SUHO’s Remarkable Comeback

Why SUHO tops my list of April’s best new releases

True art does much more than just provide entertainment. True art speaks to people. It prompts inspiration, clarity, motivation, and/or comfort. Art takes complicated concepts and distills them into interpretable, personalized concepts. Art opens up new worlds of inquiry and understanding, when done right. SUHO excels at this with Grey Suit, which is much more than the sum of its parts. Grey Suit fulfills the definition of true art, by taking concepts as well-known yet complex as time and love and describing them through a comprehensible mixture of visual and auditory narrative devices. Additionally, Grey Suit is a release worth being grateful for due to it taking inspiration from the novel Momo, an eye-opening rumination on the same themes as SUHO’s album. 

The Music Videos

The aesthetic choices made in Grey Suit’s corresponding music videos are excellent. The decision to focus on still frames in the video for “Grey Suit” is a notable contrast to the action shots and colorful scenes in “Hurdle.” “Grey Suit” exudes wistfulness and moodiness, whereas “Hurdle” is bright and energetic. “Grey Suit” keeps the focus on the aesthetics more than the narrative, while “Hurdle” is the opposite. These singles highlight how different a love-related memory can play out depending on one’s mindset. As time passes, perhaps the relationship SUHO appears entertained by in “Hurdle” is actually the same relationship as the one he thinks about in more serious terms in “Grey Suit.” 

Aside from amplifying the overall comeback theme, “Hurdle” deserves a shoutout for how much fun it is! SUHO’s celebratory mood faces challenge after challenge: his boss pops his balloon, his colleagues all look glum, and he nearly falls down a hole in the ground multiple times. Despite all of these “hurdles,” love remains the only hurdle about which SUHO is willing to spend time worrying. Nothing preoccupies him more than love, as he vents about it to a captive audience in an impromptu, disco ball-filled office party. SUHO then encounters numerous oddities and runs through an inexplicably CGI scene that makes him appear to be on a treadmill, a never-ending road ahead of him towards which he fails to make any progress. As the treadmill-like scene nears, SUHO’s obsession with time infiltrates his mind more and more. Even after entering a euphoric state, concerns regarding how much time one has for love and fun ironically rob oneself of time for either.

The Songs

As the album title suggests, SUHO sings about feeling love in shades of grey. His other core theme is the passage of time, and he often combines his references to love and time. In “Grey Suit,” he worries that he is “walking through the pale hours” and has missed out on “the light and colors that [he] took for granted / While [he] was thinking about the time [they] were together.” SUHO’s future slips away as he spends the present moment dwelling on the past. It may sound like SUHO wishes time would stop, but that presents its own issues: on “Hurdle,” he says, “Time is still, it’s like a hurdle / You’re not by my side…” SUHO is unsatisfied with both the movement of time and the lack thereof. He bemoans this on “Moment,” acknowledging “The time that felt long and tiring” repeatedly. On the other hand, he expresses patience with the slow pace of time on “Bear Hug”: “Take your time / Come to me slowly / I’ll be here for you.” Going off of this, he turns the conversation sultrier by saying the slow pace of time is “As if you were slowly approaching to unbutton a button” on “Decanting.” The only consistency in SUHO’s overall view of time is its inconsistency; his appreciation for the slowness or fastness of time comes and goes like the wind, and his urge for time to change its speed is in conflict with his urge for time to stop entirely. Whether analogizing time and a treadmill, mourning how time is keeping him away from his lover, or making peace with time by reassuring himself his lover will reenter his life when the timing is right, his fixation on time remains all-consuming.

The Literary Inspiration

SUHO says the overall premise of this comeback is inspired by Momo, by Michael Ende. This novel tells the story of a girl named Momo whose age and origin story are unknown. She lives on the outskirts of town and is poor and illiterate. The locals grow fond of her, and she soon becomes a go-to source for advice and comfort. People are intrigued by her perceived superpower to always make them feel better, but it turns out that her only superpower is being an exceptionally good listener. Good listening skills are sorely lacking in this town, where a group of otherworldly “Men in Grey” persuade the townspeople to invest in their Timesavings Bank. Taking the physical form of “hour-lilies,” residents eagerly invest their time in the bank with the promise of being able to retrieve it at a later date. Little do they know that the Men in Grey turn their time into cigar materials and smoke it away; cigars are their form of sustenance. While no one says it is a competition, residents treat it that way, obsessively trying to save more time and fill up their bank accounts more than anyone else. They stop sleeping, daydreaming, engaging in creative pursuits… the list gets longer and longer of the ways they try to save time. Momo is the antidote to the Men in Grey’s scheme. She questions why everyone is in such a hurry and what the ultimate end goal of rushing somewhere is. After all, what everyone seems to be doing with the time they save is wasting it by worrying about how to save “enough” for the future!

SUHO is like the townspeople in this story: just as the Men in Grey make others’ time go up in smoke literally, SUHO’s all-consuming fascination with time makes his time go up in smoke metaphorically. It is this metaphorical grey smoke that blurs the picture of love SUHO looks at; he does not see the full, clear picture of a love story, because greyness permeates it. Just as the townspeople lack clarity about what exactly they are saving time for, SUHO struggles when he says he worries about reaching someone or something “in time” to answer the question “In time for what?” In both the novel and SUHO’s story, the time spent worrying about having enough time takes up too much mental space to answer the question “Enough for what?” 

Momo spoiler alert: in the end, the Men in Grey are no more, and Momo returns the hour-lilies to their owners, unfreezing time and giving them the free time they have been seeking all along. A similar moment of clarity takes place in “Grey Suit”: / “Suddenly, the frozen minutes melt like a miracle / The moment I encounter you, it turns into colors / Together again, no more grey.” SUHO’s happiest moments on his new album take place when he sings lyrics like this, about seeing the beauty in the world around him instead of leaving that beauty in the dust while he sprints into the future. His foggy judgment clears up after reassuring himself he has plenty of time to stop and soak in the moment.

In “Morning Star,” SUHO references “An island that slips through the gap between [his] hands.” It can be inferred that the “island” he is referring to is representative of the sand in an hourglass. Despite the sand slipping away more and more, SUHO seems to be at peace with its pace: “It's okay to wake up like this… Everything I've lost / It's shining a new light on us.” His contentment comes not from learning how to master time but how to let go of it gracefully. By doing so, his mind is free to make room for joy in the present moment. Using this analogy, by not resisting the sand that slips through one’s grasp, one can just enjoy the island vacation!

Conclusion

Grey Suit is commendable for the profoundness of both its lyrics and its unique ways of taking inspiration from Momo. As written about previously in this newsletter, it is a gift when art prompts the audience to look into more art. SUHO’s homage to Momo can introduce a new group of readers (this author included!) to a remarkable novel. Discovering a new favorite book is truly impactful and exciting, getting audiences to see topics in a light to which they had not previously been exposed. Grey Suit is excellent not just for its substance, but also for its source material. The depth of this comeback is profound and a testament to the joys of reading into the deeper meanings of human emotions.

Check out Grey Suit for yourself here, and learn about my other Top Twenty “Best of April” picks (as well as my favorite Momo quotes!) in this podcast episode and this article!