Popscene x Rickshaw Stop Presents

DJ SUZY (Sweden)

Kira Krash Tour

7pm doors

$20.00 advance, $24.00 week of show

DJ SUZY

There’s something beautifully intangible about the music of DJ Suzy. The Stockholm-based singer and producer pairs a fluency in pop songcraft with inventive production, steeped in y2k nostalgia and the strange intrigue of dial-up internet culture. A trained choral singer and composer, she channels that virtuosity into a sound that’s meticulously layered and experimental.

One moment her music has the chirpy nostalgia of video game sonics, the next it’s embracing soulful, jazz-inflected alt-pop – a sensibility that has drawn praise from the likes of Apple Music, NTS, Nina Protocol, Clash and The Line of Best Fit. After signing with creative management force YEAR0001, DJ Suzy debuted with single ‘Wings’ in 2023, the same year she made her performance debut at Way Out West. 2024’s Haunted Disc mixtape followed, introducing listeners to her genreless, chameleonic quality by tessellating shimmering drum ‘n’ bass into frutiger aero tech nostalgia.

Suzy grew up in Södermalm, the bohemian heart of Stockholm, in a household split along musical lines: her mother loved R&B and the hip-hop of ‘90s New York where she lived, while her father was a rock musician drawn to blues and country. The result was a wide-ranging set of influences – Neil Young, Norah Jones and fellow Swede Robyn all in the mix alongside, naturally, some pop hits blasting from her CD player.

Having learnt the guitar when she was little, Suzy has been singing since the age of four – first around the dining table with her dad’s musician friends, then, from ages 10 to 15, at a choral school which taught her tonality and composition, leaving her instinctively slicing songs into their component parts. The school also gave her something that her laissez-faire home lacked: structure. Then she was studying vocal production at the legendary Rytmus, the Swedish school that produced talents like Icona Pop and Tove Lo, and Musikmakarna, the Songwriters Academy of Sweden, where she built a friendship group of close confidante musicians including Addison Rae collaborator Elvira Anderfjärd.

As well as singing and production, Suzy’s talents extend to DJing. When she first named herself “DJ Suzy” on Twitter, it was as a joke – she’d never DJed before. But after stumbling upon a dusty deck setup at school, she learned to mix and got booked for her first gig aged 18, a club named Sommargården. From there it became a side hustle, and she jokingly kept the name. Although her focus now is on singing and production, Suzy isn’t averse to mixing, having since made multiple appearances on NYC’s The Lot Radio.

Since 2019, Suzy had been thinking about an antagonist alter-ego – one she idolises, who is fearless, wild and out of control. That idea would become the concept behind her debut album, Kira Krash. Thinking about the Jungian theory of the ‘shadow self’, Kira Krash is Suzy’s hidden part of her personality, one that her conscious ego rejects or suppresses. The album invites listeners into a dark dollhouse fantasy, partly influenced by the gothic fantasy film Coraline, and the bug-eyed Blythe fashion dolls of the ‘70s. The cover artwork reflects this yin and yang body doubling, with Suzy clutching the hand of a lifesize Kira Krash doll.

Kira Krash expresses the myriad sides of Suzy’s musical journey, from the jazz-rhythmed ‘nothing i can do’, to the gorgeously layered harmonies of ‘scarecrow’ and ‘end scene’, which references the trills and bleeps of Wii games like Super Mario Galaxy that Suzy grew up glued to. ‘blue hour’ mines the archetypal string plucks and call-and-response hums of noughties bangers, and ‘i want you to leave’ has the kind of jazz-meets-Aphex-Twin noodling that only a true music obsessive could concoct.

Suzy’s songwriting never shies away from difficult truths: ‘sw33t’ documents the idea of overconsumption in love and the self-destructive grip of obsession. Like much of her music, an innocent topline lies over a darker theme running throughout. The track received a remix by Baltimore’s acclaimed Nourished by Time, adding a male response to Suzy’s cravings. Elsewhere, there’s a cinematic twist in ‘end scene’ which is replete with movie references like “don’t go down into the basement” – a play on the idea of writing a script for a relationship.

Ever since sitting in sessions with male producers who couldn’t understand her vision, Suzy has been driven to master the vocabulary and technicality of producing music. She once felt the need to handle all elements of production herself, partly as a point of pride as a female producer – but hearing a Solange interview shifted her thinking about the beauty of working collaboratively. The record contains her production (‘castle’, ‘i want you to leave’, ‘nothing i can do’ and ‘kira krash’) alongside Oscar Scheller (Pink Pantheress, Kelela) and close collaborators Osrin and aforementioned Anderfjärd, plus contributions from keyboardist Ima Bilgin Baeza and saxophonist Eskil Larsson.

Inspired by digital camera photography and the visual atmospheres of photographer Igor Pjörrt and Barbara Braccini, aka Malibu, DJ Suzy’s aesthetic has a dark, haunted feel with a distinctly 2000s edge. She plans to bring that interplay between light and darkness to forthcoming live shows at Pitchfork Paris and MOTH club in London later this year.

Kira Krash toys with the duality inherent in all people – the light and dark that exists in all of us, and the parts we perform versus what we keep hidden. Where most people store their shadow self out of sight, DJ Suzy is giving hers a stage.