On their heartfelt debut, SUDS take comfort in solitude amidst everyday anxieties

Perhaps the biggest strength of Norwich's four-piece SUDS is their penchant to excavate disparate influences and blend them into a cohesive statement wholly their own. SUDS's new effort overtly draws from midwest emo, with a captivating interplay of drum work and guitars indebted to acts like The Appleseed Cast and the twinkling, shy emo and math-rock of Mike Kinsella's Owen and American Football. Hovering above the heavier instrumentation is Maisie-Mae Cater’s voice – bringing to mind The Postmarks’ soft-spoken, 60-influenced indie pop – which weaves together the collection with delicate, mesmerizing clarity.

The Great Overgrowth is concise, clocking in at just under thirty minutes over the course of nine songs. Yet SUDS manage to follow an ambitious conceptual arc they began exploring on their 2022 EP, In the Undergrowth: the ever-changing, sometimes anxiety-inducing unpredictability twenty-somethings face as life becomes bigger but consequently overgrown with regret over wasted time and longing when youth slips away; the very Gen Z and Millennial predicament of a life mired in an inescapable nostalgia for times past; and the expansive promise – or at least the ghostly hope – of reaching self-actualisation amidst it all.

This is an album about retreating from the chaos and uncertainty of everyday life in order to find clarity within, and SUDS know the natural world creates space for that. Take the title track, “The Great Overgrowth,” a celebratory anthem featuring Cal Hudson of Other Half, a fellow Norwich band. Although Maisie Cater's vocals take a backseat to spotlight co-writer and drummer Jack Ames's singing – disrupting an otherwise sonically tight track list – the song stands like a beacon in SUDS’s forest, illuminating motifs throughout the band's catalog. Along with closer "Overgrown," the track serves as a manifesto for a project that is, at its heart, a concept album with an understated flair – and that's what makes SUDS's work so exciting.

On "Paint My Body," Cater sings "when it comes to going out / I’ll just steer clear / the flowers grow / I'm overgrown / I'll stay right here." It's here that band explores how solitude is sometimes as simple and complex as noticing a small bloom while sitting with our anxieties and resisting, or sometimes giving in to, the overwhelming pull to retreat from others. The true difficulty, then, is navigating these moments when our minds are overgrown with too many thoughts to parse through.

With acute awareness, SUDS show that beyond our anxieties and disconnection lay expansive thickets of thought and profound realisation: “Now I'm doing better / so much better / I'm overgrown." In The Great Overgrowth of SUDS's world, time allows for peace to settle in, bud, then slowly eclipse loneliness, until Cater sings in "Freckle," we can "situate / [ourselves] within the trees at home / hibernate," and look upon it all with compassion.