Sour Blood

Suas is the debut album from Sour Blood, an 8-part symphonic swell of nocturnal balladry that drifts eloquently across glacial fronts of rich orchestration and introspective grandeur. In a remarkable feat of both musical composition and sound design, Suas is a fascinating broadcast of songwriting wonder which repeatedly unveils the complex sonic beauty within.

The music of Sour Blood moves in lucid expressions, tender fault lines upon distinct waking and dreaming realities. Kevin Gleeson is responsible for these beautiful incantations, a Tipperary-born theatre artist and musician who debuted the project in 2019 with a sold out show at the Dublin Dance Festival. 2021 saw the release of his debut EP Good Nevers, four tracks exploring his unique sonic language formed in great consequence to an abundance of influences with a talent for sculpting sound into stirring structures of song.

Written and recorded between Gothenburg and Dublin from 2022 to 2023 in collaboration with Brendan Jenkinson (Villagers, Aoife Nessa Francis, John Francis Flynn), Suas is Sour Blood’s debut album and a monumental development in breadth and ability. A wintery warmth hues the album’s sonic palette, enhancing the pastoral complexities found within to make songs that ambitiously expand beyond far nearer horizons. Gleeson's vocal versatility is joyous, sometimes centre stage like on the forlorn R&B-inflected boom bap of Mysterious Creature and in the piano-led warble of Bruise, while others filtered and manipulated through reed-filled atmospheres that harmonise with its instrumentals in euphoric glee. The swooning currents that flow through tracks like The Devil and Clot highlight the budding romanticism bubbling at the surface throughout the album’s duration, before closer Overglowing strums through haunted acoustics and faint organs for a surreal finale of open-ended conclusions.

Suas is a complex wonder of musicality, a debut that posits Sour Blood as a gifted artist of great worth in practice and output.

Words by Nevan Jio
credits
releases August 2, 2024

Written, recorded & produced by Kevin Gleeson between Göteborg and Dublin
Additional production and mixing by Brendan Jenkinson
Mastered by Amir Shoat
Cover Photography by Johanna Dieskau
Cover Design by Aymerick Marie Rose