Artist Profile: Suitor

Photo Credit: Zoe Heller

Although Suitor’s roots are undeniably in the Pandemic-era recording whims of vocalist Emma Shepard and guitarist Chris Corsi, their expansion into a five-piece group— with the addition of bassist John Corsi, guitarist Stephen Ovak, and drummer Ryan Matricardi— has helped bring the band into its fullest, exploratory shape. While the springing, post-punk foundations of their debut LP Communion are still ever-present in their sonic atmosphere, their sophomore effort Saw You Out with the Weeds leverages the expansiveness of their new instrumentation in a way that’s undeniably refreshing and unique.

As the band’s creative range continues to expand, so does their ability to execute the daring twists and turns contained not just within the breadth of their project, but within each individual track.

This clear creative unity can be tied to the fact that, while Suitor as a proper project didn’t begin until the Pandemic, the foundations of both the sound and the collaborative relationships between each of the members were laid long before that. When they all were based in Kent, Ohio, Emma and Chris were the primary songwriters in a psychedelic-tinged indie rock group called Small Wood House.

Chris, John, and Stephen, during that time, all had prior experience jamming together during high school, and Chris and John remained close friends with Stephen when they moved into college. Ryan, who was playing in an indie-folk project at the time, also had close connections with the group.

Although their dreamier work with Small Wood House occupied both Chris and Emma creatively, they began sensing a shift in their tastes toward the end of their time in the band. Both were getting more and more heavily into the post-punk sounds that were springing back into prominence in the late 2010s, and their tastes were expanding, in an individual sense, beyond what they had first loved when they started Small Wood House.

When the Pandemic started, therefore, and Emma and Chris began improvising some demos in the isolation of their shared living space, the sound naturally took a sharp turn away from what they were writing with their previous band. Although some of the later work with Small Wood House bore the mark of these influences, they were now ready to fully pursue this new direction.

“On the last thing we released as [Small Wood House], I felt like we wanted to go in that direction, but it we didn't really fully lean into  a faster, punkier sound for the most part,” said Chris, “It wasn't until COVID hit, I had a lot of extra time, and I was just listening to more punk than ever… One day, we just [recorded] something off the cuff and then started banking songs… It was one of those things where, early on, I knew it felt different, and the writing felt different.”

Their first record, Communion, was recorded entirely in this context, and it bears the marks of these experimentations wholeheartedly. From the rutted rhythms of tracks like “Spectator” to the subdued, cyclical lyricism of tracks like “Moth”, Shepard and Corsi’s unbridled creative energy is on full display, balancing a punk-inspired urgency and a clear conscientiousness of timing and structure.

Although the original plan for Suitor was simply for it to operate as a recording project, the encouraging response to Communion pushed Shepard and Corsi to expand the project into a live-band effort. They reached out to John, Ovak, and Matricardi— whom they had long known as friends— and all three jumped at the opportunity to join in the endeavor.

“Just hearing that first record, it seemed like something I would enjoy playing live and trying to collaborate and write in this style,” said Matricardi, “Although they are my best friends, I would not have joined or played with them if I didn't like it and they weren't all really talented musicians.”

As they began to iron out what the tracks from Communion could sound like in a five-piece context, each member began to feel more and more comfortable within the post-punk atmosphere that Shepard and Corsi had laid down across the early days of Suitor.

Although the initial goal was simply to translate those songs into a live setting, the band quickly and naturally found a new songwriting process. While post punk-tinged indie rock was still their primary motif, the expansion of the band’s contributors, and the widening of their collective influences, played a major role in the new sounds they started to carve out together.

“When I first joined the band, I felt kind of like a live member…” said Ovak, “I didn't know how to fully get involved with the writing process. But now, a lot of the songs we write, Chris starts one, or John starts one, or I start one, and we make it kind of like how Communion was made. All three of us use Logic, and we all like crafting a song from the ground up.”

As the band expanded, therefore, so did their sound. Ovak’s lead guitar experimentations added a dreamy quality to the band’s atmosphere, and the addition of Matricardi and Corsi in the rhythm section provided a solid, deep, and emotionally complex backing to Suitor’s songwriting efforts.

As heavily influenced as Communion was by Chris and Shepard’s tastes, they resolved to make their second record, Saw You Out with the Weeds, much more transparent in its foundations— they decided to fully embrace the contributions of each individual member in pursuit of a larger, more fulfilled sound.

As the sound continued to expand in the process of writing their sophomore LP, each member of the band pushed themselves to grow in their individual efforts. But the shift to the five-piece context affected none more than it did Shepard, whose vocal and songwriting efforts now had a wider scope to operate within. She, in part, departed from the spoken-word, post-punk nature of her earlier efforts, instead striving to complement the lushness and convexity of the sound with a new, more intentional approach. 

“I used to have a belief that, when you're writing music, your spontaneous instinct is the one you trust, because that's how you know it's real,” said Shepard, “And I no longer believe that, because I've seen that I've only grown when I'm challenged to kind of rethink parts… It's kind of like a puzzle, or a Rubik's Cube, and it's fun. I just feel like our style changed as a five-piece, so it made me think about like, ‘Oh, I can't really rely on spoken word post-punky vocals for everything. Or this new bass, guitar, drum part is so beautiful and lush, and how can I complement that and really maximize how effective I think this instrumentation is?’”

Saw You Out with the Weeds, while not a complete departure from the sound achieved on Communion, is a sort of realization of what Shepard and Corsi first began carving out with the Pandemic. While tracks like “Televangelist” and “Model Actress” still bear many of the hallmarks of the sound that Suitor’s fanbase has come to love, moments like the insistent riffs of “Blank Americana” and the swooning choruses on “Factory” provide injections of previously untapped energies into the band’s atmosphere.

Their sophomore effort, therefore, is a sign of exponential growth— of a natural expansion of the world that Suitor has built since its transition into a five-piece group.

Now, as the band completes their first tour and prepares to start nailing down the tracklist for their third record, they hope to keep this momentum going, taking each new sonic development in stride and maintaining the careful balance they’ve discovered in the process of this monumental shift in creative identity.