Suzanne Kraft - About You (2021)

The surest thing about traveling through time is that you’ll eventually and up right back where you started. On About You, Suzanne Kraft has closed the loop.

A Los Angeles native, Diego Herrera grew up in Venice Beach, breathing visions onto four track tapes. Hair down, mind far off, his garage was abuzz with fuzz guitars and crisply clipped drum machines. The palm trees overhead swayed like antenna tapping the salty air for distant dreams. Herrera wasn’t alone in aiming to catch atmospherics from across the sea. He was amongst a music community seeking melancholic catharsis in the blissed out fuzz of 90’s shoegaze—channeling UK clouds to block out the California Sun. And as fast as he was trying to project away from his home turf then, he’s now been craving to return.

Herrera’s trajectory eventually brought him to Amsterdam where he shares a studio and collaborates closely with Melody as Truth’s Jonny Nash. After a highly productive stretch of recorded output that saw him creating magnetic dancefloor musings and pushing the fold of minimalism to its essential framework, Suzanne Kraft clicked back onto a course that had always been unfolding, tracking along beside him like a phantom. About You is less a departure from form and a more of a stylistic return home.

About You is a set of hazy-haloed pop songs crackling with the flutters of fresh love amidst a mind full of memory flashes. Written in the whirlwind of a hopeful affair, instantly transformed into long distance romance, it’s a head rush of affection with the universe bending blurrily around it — an archive of yearning from a year that rifted warm bodies adrift; an outline of the in-betweens, the familiar and foreign, hopeful promise and heartbreak.

Suzanne Kraft has shaved silver linings from cloud formations and ignited them into crackling flames. It’s a full circle journey that floats on shimmering guitar tones, fluid vocals, and gently persuasive drum tracks chugging towards their destiny while reveling in the unknown. About You is a folding of time and space in album form and stands aloft as Suzanne Kraft’s next big step in fully becoming himself.

Text: Mark "Frosty" McNeill.