Memoir of a Sparklemuffin
Playing a keyboardist in a fictional 1970s rock band for 2023’s *Daisy Jones & The Six*, Suki Waterhouse regularly rehearsed with her co-stars in the same Los Angeles studio where Fleetwood Mac worked on *Rumours*. The English multi-hyphenate (a distinction she winks at knowingly on “Model, Actress, Whatever”) had been quietly releasing hazy indie pop since 2016, but the role gave Waterhouse the spark to throw herself into music head-on. On her second studio album, named for a species of spider that’s cute but twisted when it comes to mating, the singer-songwriter connects the dots between mid-century girl groups, Laurel Canyon psychedelia, mid-’90s Mazzy Star (particularly on “To Get You,” a cosmic country wallower co-written by Cigarettes After Sex’s Greg Gonzalez), and Lana Del Rey circa *Chemtrails Over the Country Club*. Between messy, honest songs like “Supersad” and “Blackout Drunk” emerges a nostalgic portrait of the last of the old-fashioned It girls, cool but not too cool to get her hands a little dirty.
Tied together by the motif of transformation, it's an apltly titled record that finds Waterhouse in the midst of refining her own image.
With most of Suki Waterhouse’s sophomore album sounding exactly the same, her heartfelt lyrics get buried underneath blasé vocals that sound resigned to her fate.
Waterhouse ventures beyond the heavy-lidded romance of her early hits towards crunchy guitars and propulsive drums
Suki Waterhouse describes “Supersad,” from Memoir of a Sparklemuffin, as a “song you could hear playing at the mall in Clueless or as an opening track for Legally Blonde.”
Actress, model, mother, and sometime pop star Suki Waterhouse found her spirit animal when she learned of the Sparklemuffin, a razzle-dazzle, wildly
Memoir of a Sparklemuffin by Suki Waterhouse album review by Tuhin Chakrabarti. The artist's new LP is out today via Sub Pop Records