Albums by Melbourne-based artist Sui Zhen unfold like narratives from a dream — incredibly vivid (if slightly off-kilter) and revealing of deep personal truths. Her surreal synth-pop culls inspiration from bossa nova, Japanese city pop and the early electronic music of the 1980s, and is also interspersed with atmospheric soundscapes and spoken-word dance. Following her 2016 breakout Secretly Susan, she returns with a new long-player, Losing, Linda. It's an album about loss, both on the personal level (documenting the tragic loss of her mother in 2018) and on a broader, societal scale (the loss of selfhood in the digital age). Losing, Linda is a trip through the real and the uncanny — a lovingly personal and humanistic document of our ever-changing world, the things we lose along the way, and the insights we gain from loss itself.
