Don’t let the sparklemuffin’s whimsical name fool you: The brightly colored Australian spider’s life has enough lust, betrayal, and intrigue to launch an HBO true crime series. The male sparklemuffin dances to attract female spiders. If he impresses his desired partner, they mate. But if she deems his moves unsatisfactory, she kills and eats him. The contrast between the spider’s joyful, jittery dance and the life-or-death stakes he’s navigating is so compelling to 32-year-old singer-songwriter Suki Waterhouse that she named her sophomore double-album Memoirs of a Sparklemuffin. “The sparklemuffin is this little guy that can cannibalize others, cannibalize himself, but he still wants to have fun at a party,” she says. “[I liked the message] of ‘Put on your little sparkly feather boa and get back out there.’”
Suki’s debut, I Can’t Let Go, was a scuzzy alt-rock record written when she was feeling “very dissociated from myself and recovering from a fetishization of my 20s and being in love in a very sadistic way with a very sadistic person,” she says. “It explores how there’s always punishment in that kind of love.” The music is churning and gritty, the sound of a mind spinning as it tries to process the simultaneous allure and pain of a toxic relationship: On inky, lilting track “The Devil I Know,” she likens a lover to the devil, and on delicate piano ballad “Put Me Through It,” she watches the fantastical thrill of new love transform into dread as a relationship sours.
Since then, she has become engaged to longtime boyfriend Robert Pattinson, with whom she had a child earlier this year, and Memoirs of a Sparklemuffin finds Waterhouse “picking myself back off my feet and asking, ‘What are we doing tonight?’” The music is fuller, crisper, and more self assured, even though she grapples with many of the same negative emotions she expressed on her debut. “Supersad” is a winking dismissal of fear—she knows that none of us can just stop being sad on command, but that doesn’t prevent her from adopting the facade of shimmery nonchalance. As her voice echoes over guitars that hurdle forward like steeplechase runners, she sounds completely liberated. On “OMG,” she expresses romantic frustration, but delivers the booming pop chorus with a sense of indignation that leaves the song feeling energized.
Waterhouse was born and raised in London by a father who was a plastic surgeon and a mother who was a nurse. She started modeling when she was 16 as a way to, “meet people that didn’t live in the suburbs.” Her main priority at that age was connecting with people who loved film, music, and literature as much as she did. She says she “had a fiery curiosity for life and was always very enveloped with falling in ‘caps lock LOVE,’ hardcore love.” It was a formative time, but modeling at that age came with its fair share of pain too. “I think it did a lot of damage,” she says. “It is intense to have your world be about the way that you look and to have that be your currency in the world. You’re never sure if it means as much to you as everyone around you thinks it does.”
While writing Memoirs of a Sparklemuffin, Suki found herself returning to the adventurous and impulsive personality she’d had back then as a teenager, parts of herself that she had overlooked or ignored for years. She imagines that she would have listened to the songs on Memoirs of a Sparklemuffin at the music festivals she attended in her teens. She recalls one particular festival in 2008 when she “woke up covered in mud and probably other people’s pee, soaking wet. I got myself up again and said, ‘Yeah, I’m going back out into the trenches and partying really hard,” she says. “I remember once, I went to a festival and in 24 hours, I cried by myself in the field, got super fucked up, stayed up till 6:00 a.m., and finished the whole weekend sitting on the side of a train station in a sleeping bag next to someone I’ve never met before, falling in love before I went home.”
She admires the resilience and bravery she exhibited in these teenage years. But resilience is also a response to pain, which she acknowledges lingers too. “I’ve never really been able to get over anything—I don’t really think we ever do,” she says. “We might move on and have happiness, but I don’t think you ever really get over the worst things that happen to you or even the most beautiful things that happen to you. It’s just imprinted in your mind.”
The confidence and growth on this record is intertwined with memory of all that she’s endured to get here. “Big Love,” for example, is a track haunted by longing. It recalls a lonely time in Waterhouse’s life, when “there’s a knot in your heart and you look at the sky and imagine the person [you want to be with.] You’re driving in the car and looking at your phone imagining calling him. You’ll go head first into things that you know are going to be a disaster because the yearning is just so big.”
Suki leans into a melancholy country twang and elongates her words as she croons, “Sleeping around isn’t stopping the bleeding / The tourniquet snapped when you said you were leaving.” And “Could’ve Been a Star” is named after a friend’s mother who couldn’t get roles as an actress because of her accent. She moved to the U.S. so her daughter could have access to opportunities that she didn’t, but now their relationship is complicated by tinges of the mother’s regret and resentment.
Despite her work as a model and actress, music has always been Waterhouse’s primary means of understanding herself fully. “Music was the only way I could find out what actually mattered to me,” she says. “It was how I wanted to memorialize and understand myself—the voices in my head, all of the ways that my life and morals and thoughts contradict themselves.”
And yet, even the process of making music is a complex one: She wonders if she is chasing a solitary expression of self or a sense of external recognition. “I’ll be honest and say fear has always been a huge driver in terms of pushing myself,” she says. “I have such a fear of being stagnant or disappearing. It is probably an unhealthy thing, but I think being on stage is my way of solving that fear. I guess it sort of goes back to the spider. I am contending with not being eaten for a dance that sometimes can feel dangerous—the desire can feel dangerous.”