A Danish songwriter who refused to chase volume
There is a particular kind of music that arrives without fanfare and then refuses to leave. ML Buch, the Copenhagen-based songwriter and producer Marie Louise Buch, makes records like that. Her 2023 album Suntub crept out on the small Danish label 15 Love and slowly, almost shyly, became one of the most quietly admired pop records of the decade. It is not loud. It does not ask for your attention. It simply waits, patient as a lit window, until you turn toward it.
What makes ML Buch interesting is not novelty. It is the opposite of novelty. She is working in a tradition that runs through Cocteau Twins and the slower edges of nineties pop, but she has stripped that tradition down to something that feels almost domestic. Suntub is a record made of guitar lines that bend gently against each other, voices layered like sheets on a clothesline, percussion that sounds less programmed than remembered.
Suntub as a kind of architecture
If you sit with Suntub long enough, you start to notice that the songs are built like rooms. There is Pan Over the Hill, which opens the album with a slow gathering of voices and a guitar figure that seems to fold back on itself. There is Fleshless Hand, a song so soft it almost dissolves, but which carries one of the most affecting melodic turns in recent pop. And then there is Solid, a song that sounds like it was beamed in from a parallel timeline where MTV slowed down by half and forgot to advertise.
What she is doing on Suntub is deceptively simple. She layers her own voice in close intervals, a trick that should sound cloying but somehow doesn't. She lets guitars ring out with the kind of tuning that drifts in and out of resolution. She builds songs around a single image and trusts the listener to live inside it. There is no chorus arms-race. There is no production maximalism. There is just a sequence of small, careful gestures that, taken together, feel monumental.
The 15 Love label and a different kind of patience
Suntub came out on 15 Love, a label that has quietly been one of the most interesting curatorial projects in European music. The roster includes Erika de Casier, Astrid Sonne, and Clarissa Connelly, all artists who share a similar instinct: that pop music can be made small and personal and still carry weight. ML Buch fits this lineage almost perfectly. Her records do not chase the algorithmic pulse of modern release strategy. They arrive when they are ready and they are listened to when listeners are ready.
This matters more than it might seem. The current pop economy rewards immediacy. The album cycle has compressed to weeks and singles often arrive with the expectation that they will be either viral or invisible. ML Buch's career proceeds at a different speed, and that slowness is not a limitation. It is the entire point.
Skinned, the precursor that explained everything
Before Suntub there was Skinned, her 2020 debut. It was a stranger record, more textural, more openly experimental. There were tracks that drifted close to ambient music, vocal experiments that recalled Liz Harris of Grouper, and a clear interest in the seams between song and field recording. Skinned is the kind of debut that announces a sensibility without yet knowing how to deploy it. By the time of Suntub, that sensibility had matured into something with a clearer melodic backbone.
The through-line between the two records is intimacy. ML Buch has been clear in interviews that she records mostly alone, in domestic spaces, with the kind of attention that comes from having no audience yet imagined. The songs sound like they were made for one room and one ear.
Why Suntub kept growing
Most records peak in the months after release and then fade. Suntub has done the opposite. It has accumulated listeners slowly, almost organically, through word of mouth and end-of-year list inclusions and the steady recommendation of other artists. Caroline Polachek has cited it. Vegyn has played it. Yves Tumor has worn 15 Love merch. The record has the quiet authority of an album that other musicians listen to.
This kind of slow burn is unusual now. It suggests something that the streaming-era release calendar tends to obscure: that the audiences for genuinely strange and careful music exist, that they find what they are looking for, and that they tend to keep listening once they do. Suntub is now the kind of record that is referenced, sampled in spirit, and aesthetically borrowed from. Its influence is moving through pop in ways that may take years to fully surface.
What comes next, and what doesn't have to
ML Buch is not under any obvious pressure to make a third album quickly. She has said in the few interviews she has given that she works at her own pace and does not see urgency as a virtue. This is the right answer. Suntub is the kind of album that earns its maker the right to disappear for a while. Whatever comes next will arrive when it arrives, and based on the trajectory from Skinned to Suntub, it will probably be even more itself, even more committed to its own internal logic.
In an industry that rewards relentless visibility, ML Buch has built a quiet stronghold. She is one of the most important pop songwriters working at this scale, and she has done it without ever raising her voice. The lesson, for anyone listening closely, is that there is still a way to make music that does not have to perform itself. You can simply make it well, release it carefully, and trust that the people who need it will find it. Suntub is the proof.
