Intoxicating: Suzy Clue Wants It All

From What's Nu? Magazine Issue #015

Quick music terminology 101: A ‘topline’ is a vocal melody that sits on ‘top’ of the instrumental. Thus, the ‘top’ line. Now, have you considered Linkin Park’s toplines? They are so good. Take “Runaway” for instance; try tracing Chester Bennington’s melody with your finger in the air and you’ll get rises, falls, dips and leaps in all kinds of places. You could transplant that onto any pop song and it would be improved. Toplines might not the first thing you might consider when you consider Linkin Park but Suzy Clue does, and when she exclaimed to me in the green room at the Lodge Room in Los Angeles just how good Linkin Park’s toplines are I understood completely and, based off her catalog so far, so does she. 

Suzy Clue’s music sounds like what TRL actually was in 1998, not what it is remembered as: a place where Korn’s “Got the Life” may have dethroned the Backstreet Boys but competed in the same area, with the same pop appeal, in order to get there. What percentage of the screaming girls that lined the block outside MTV studios in Times Square had copies of Backstreet’s Back and Follow the Leader in their CD binders? Maybe not all of them but more than you’d think, I’m sure.

This is who Suzy Clue’s radically accessible yet uncompromisingly heavy pop metal is for.

It was the 2025 single “Uneasy” that first landed Suzy Clue on my radar and ensured she’d stay there. Plenty of pop stars have been making eyes at nu metal for the duration of our recent ‘revival’ but “Uneasy” asks it on a date. Principally the guitars, provided by NYC’s Gun, are loud. And not in a now-stock ‘nu-gaze’ manner either, they riff. They pull Clue’s ethereal melodies back down to earth and ground them on a bedrock of nu metal energy. This combination only occasionally surfaced in the Y2K pop golden age, but if you know ball you know where this is coming from. You would know that Aaliyah was a huge Korn fan who was set to collaborate with the band on a song for the Queen of the Damned soundtrack before her untimely passing in 2001. You would know that the guitars on Ashanti’s “Only You” have no business being that heavy. And you might know the same applies to Lindsay Lohan’s “Rumors,” perhaps “Uneasy”’s most direct influence and one that I excitedly confirmed with Suzy Clue herself as truth.

We had barely a moment of breathing room in the green room before it was filled with friends, bandmates and important record industry types, all of whom rightly believe Suzy Clue has ‘next big thing’ potential. We dashed about the venue looking for an unoccupied space before settling for the bathroom.

“I approach things from the perspective of being a pop girl just because I like to dance and that's how I want to present myself,” Clue imparted to me between the sink and the stalls. “But in terms of even how I mix the music, I want the guitars to be louder. I want things to sound really heavy.” 

While “Uneasy” may fit that maxim to a tee, Suzy Clue’s latest single “FEED” flips the script. Over a sleek and intense instrumental that finds common ground between Savage Garden’s “I Want You” and Playing the Angel-era Depeche Mode, Clue uploads a melancholy tale of forbidden love (inspired by Russian pop duo t.A.T.u and Black Swan). “I can smell her on my clothes,” she sings, sounding like somebody floating outside her crush’s bedroom window, “It’s intoxicating.” Heavy metal drums come crashing in to set up the chorus but right where you think those aforementioned really heavy guitars are about to be, an array of synth arpeggios explode like fireworks, showering the track in Dandelion florets of melody. It’s a dazzling moment that elevates “FEED” from alt-pop goodness to the kind of track Britney Spears would have gone to war for during her In the Zone era.

Summiting the stage in front of a restless but polite crowd, Suzy Clue’s first priority was to request her vocals higher. If the request was obliged it was hard to tell but it was also hard to tell that this was a problem. Although later she’d express consternation at the volume it sounded about right to me, her low vocals adding a new undertow of sexiness to an already sensual set. With a three piece band backing her up, seven string guitarist of course, Clue’s performance featured the occasional burst of solo choreography that other vocalists would wait on until they had a troupe of backup dancers joining them. Not Clue. She grew up watching Britney and Shakira’s onstage choreo add to their shows and couldn't wait on the luxury of additional dancers to integrate her own. The effect is both charmingly small scale and intimidatingly ambitious. What may once have been between Clue and her bedroom mirror before won’t be for much longer.

“I want dancers. In New York we did a show where I brought dancers on and it was amazing,” Clue would inform me after the show, “In the future, I want to have a full stage production, a bunch of dancers and a whole storyline and choreography. I want it all.” 

Watching Suzy Clue’s set that night, I could imagine all of it coming her way soon. Her sound is both of the moment, Y2K indebted pop with a healthy dollop of nu-metal on top, and way beyond it. There isn’t the hesitancy other modern pop artists have when approaching those sounds as they try to figure out what percentage of which will go viral on TikTok this week. Clue’s music is both of them at once without apologies. It understands that when nu metal bands cut out the guitar solos from their heavy metal predecessors, it was to make room for more hooks. It knows that Janet Jackson once gushed to Carson Daly on TRL that she just loves the new Papa Roach single (true story, look it up) and understands that as a sign of admiration between peers, not rivals. It wants to right the wrong that was done to Linkin Park when “In the End” was blocked from the number one spot on the Hot 100 by Jennifer Lopez. And it wants to do it by sounding like both artists at the same time. It’s in everyone’s best interest to cheer her on while she tries. After all, a little ambition used to go a long way in pop music. So did choreography. So did drop-tuned heavy guitars.

There's no reason why it couldn’t go all the way again.