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Sep 30, 2021 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Sully Sullivan

This fall, Charleston-based outfit SUSTO is sharing their new album, Time in the Sun. After leading the band for nearly a decade, the band’s New West Records debut finds frontman Justin Osborne at the crossroads of endings and new beginnings. The record was written both just after Osborne became a father and just as he lost his own father to cancer.

As Osborne explains, “Because I had begun writing when I found out I was going to be a dad, these events were the biggest inspirations for the record. It felt like I was in between the beginning and end of life. Up until my own father passed away, I felt like it was an album about new life and becoming a parent. His passing shifted the narrative towards the cyclical nature of life, death, and new births.”

Ahead of the release, the band has already shared “Get Down” and “Summertime,” and today they’re back with the record’s latest single, “Life Is Suffering,” premiering with Under the Radar.

Despite the bleak title, “Life Is Suffering” is a thoroughly bright and breezy track. Twangy Americana instrumentation mixes with washes of psychedelic melodies, imitating the sunburnt Southern locales where Osborne came of age. Meanwhile, Osborne traces a tribute to those experiences with the track, both their pains and their simple pleasures一“Life is suffering / But love and family / Make hard work in the hot sun / Okay when the day is done.” The result is a seamless melding of rustic Southern Gothic narratives, spacious psychedelia, and warm guitar pop.

Osborne explains of the song, “This is one of my personal favorite songs on the new album, because it really feels like a collage of my experience being raised in South Carolina, and still living here today. The characters I envision when I sing this song are all based on real memories of real people from my life. My dad worked in road construction and I have vivid memories of the sights, smells, and general feeling of going to work with him and being around salty older guys who worked and sweated all day out in the brutal Southern heat. Laying asphalt, clearing new roads through deep woods. They had a certain smell about them, they smelled like hard work.

Also, my family is all from a very rural part of the state, off an exit on I-95. I have vivid memories of stark white fields of cotton in full bloom, across the street from my grandma’s little house on HWY 378. They all grew up poor, rural, and very religious, so there were always these isms being repeated about life, and pain and dealing with it all. A lot of that comes out in this song, and I even had a little fun with the biblical narrative and let Abel be the bad guy this time around. When you grow up here, you get used to hard work, hurricanes, and dealing with demons.”

Check out the song below. Pre-order Time In The Sun here, out October 29th via New West Records.