Suntub

The Artist

ML Buch is a Danish songwriter, producer, and guitarist based in Copenhagen whose work sits at the intersection of ambient pop, folk, and experimental electronic music. She emerged with 2020's Skinned, a self-produced debut that established her signature palette: layered guitars, digital textures, and a soft, close-mic'd voice threading through it all. Buch builds most of her music alone at home, treating the computer as an instrument alongside her guitar, and her songs feel both handmade and strangely weightless. She's part of a broader wave of Nordic artists blurring the line between bedroom pop and sound design, but her work stands apart for its warmth and physicality. Suntub, her second album, arrived in 2023 and cemented her as one of the most quietly distinctive voices working in guitar-based music today.

The Album

Suntub was written and produced by ML Buch herself over several years, largely in solitude, and released in late 2023 on her own imprint. The album is built around dense stacks of clean electric guitar, processed and layered until they take on the shimmer of synths, with programmed drums and her multitracked voice hovering above. Buch has spoken about wanting the record to feel like a body, or bodies, in landscape: skin, bone, air, water, and sun all recur as textures and images. There's a striking sense of scale throughout, with songs that feel both intimate and vast, like pop music heard from a great distance. Thematically it circles the physical world and the strangeness of being alive in one, moving between the earthly and the transcendent without ever settling.

Listen For

The guitar as everything. Nearly every sound on the album traces back to electric guitar, layered and processed into pads, leads, and choirs. Notice how "Pan over the hill" and "High speed calm air tonight" build entire worlds from what is essentially one instrument.

Buch's voice up close. Her vocals sit right against your ear, doubled and harmonized with herself. On "Flames shards goo" and "Big sun" the phrasing feels almost spoken, like she's thinking out loud beside you.

Songs that drift instead of build. Rather than choruses and drops, tracks like "Somewhere" and "Clearing" unfold in loops and shifts of light. Pay attention to how sections arrive and dissolve without announcement.

The body in the lyrics. Buch keeps returning to skin, flesh, hands, and bone, most explicitly on "Fleshless hand" but also woven through "Solid" and "Dust beam." The imagery grounds the airy sound in something physical.

Water, sun, and landscape imagery. The album's world is full of natural elements as spiritual weather. Listen for how "Well bucket," "River mouth," and "Mirror bridge" use these images to sketch a kind of interior geography.