Sui Zhen Losing Linda Vinyl

Throughout her discography and performances, experimental pop and performance artist Sui Zhen has zoomed in on the intersections between human life and technology — how to exist in the digital age, as well as the ways in which we risk losing true sight of ourselves in the process. Sui Zhen’s third album, Losing, Linda, pairs her signature inquisitiveness with a surreal electronic pop that possesses a dreamlike quality: vivid, uncanny, and upon close examination, revealing of deep emotional and personal truths. It’s an album that examines loss on multiple levels — from the death of our loved ones, to our widespread societal tendency to disappear within the ones and zeroes of modern life's tech-driven rush.

The story of Sui Zhen’s latest album, Losing, Linda, began in August of 2016, when she took up an artistic residency in Sapporo, a Japanese city on the northern island of Hokkaido. Sui Zhen originally came to the residency equipped with demos conceived in the wake of Secretly Susan — but real-life tragedy intervened, as her mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Sui Zhen’s family insisted she continue with the residency as planned, but the experience proved indelible and she abandoned the demos to start anew.

After some time away from the album, Losing, Linda was completed near the end of 2018. "I finally felt ready to return to the album," Sui Zhen explains. The resulting record pushes the fascinating sounds and ideas of Secretly Susan further and deeper, drawing equally from the plush realms of Sade, Japanese city pop, the early electronic music of the 1980s, and the mournful swing of Tracey Thorn's early work. Sui Zhen cites a range of forward-thinking artists from past and present as inspiration, from Lizzy Mercier and Laurie Anderson to Holly Herndon and Suzanne Ciani. The lush body-moving pop of "Being a Woman," for example, finds Sui Zhen's personal experience colliding with her own self-investigation, as she sings about her relationship and struggles with femininity: "When I grew up/ I thought I had to be/ Somebody's mother/ Or somebody's daughter." It's a striking example of the personal, political, and societal themes at the center of Losing, Linda, packaged as an infinitely listenable pop song.