SSION is back, and the time is right

Since its earliest days incubating in Kansas City, SSION, the experimental art-pop project led by Cody Critcheloe, has embraced a complete and total disregard for genre norms, gender norms, and the comfort level of anyone paying attention.

So it’s surprising to meet up with Critcheloe at Broadway Cafe and have him several times pause to make sure he wasn’t speaking too loud for the coffee shop setting or too quietly for my recording. Our polite Westport encounter took place a stone’s throw from the Airbnb that Critcheloe was renting out during an April visit to Kansas City. He’d been assembling a team here to film a music video for “Heaven Is My Thing Again,” the dreamy disco conclusion to SSION’s latest album, O — its first full-length in seven years. North Dakota synth-pop wonder MNDR, who makes an appearance on the track, would be arriving soon to appear in the video. Critcheloe was also flying in Nick Weiss (of electronic pop duo Teengirl Fantasy) and Sam Mehran (a former bandmate of Dev Hynes’ in Test Icicles), the two producers he’d worked most closely with on O.

In addition to these out-of-town guests, Critcheloe had wrangled a cast of local characters — artists and old friends, mostly — with whom he’s been working since his days at the Kansas City Art Institute. Despite spending his childhood in Kentucky, he still considers Kansas City his home. 

“I kinda feel like my family is here,” Critcheloe says. “This chosen family. The people I developed an aesthetic with, and a style with, are all here. So when I come back and make something, it’s like a family reunion.”

Critcheloe returns to KC often, but he hasn’t technically lived here in nearly a decade. His current residence is in New York — “All my stuff is there,” he says — though he says his lifestyle these days is more “gypsy-ish.” He travels constantly, hopping from recording sessions to tour dates to video shoots. 

It’s the latter of those that has occupied the biggest chunk of Critcheloe’s time in recent years. His adventurous, often surreal visual style has endeared him to notable performers like Santigold, Perfume Genius, and Kylie Minogue, all of whom have enlisted Critcheloe to direct their music videos. 

“The videos are the most articulate thing I make,” Critcheloe explains. “Talking to me is never gonna be as profound or articulate as watching a video. To me, I really feel like they’re really nuanced and say everything that I don’t know how to communicate.” 

Critcheloe’s videos are rife with subtle references that often require multiple viewings to catch, and this is certainly true of the videos he’s released so far for O. It was a while, for example, before I noticed that the prevalence of the bright blue “O” that pops up several times in SSION’s “Comeback” video may also be a nod to the Germs and Critcheloe’s punk-rock roots. But even if you’re not on a hunt for Easter eggs, the videos are still incredibly rewarding. On “At Least The Sky Is Blue,” Ariel Pink, dressed in drag, appears briefly to cover Neil Young’s “Hey Hey My My.” 

For awhile, Critcheloe even considered abandoning music altogether in favor of directing. 

“[Being an underground musician] is an insane amount of work,” he says. “And it’s a lot of work that doesn’t feel like there’s any kind of payoff to it, which I honestly think is kind of a spoiled way to think, but it’s a phase that I went through.” 

When SSION briefly toured Europe in 2015, though, the crowd’s response to Critcheloe’s new material invigorated him, and he dove back in. Critcheloe says that he sees himself investing at least the next year or two into touring and releasing more music videos from O. 

Sonically, on O — more than on any of his past efforts — Critcheloe has effectively blended drastically different sounds together to capture what he calls “an in-between-ness” that embodies the soul of SSION. During the album’s recording process, Critcheloe was flying back and forth across the country, visiting Mehran in Los Angeles to craft synth-heavy dance-pop hits, then catching a flight to New York to visit Weiss and add hardcore electronic sounds to, he says, “[fuck] things up.” The aggressive genre melding that resulted from this dynamic would have been hard to fathom twenty years ago. But in this age of unprecedented access to new and different cultures, O seems like a document of its time. 

“I just feel like it’s probably even less conscious, and more subconscious, that people are doing that,” Critcheloe says of the mashing-up of styles and sounds. “It’s just the state of our access to things.” (He credits M.I.A. as one of the first to exemplify this evolution in pop music.)

Also timely: O is arriving at a moment when a majority of music outlets (and those who follow them) are growing more accepting of, and enthusiastic about, work made by the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups. It’s good for business, but Critcheloe has been around long enough to know it’s no guarantee of long-term success. 

“It’s just this wave,” he says. “There are times when people are gonna be really into it, everyone’s gonna love it, think it’s totally cool, and there’s gonna be times when no one’s interested in it, it’s not cool. You kinda just have to do your thing and be invested in it for yourself.” 

♦

O is out now.