Album Review: Sui Zhen - Losing, Linda

After secretly introducing us to Susan on her last album, Sui Zhen has crafted an album about losing her latest heroine, Linda. Recorded after her mother’s cancer diagnosis, this album finds Zhen in an understandably more melancholic mood, reflecting on memory and philosophically examining the impermanence of existence.

Losing, Linda brings dreamy, pastel-coloured electronic arrangements as Zhen embarks on a spiritual journey delivering deep contemplations about difficult realities. The album's opener Another Life mediates on memories of past lives. There’s a robotic emptiness to Zhen’s vocals that somehow manages to hypnotise and seduce. The pulsating Matsudo City Life offers aimless wandering through astute existential observations of rat-race city life to feelgood disco beats. Meanwhile, the light bossa of I Could Be There breezily dances itself through more angular relationship complexities.

Reflecting and refracting her lyrics and myriad influences through her slick electronic pop aesthetic, Sui Zhen continues to create a strange new sound that is uniquely her own.