Suntub extras

Suntub extras is a glowing dispatch from the world of one of 2023’s best albums. It might also be a barrier ML Buch has thrown between herself and her fans. Suntub took five years to make, and it was only the Danish musician’s second album. An unruly situation arises: Will the reverence with which fans currently treat Buch as the indieverse’s mother du jour curdle into scorn if she doesn’t deliver on schedule? People are already getting antsy. The demand for art pop from continental Europe is through the roof, and strong 2024 records like Astrid Sonne’s Great Doubt, Milan W.’s Leave Another Day and Molina’s When you wake up have all been saddled with the unfair burden of being dubbed successors to Suntub’s throne; one imagines she slept a little more easily after dumping these tracks on YouTube a few days before Christmas (they’re also available as bonuses when you buy Suntub through Bandcamp).

To be clear, this is not the next Suntub. Nor is it a glossy deluxe edition, like Jazmine Sullivan’s Heaux Tales, Mo’ Tales or SZA’s Lana, that deepens and complicates the original release. Buch doesn’t sing at all on these six tracks, a fact she riffs on in the YouTube album art, which shows the field of grass in the background of the original cover with her face edited out. She’s made no effort to present it in the neat package of an album or EP, though you could argue a neat package is no longer a requirement for something to be considered an album or an EP. It’s 15 minutes of material from the Suntub sessions—take it or leave it. There’s no reason not to take it.

Four of these tracks feature no recognizable instruments other than guitar, but her tone is so distinctive that we’re instantly thrown into Suntub’s world, or maybe a small uninhabited moon orbiting it, from the opening notes of “Sway walking.” Think Tom Scholz by way of “Watermelon in Easter Hay” by way of Buckethead’s Electric Tears, playing music at the intersection of Joni Mitchell’s Hejira and Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi. Attempts to classify Buch’s sound tend to unspool into messy lists like these, none of which do justice to the uniquely uncanny quality she brings to her music.

Suntub’s careful balance between songs and instrumentals kept it from fading into the background; it was often striking to hear Buch’s voice and realize we hadn’t heard it in a while. It’s not clear whether these tracks are sketches meant to become full songs later or complete recordings excised during sequencing, but had they been included on Suntub in their present form, they might have tilted the album a mote too far in the direction of mood music. “Opener,” a two-minute guitar solo, certainly would’ve been a far less effective intro than “Pan over the hill” and its scene-setting synth wingbeats. “Halfdark, Slow blinking” is OK if what you want to hear from one of the decade’s most distinctive guitarists is a Robin Guthrie impression.

The two recordings that stand most easily alongside the original material on Suntub are the two that feature percussion. Cymbals and tom splashes turn “Suncrumb trail, Staging” into a snowglobe. The only one with drums throughout is “Moving light, Change,” the longest and best of the six tracks, whose slow and almost imperceptible build brings to mind ambient techno and whose wind-tunnel percussion echoes the eerie puffs of air on Suntub’s “High Speed Calm Air Tonight.”

We don’t learn much about Buch’s music from these songs, and only the track names give any insight into her process. Separated by commas, as if to imply multiple tentative titles, they suggest Buch playing around with different words in developing Suntub’s astounding vocabulary of natural and anatomical imagery. The reason to listen to these extras is simply to listen to them, and they work both as an ersatz EP, on their own, and a tidy little anticlimax to the Bandcamp download. It’s no substitute for the real thing, but it’s great if you want to get close to where Suntub takes you without listening to Suntub itself. I’ll cherish it on my 15-minute walks.