We travel across the pond to Los Angeles for today’s discovery to tell you all about Rosie Tucker and their new album Sucker Supreme.
Tucker exploded into the musical zeitgeist with the critically acclaimed 2019 album ‘Never Not Never Not Never Not’, and has been on fire ever since.
On this album, Rosie’s openhearted, sing-song alto melodies are king and wry, detailed lyricism is queen. As with all things Rosie Tucker, Sucker Supreme is not easily slotted into a binary like happy or sad.
In the world of ‘Sucker Supreme’, concepts like male or female, married or divorced, destruction or salvation, are not two opposite sides of the same coin, they are all connected points on the same sphere.
The electrifying album opener ‘Barbara Ann’, visits coming of age in an emphatically hard-rocking tale of family conflict, knowing yourself, and agribusiness.
Rosie describes the song as one of their “many vivid memories of visiting my maternal grandparents who worked out a living on a farm in northeast Illinois”.
She adds: “Once, in complete secrecy, I laid an open palm on the electric wire that ran around the property even though I’d been told a million times not to.
“I desired the knowledge more than I feared my parents. The shock felt like falling to the ground from a great height. I didn’t cry and I didn’t tell a soul for many years.
“The song is about the Midwest, how corn and soy monoculture relate both to wider industrial food systems and to farmers trying to make a living.
“It’s about my grandmother, a working-class woman who spent every second working, not just the work of mucking the chicken house and raising children but of imbuing a hard life with sweetness for herself and her daughters, the work of reminding them that survival means laughing a lot and refusing to yield to the will of any man, be it boss or husband.”
With the freedom to roam it’s transponded across the 14-tracks like ‘Habanero’ – about waiting for a transformation that isn’t coming – and ‘Ambrosia’ which explores this idea in the way only they can, by crafting an oddly dazzling vision of ambrosia salad.
Since sharing stages with kindred spirits Phoebe Bridgers, Soccer Mommy, Vagabon, and Remo Drive, ‘Sucker Supreme’ is just the right follow-up from album no.2: still playfully observed, still sneakily political, still indebted to folk singers of the past – but also much, much bigger, brighter, louder and noisier than anything Tucker has dared before. So, how was it?
Featured image by Lucy Sandler
