Suicide Get New Life
Pioneering electro-punk duo Suicide will release American
Supreme, their first album since 1992’s Why Be Blue?,
on Mute Records October 29th. Singer Alan Vega and keyboardist
Martin Rev recorded and produced the set themselves over the past
twelve months in New York City.
“We’d been talking about doing a new album for years,” Vega
says. “Everyone had been asking us when we were going to do it. We
knew there was another one coming, but now I’m glad we waited as
long as we did, because we could not have done it in the same way,
even a year ago.”
“Before September 11th,” he continues, “we had started a new
album after ten years of not doing anything, and then all of a
sudden, after the attacks, we just couldn’t do it the same way. I
couldn’t sing to the music in the same way. It’s still Suicide.
It’s always going to be Suicide. But it’s not like we say, ‘Let’s
just do the same shit.’ We still try to reach for newer
things.”
Vega and Rev first made their name on the fringe art scene that
thrived on New York’s Lower East Side in the late Seventies and
early Eighties. Their first two albums — both titled
Suicide and released in 1977 and 1980, respectively —
foreshadowed pop’s synth era. But their live show won the two their
greatest renown; onstage, they combined the Stooges’ bare-bones
aggression with an arty, urban sensibility and antagonized their
fellow scenesters into an often-abusive frenzy.
Suicide will take that live act on the road to support
American Supreme this fall.