LOS ANGELES — AUGUST 1, 2024: Suki Waterhouse in Los Angeles on Thursday, August 1, 2024 (Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
When Suki Waterhouse discovered the Sparklemuffin, it was as if she had caught wind of one of the juiciest pieces of gossip of all time. She was in the midst of a late-night internet search binge when she came across a fuzzy peacock spider that dances. “I was really attracted to looking at him,” the blond-banged multihyphenate says over the phone from London. “He’s very wildly colored and also sort of self-destructive in a way because they eat their partners if they don’t like the dance that they’re doing.”
At that moment, an awestruck Waterhouse thought everyone needed to know about this vibrant creature whose orange-and-blue-hued abdomen resembled a Pendleton blanket. Naturally, she began firing off messages and DMs to friends and flooding her family’s WhatsApp chat with Sparklemuffin content. Before she knew it, her mild fascination began to dominate her world.
But at that point, it was solely a personal obsession — not even remotely an album title. She had been fixated on calling her second LP “A Yellow Rose for Bobby Peru,” an homage to one of her favorite movies, “Wild at Heart,” and the Victorian-era notion that yellow roses “were associated with slightly unhappy relationships.” But Waterhouse craved a title that incited joy — something that was the antithesis of her headspace when she created her debut album, “I Can’t Let Go.” Still, Waterhouse couldn’t shake her fascination with the sparklemuffin chic arachnid. After all, it was “silly and ridiculous.” So it was fitting that she landed on the name “Memoir of a Sparklemuffin” for her sophomore album. “That title just felt much more celebratory,” she asserts.
Indeed, the 32-year-old musician has had lots to celebrate lately. Last year, Waterhouse starred in the popular musical drama series “Daisy Jones & the Six,” the adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s bestseller, which created an insatiable fandom. This April, she and fiancé Robert Pattinson welcomed their first child — a daughter — and just days before this conversation, she made her debut as an opener at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour at London’s Wembley Stadium.
Following her Coachella performance in April, Waterhouse received a call asking her to perform on the Eras Tour. “I freaked out and was completely obviously overjoyed that would be happening,” she recalls. But she was hesitant to tell that many people in her life because she was afraid of how many people would ask for tickets. “I kept it pretty close to the heart,” she laughs. On the day of the show, Waterhouse was nervous to walk the stage’s “intimidating” catwalk, but Swift provided some encouragement. “She was like, ‘You have to go for it and walk down that and have that fun moment,’” Waterhouse recalls.
LOS ANGELES — AUGUST 1, 2024: Suki Waterhouse in Los Angeles on Thursday, August 1, 2024 (Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
“I was trying to stay very cool and casual about it before it happened and during, so I could get through my set and really enjoy it, but reflecting on it now, I’m so glad that I’d actually soaked it all up,” she says. Luckily she was able to enjoy the performance, where her entire family attended and her friends in her hometown were watching, because “it was such a jump of a crowd to go from playing for a couple of thousand people to looking out on a stadium that size.” During Paramore‘s Eras Tour set that night, she and Pattinson also received a surprise shoutout from the band, which went viral.
Before Paramore performed “Decode” — a song from the “Twilight” soundtrack — bandleader Hayley Williams told the crowd, “I would like to dedicate this next song to Mr. Waterhouse,” a cheeky nod to Pattinson’s brooding vampire Edward in the “Twilight” franchise. Waterhouse thought it was hilarious, but her dad was confused. “[He] didn’t really understand what was going on because she said ‘Mr. Waterhouse,’ so he was already having this very excited, prideful moment, and then his brain couldn’t compute what was happening,” Waterhouse says. “He definitely doesn’t understand those references.” Pattinson was blissfully unaware of what was happening, but that’s because he was on set. Waterhouse, of course, informed him of Williams’ shoutout: “It was very sweet.”
Performing at the Eras Tour may have been a landmark moment for Waterhouse, but she’s been cutting her teeth as a creative for half her life. The London-born actress-singer began modeling at 16 for brands like Burberry, Tommy Hilfiger and Ferragamo. She graced the covers of Vogue and Elle before pivoting to acting in 2012 with roles in films including “The Divergent Series: Insurgent,” “Assassination Nation,” “Detective Pikachu” and “Misbehaviour.” By 2016, Waterhouse released her debut single — the dreamy breakup ballad “Brutally” — which she followed the next year with the lovestruck retro-pop number “Good Looking” (it earned a viral boost from TikTok in 2022).
After sporadically sharing singles over the years, she released her debut album, “I Can’t Let Go,” in 2022. Later that fall, she shared a compilation of her singles over the years with her EP “Milk Teeth.” In 2023, she expanded her musical talent further, learning to play piano for her role as ambitious keyboardist Karen Sirko in “Daisy Jones & the Six.” The “band,” she revealed in a vlog from May, was actually supposed to surprise perform at Lollapalooza last year but plans were halted due to the writers’ strike. They tried to play shows a few times, she says, but each time something got in the way. “I think everyone’s too busy now,” she says of a prospective performance, but she’s leaving it up in the air: “Who knows?”
