Citizen Above Suspicion – Failure
Baptiste Bernon builds guitar pedals for a living, through his work with Rainger Fx and Audio Error, and a good number of the ones on Citizen Above Suspicion’s debut album came off his bench. That says a lot about how the Hackney trio work. Bernon (guitar), Ben France (drums) and Julia Cadau (bass) formed in 2024, put out a self-released split single, “Fear Your Tears / Atomic Dreams”, and then made “As Above So Below” entirely by themselves, from the recording and mixing to the artwork and merch.
“Failure” is the first single, out now on Fuzz Club, with the album following on January 26, 2027. It runs on repetition and thick feedback, with New Wave song shapes underneath and the weight of heavy psych and shoegaze on top. France’s drums were tracked in the band’s practice space; everything else was pieced together in fragments in Bernon’s home studio, a habit he picked up from making electronic music. Stray feedback and wrong notes stay in the mix on purpose.
Lyrically deals with grief, friendships that fell apart and low self-esteem, kept abstract enough that the band would rather you absorb it than decode it. They say they care more about “feelings, textures, and intensity”, and on “Failure” the texture gets there first, ahead of any words.
