Known mostly for modeling and acting, Suki Waterhouse has also been making music, releasing her first single six years ago. Since then, she’s released several tracks but has never released an album – until now.
On the cusp of releasing her solo debut, the triple threat spoke with NME about leaning into her anxiety to finally feel the freedom to release her debut album I Can’t Let Go onto the world:
“I felt incredibly blocked in my own autobiographical memory of who I was or what I could be… Jumping into those anxieties helped me feel free. That’s not to say suddenly everything became super joyous and easy, but I think if you want to stay in that state of creativity, the whole thing is, a lot of the time, it’s not a great place to be at all. That’s what has to be appreciated – the pockets of bliss are small and it’s the muddiness in between and the willpower to jump into the fear.”
Even finding a record label to sign with proved to be a challenge for Waterhouse, who released her previous singles independently. Joining with Sup Pop for her debut came down to her partnership with producer Brad Cook, who previously worked with Snail Mail and Bon Iver:
“Brad could see that I was lost in a lot of ways and had a direction that wasn’t complete. There was a nervousness too because it was like throwing all your chips at a wall in a lot of ways – we didn’t know each other and we basically just worked by peeling down the songs like an orange and squeezing them out, looking at the mistakes and things that weren’t working.”