Right now, she’s fully immersed in sparklemuffin world. For Waterhouse, the discovery of the arachnid wasn’t just throwaway internet fodder — it became a metaphor for her own memoir and, in turn, “Memoir of a Sparklemuffin,” due Sept. 13 on Sub Pop. The introspective project is “a turbulent journey, tangled in self-destructive choices and relationships,” which mirrors the life cycle of the arachnid. “It’s all about enchantment and entrapment,” she says. But the 18-track album allowed Waterhouse to reflect on her identity and values. “I thought about the emergence from despair as the spider leaves its cocoon and the caution of opening up to possibilities of genuine love,” she explains.
LOS ANGELES — AUGUST 1, 2024: Suki Waterhouse in Los Angeles on Thursday, August 1, 2024 (Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Waterhouse says she didn’t have the opportunity to collaborate with as many people on her first album, but “Memoir of a Sparklemuffin” allowed her to join forces with executive producer Eli Hirsch, as well as artists including Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado (Weyes Blood, Father John Misty, Beyoncé), Cigarettes After Sex’s Greg Gonzalez, Rick Nowels (James Blake, Lana Del Rey) and Natalie Findlay and Jules Apollinaire of the band Ttrruuces. She also teamed up once again with Brad Cook (Waxahatchee, Snail Mail), who produced her debut album. With this team of creatives, she was able to “expand genres” — to woozy doo-wop (“OMG),” ’90s mall-core (“Supersad”) and Americana (“Think Twice”) — while making the project sound cohesive. That wider sonic palette also stemmed from inspiration Waterhouse found in artists like Sharon Van Etten, Garbage, The Magnetic Fields and Sheryl Crow.
For instance, Waterhouse wanted a “head-banging car song” on the record that was a nod to Paramore and Garbage. That ended up being the ’90s-alt-tinged opener, “Gateway Drug,” which is a bait-and-switch thanks to her soft vocals and some heavy guitar riffs. “I wanted to do something that lulls you into a sense this is going to be a slow, romantic song and have something that really explodes and has a wild abandon to it,” Waterhouse says of the track.
On the cinematic “Model, Actress, Whatever,” Waterhouse evokes Lana Del Rey and “grapples with aspiration and the reality of superficiality,” which stemmed from her own experience of being written off as an aspiring artist. “All of my dreams came true, the bigger the ocean, the deeper the blue / Call me a model, an actress, whatever,” she sings with her honeyed lilt.
“With my first album, I did struggle for quite a long time to get labels to even open my email and read it,” she recalls. “All the feedback I kept getting was like, ‘No, we don’t listen to albums from models.’” She also found she was referencing the arc of an ingénue in a Jennifer Blowdryer book she nabbed in Silver Lake. “In Hollywood, you’re a model and then you’re an actress and you become a big thing, and then you’re just torn down,” Waterhouse says, then pauses. Perhaps, she says, she was inserting herself into that character. “What will it be like when it’s all over? Does that sound really dark?” she laughs nervously.
LOS ANGELES — AUGUST 1, 2024: Suki Waterhouse in Los Angeles on Thursday, August 1, 2024 (Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Hollywood is also the focal point of “Lawsuit,” which Waterhouse insists she thought was a “tongue-in-cheek” word to have in a song and not specific. “I could write a book about the ways you took advantage, yeah / You think it’s bad, but it’s about to get worse,” she taunts on the R&B-meets-pop track. Waterhouse transfixes with the garage-y “Big Love,” which was inspired by stories she heard from “Frozen Oranges” author Violet Paley about her manic episodes at a New York City bar. The book stuck with Waterhouse, particularly the sentiment that “you’re just running into self-destruction and there’s this huge hole in your heart that you’re trying to fill with love and nothing’s working to fill it.”
Despite being in a committed relationship for several years, Waterhouse found inspiration for the melancholic breakup song “Everybody Breaks Up Anyway” in an overheard conversation at a party. The line stuck with her, but it became more emblematic of “more tragic circumstances that could happen.” “Love never lasts, but I’m gonna stay on your mind forever / ’Cause everybody breaks up anyway,” Waterhouse solemnly sings over lush strings. “It is left open-ended,” she says of the track.
With the sweeping album closer, “To Love,” which evokes the aching slide guitar of Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You,” Waterhouse took the stems of her viral hit “Good Looking” and stripped it down. “It’s about two people acknowledging a past and being able to fully experience the depth of a new love,” she explains.
Waterhouse hopes that “Memoir of a Sparklemuffin” opens up new opportunities. She’d love to collaborate with Rosalía even though admittedly she’d “be super freaked out because she has the best voice probably in the world. After I saw her live in concert last year, I was completely speechless about her, just the energy and her presence,” Waterhouse beams. Also on her list of dream collaborators: Aimee Mann, Cat Power, PJ Harvey and Sophie B. Hawkins.
But for now, Waterhouse is just grateful to be making the music she’s always wanted to create. She knows it’s taken time to earn “respect,” as a “model, actress, whatever.” “You can’t just sail into a new position,” she says. “You just have to hope that you keep getting opportunities.”