The idea started with two words: "ambient" and "country". For the original members of SUSS (Bob Holmes, Pat Irwin, Jonathan Gregg, William Garrett and Gary Leib), the genre of "ambient country", which they are often attributed to creating, has been hiding in plain sight for decades. The inspirations for SUSS's music lie in albums as diverse as Brian Eno's and Daniel Lanois's "Apollo Atmospheres" and Ry Cooder's "Paris, Texas" soundtrack. The listener can even trace the melancholic, high lonesome sprawl of these artists back to Hank Williams. Their first release on Northern Spy Records Ghost Box (Expanded) was described by Pitchfork magazine as "a vivid landscape where mellifluous tones foster the mystery and magic of a fabled landscape." 2019 & 2020 saw the release of High Line and Promise, two albums that made it on to many of the Top Ten Ambient album lists of those years. With the unexpected passing of founding member Gary Leib in 2021, SUSS released the posthumous EPs Night Suite and Heat Haze that included tracks recorded just before his passing. 2023 saw multiple releases from SUSS including Winter Was Hard and Across the Horizon , which together with the previous EPs, were released as the self-titled double album SUSS. 2023 also saw the release of a collaboration with the artist Andrew Tuttle - a thirty minute track called Rising on the Longform Editions record label. by Northern Spy Records