The Virtual Natural Of ML Buch’s Suntub

ML Buch’s second album Suntub somehow captures the feeling of the early internet era without any obvious signifiers. It’s all in the smooth surfaces, the curved lines, the sleek contours. Even its 55-minute length, nearly double that of the Danish artist’s explicitly “online” 2020 debut Skinned, conjures a faint memory of the CD era and its bloated runtimes. The guitars are impossibly lustrous, there is an alarming lack of bass, and the melodies must have been thought about long and hard by the classically trained Buch. Over this glistening, hyper-real music, the singer affects the monotone of someone in a state of stupefied awe. Her lyrics lean towards the visceral, sometimes even approaching body horror, and yet even nature seems to fold itself up to fit her 2D vision; on the haunting opening cut “Pan Over the Hill,” she sings of being “splattered on the film of sky.”