Written by: Alex Green

W.H. Auden once wrote: “A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”

Auden didn’t live long enough to ever hear the music of Tuff Sunshine, but given that quote, it’s hard not to think he would have been a big, big fan.

The New York outfit’s braintrust Johnny Leitera is one of the most inventive writers in music today and he’s clearly got a passion for language. An undeniable poet, Leitera takes unexpected words and phrases and blends them together so seamlessly, the most unlikely of pairings end up coming across as the most natural.

Tuff Sunshine’s new album Yesterday Suit is a staggering and deftly played 8-song collection that’s filled with clever wordplay, sneaky rhythms and peerless phrasing. Each number is a catchy blast of angular and intimate indie rock.

The follow-up to 2019’s Dig Deeper, Peanut, Yesterday Suit was cooked up during quarantine and though its genesis came amidst anxiety and isolation, it’s redolent with the kind of warmth and wisdom that gets us through such things.

Liter opens “My Back Catalogue” with: “720 sq ft/I tremble when I make the rounds/My guitar has turned to concrete/I swear it weighs one thousand pounds…”

Perfectly crystalizing the emotional, creative and financial burdens of being an artist during a global lockdown, “My Back Catalogue” is not without its solutions. In fact, the song suggests that the best remedy for crafting a future catalogue is to listen to the one that came before it.

“There have been many nights spent attempting to justify my existence in a world without touring or playing gigs,” Leitera says. “And the one thing I seem to come back to is playing my own records, over and over again, through the headphones, in an attempt to remind myself….There’s some comfort reliving and reconnecting with what has come before in a time where it seems that much creative life is not only on hold, but at times even seemed frivolous with everything else that was going on in the world.”

A syncopated, rhythmic track that clicks away with jittery post-punk grooves and a blissful, percussive backbeat, “My Back Catalogue” somehow combines the sentiment of “Dancing In The Dark”(“I’m dying for some action/I’m sick of sitting ’round here trying to write this book”) with Jets To Brazil’s “I Typed For Miles” (“In worried piles/I typed for miles/And you just stood there…”).

Elsewhere, there’s the jittery jangle of “Insomnia,” the sweet and introspective darkness of “I Got My Hardhat On,” and the ghostly “My Greatest Hits.” The latter is an uneasy surveying of the self that not only contains a visit to the doctor, it finds Leitera admitting: “It’s not like my life flashed  in front of my eyes/Man, it was more like I seen nothing at all…”

The song also features my favorite line of the album: “I talked to the doctor/I swallowed some pills/I gave a T-Shirt to the nurse…”

As for the title track, it’s a nearly ten-minute rumination that’s filled with delicious acoustic wobble that falls somewhere between low-fi bossa nova and unplugged indie rock. “I’ve been born again/So many times,” Leitera tells us.  A nervy number about reinvention, rejuvenation and trying to shed the past like a skin so one can enter a future that’s certain to be uncertain, Leitera spells out the paradoxes of such a venture with needle-like accuracy: “I got an itchy trigger finger/I got a paralyzed hand/You see me mopping up the barroom/With my invisible band.”

A quiet stunner, “Yesterday Suit” is one of the most powerful songs of 2021. And it very well may be on the best record of the year.

Yesterday Suit Track Listing:

1. My Back Catalogue

2. My Greatest Hits

3. Insomnia

4. La Cucina Strangiato

5. The Scaffolding

6. I Got My Hardhat On

7. Yesterday Suit

8. Spit The Rind

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