If there's an aligning theme to the varied catalog of Suzanne Kraft, it's that instrumental passages can be as lyrical as traditional songs. Perhaps it's down to the unfussed energy of his hometown, Los Angeles, that Kraft—real name Diego Herrera—has easily navigated through a prolific decade of solo records and collaborations encompassing dance tracks, various mutations of mannered pop, and a myriad of downtempo & electroacoustic experiments.
Trained in saxophone, guitar, bass and keys, during his teenage years Herrera began bus pilgrimages to Los Angeles open-format radio institution Dublab, where he fell in with a coterie of music-obsessed freaks. He'd eventually become the station's creative director while developing wide-ranging DJ instincts over thousands of hours logged on-air.
This time spent playing and exploring music while rubbing shoulders with LA's deepest record heads led to studio efforts conveying a striking creative maturity. Green Flash, his first 12-inch, is four-tracks of warm house music with subtle samples, falling squarely within the sun-warped LA tradition of dance music. Missum, released on CDr in 2010 and reissued four years later, delves into a more personal aspect of Herrera's production, its gentle arrangements for sax, guitar and synth presaging a string of accomplished solo albums.
In his early twenties, Herrera established himself as one of LA's brightest new dance music talents, beginning to tour the states and Europe as a DJ, exhibiting an uncanny knack for unearthing idiosyncratic bangers and an admirable appetite for risk. At this juncture, he could have banged out big track after big track. Sometimes, as is the case with "Renee Running" (under his Dude Energy alias), he did.
But nightlife and clubs held only a partial pull on Herrera's imagination. In the quieter times, he'd begin on a series of diaristic solo albums for Melody As Truth, the Amsterdam-based label run by Herrera's close collaborator Johnny Nash. After participating in the Red Bull Music Academy and producing a landmark album of contemplative instrumentals and cinematic, low-tempo beats, 2015's Talk From Home, Herrera relocated to Amsterdam, where he'd split a studio space with Nash and begin a period of focused studio exploration in between DJ gigs.
Over the next five years, Herrera would split his time between the club and the quiet repose of the studio, releasing patient solo albums like What You Get For Being Young and collaborating frequently with the likes of Nash, Adda Kaleh (with whom he made an album of beautiful Balearic pop as AKSK), and the legendary Spanish composer Suso Sáiz, to name just a few. He'd also develop a separate alias for outré dance experiments, releasing weird and endearing tracks through the inscrutable 'No' Label imprint by Amsterdam vinyl hub Rush Hour.
All the while, Herrera's monthly radio show for Dublab.de displayed a renewed obsession with subtle songcraft, which paved the way for a new artistic breakthrough. His 2021 album of exquisite guitar songs, About You, extolled the virtues of home and the complex web of emotions surrounding new love. In his hands, these classic themes, and the mix of dream pop and shoegaze, felt novel, the album's blurry, giddy style a perfect complement to its themes of distant longing. In a natural next step, Suzanne Kraft made a welcome return to Los Angeles to write more songs and make more records, alone and with friends, suitable for consumption in either setting.
The Suzanne Kraft live band will debut in spring 2022. In just over a decade, Herrera has put forth a warm, prolific body of work, shifting between styles as easily as freeway lanes.
