its own.
Pop Matters
November 9, 2018
Evan Sawdey
SUSS's Country-Ambient Sound Achieves Bizarre New Heights with the "Steam" video.
It's hard to know exactly how to quantify what SUSS is -- but that just makes this band's distinct sonic journey all the better.
RELIX
May 11, 2018
Richard Gehr
Anxious times demand pacifying palliatives. If the American dream’s got you tied up in knots, then loosen those tethers with SUSS’ hauntingly appealing Ghost Box , an ambient jingle-janglejingle across the highest of hill countries.
MOJO
January 23, 2018
John Mulvey
The first MOJO playlist of 2018
Hear the highlights of this week's MOJO listening sessions
Vinyl District
February 1, 2018
Joseph Neff
Ghost Box sidesteps genre grafting, instead unwinding like something natural yet quite out of the ordinary.
The Pulse
New Music From SUSS
by Ernie Paik
March 7, 2018
Overblown
Top 10 Ambient Albums Of 2018 (So Far)
By sam Rosean
June 14, 2018
Broken rails and empty expanses.
Guess we can’t go any further than this.
PAT IRWIN: SHARING JOY WITH THE B-52’S, RAYBEATS, 8 EYED SPY AND BEYOND
September 17, 2019
Valerie Simadis
A founding member of The Raybeats and 8 Eyed Spy, Pat Irwin had his roots in jazz and the avant garde, studying with John Cage and befriending the likes of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs in Paris. But once he moved to NYC and played CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, his musical path took a punk turn
Release Date: April 06, 2018
BY John Schacht O
For connoisseurs of instrumental landscape sculpting, SUSS has created a concise masterwork of the form.