Suitor : Saw You Out With the Weeds
Communion, the debut release by Cleveland post-punk group Suitor, arrived as the fully formed introduction of a band that, itself, wasn’t quite fully formed. Recorded solely by the duo of vocalist Emma Shepard and multi-instrumentalist Chris Corsi, their cassette-issued first album felt only as raw as it needed to be, its haunted post-punk abrasion occasionally awash in moments of slacker jangle and curious abstractions, like Parquet Courts descending into London’s famed Batcave. But that added looseness gave their goth shimmer a bit of a rubbery groove, never too rigid to feel out of place at the best DIY basement show in town.
Suitor’s sophomore album Saw You Out With the Weeds is something of a reintroduction, their first release for Feel It Records also being their first full-length recording as a proper live-band lineup. Emma Shepard and Chris Corsi are joined by bassist John Corsi, guitarist Stephen Ovak and drummer Ryan Matricardi, their deeper bench reflected in the richness of the songs themselves—not so much an escalation in fidelity as in depth. There’s a more brilliant gloss to their jangle, and more of a psychedelic sheen to their gothic crawl.
The rapid-fire, staccato guitar chords that fire up opening track “Model Actress” are evidence enough that, for all intents and purposes, Suitor are a punk band at heart. But it doesn’t take long to hear the dimension and depth in their songwriting, John Corsi’s taut bass groove snaking around and in-between the two guitarists while Shepard transitions from monotone readings of disorienting and defeating scenes—seeing an old friend in a strange context, watching a stranger make his wife cry, the discovery that sobriety makes the days feel even longer—into an absolute belter of a chorus: “Hell in every bed you lie in/Hell in everyone you meet.” A dull hometown becomes a sucking vortex on the hypnotic “Blank Americana,” similarly and sinisterly infectious, while brief snatches of violence (“Guys at the bar would leave you for dead/Got a slap on the wrist, got a gash on your head,” “At the whore house they won’t leave you alone/Said you’d leave the city but he pulled out a gun“) pave a path toward triumphant hooks on the shimmering single “Factory.”
Suitor reach even more abrasive and eerie realms on Saw You Out with the Weeds, whether in the form of the krautrock-meets-deathrock pulse of “Private Prison,” the dissonant lurch of “Generator,” or the nervous tension of “Televangelist,” exploding into a chorus of “are you listening!?” And if you are, you’ll hear muscle and tendon, groove and syncopation—the moving parts of an outstanding band in motion.
Label: Feel It
Year: 2026
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