Announced: Sui Zhen – Witness + ‘Percy’s Day’

Alternative pop enigma Sui Zhen announces her new double album Witness, due Friday 19th March. Today, she shares the new single ‘Percy’s Day’ alongside a lyric video, out now.

Speaking on ‘Percy’s Day’, Sui shares, “I didn’t know how to celebrate him or how to acknowledge him for a long time, given the circumstances surrounding his death and our feelings about it. It was a very privately endured loss, despite my social media presence. This song is my memorial for Percy. It is my way of keeping him alive and sharing him with the world.”

Witness began as a release built around the meditative 13-minute single ‘Sleepless’, but it expanded into a much wider body of work, created with a stable of remarkable musicians including Phil Stroud, Adam Halliwell, Jack Doepel and Josh Smeltink.

Reflecting on how the album came together, Sui Zhen says: “I embarked on this album without intending for it to be my grief album, my healing album, or even a collection of music for bereaved people. It is a document of a time that I lived through where I was met with much adversity. And it is my hope that other who are living through loss may find comfort in the songs and feel less alone in their struggle.”

In 2021, after the sudden loss of her three-day-old son, Zhen found music extraordinarily difficult to face. Slowly, she returned to it through loose, searching jams with Stroud, Halliwell, Smeltink and Doepel. Their jazz-trained approach shaped Witness (2026), an album with no persona or elaborate world to inhabit. Rather than working towards a particular concept, Zhen was making music as a means of psychological and emotional survival, at a time when getting through the day could feel like a creative act in itself. The result is perhaps her most exposed work yet, freer in form, more improvisatory in spirit and imbued with the hard-won fulfilment of being able to create once more.

Sui Zhen’s music moves between dreamlike electronic pop, dub, lounge and bossa nova-inflected songwriting. Her early releases, including Sui Zhen (2007), Two Seas (2012), Body Reset and Female Basic (2014), established a fascination with where pop music, fiction and lived experience overlap. Secretly Susan (2015) gave that impulse a persona, using ‘Susan’ to explore the construction and performance of identity and womanhood online. Losing, Linda (2019) followed with another meticulously realised character and world, turning towards death, memory and the strange afterlives of digital ephemera. After Zhen lost her mother in 2018, those ideas became unavoidably personal.

Pre-order / pre-save Witness here.
Stream / purchase ‘Percy’s Day’ here.