No Backing Down

No Backing Down Brett Anderson & co. remain in thrilling, exhilarating form as their second act hits new heights.

- Shaun Curran

Suede have always been knowingly adept at constructing the parameters of their own universe. Singer Brett Anderson grandly calls this Suedeworld, a certain aesthetic - a sort of romantic literate realism where cold and grit meet broken beauty - that whether writing about chemically enhanced sex or the insecurities of fatherhood, has survived 10 varied albums across a 35-year career that has necessitated numerous reboots, a Suede speciality. Both 1996's pop-facing best-seller Coming Up and 2013's post-reformation Bloodsports represented new starts, the latter reintroducing the band as durable energised creative entity after first era Suede’s slow malaise.

There was another gear shift with 2022's Autofiction, which after 2018’s superb, elaborate hinterland probing The Blue Hour successfully reset Suede as a potent, urgent rock band in their fifties - “punk through a Suede lens” as Anderson put it, ie. not really punk but Suede’s agitated black-and-white hued take. Tenth album Antidepressants feels like the natural followup: not a post-punk record per se as ever, this is the Suede lens - though the musical language certainly has entomology in the era (PIL, The Cure, Banshees, Joy Division). Enriched with more colour and very Suede-like melodicism, it makes for a stirring update on Autofiction’s palette.