Album Review: Autofiction by Suede

Easily Suede To preface, I'm not the obvious choice to review Suede's ninth LP, the latest in a fairly illustrious career spanning around three decades. After all, the band's best known for their critical role in the emergence of the Britpop movement, and my knowledge of that style is rather surface level at best, relegated to familiarity with a handful of Oasis and Blur records. In fact, while I've long been aware of Suede's existence and historical relevance, to my knowledge I've never heard one of their songs, let alone a full album, until now (as an American, this type of thing is easy enough to miss, "Wonderwall" being the radical exception).

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At their most urgent, stomping, raucous best, three decades into their career they sound as fresh and exciting as they did at its start The comeback of Suede has been one of the more welcome, if unlikely, success stories of the past decade. This was a band who, after all, lost their lead guitarist and co-songwriter after their second album, and then spent the reminder of the ’90s in a haze of drugs and acrimony. It would be one thing had Brett Anderson and company decided to just hop on the ’90s nostalgia train, but what’s impressive about Suede is their determination to make new music which stands alongside their classic period.

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Suede have pulled off arguably the most successful reformation and comeback in recent years. The band opted to call it a day after their fifth album, 2002's A New Morning didn't meet expectations, but then they regrouped seven years later for some live shows and, soon after, 2013's comeback album, Bloodsports. It's a move that hasn't just paid dividends, but has also cemented their status as one of the most consistent bands from the past 25 years, while also introducing them to a new audience in the process.

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Suede (or The London Suede , if you're in the US) are back with their ninth studio album, an introspective, 11-track sojourn that ruminates on the gruelling mechanisms of fame almost 30 years after the band's eponymous debut. While their last release, 2018's 'The Blue Hour' , was subversive and esoteric, an experimental jaunt into a cinematic world of macabre gloom, 'Autofiction' is a punk-inclined renaissance for Suede, a return to the primordial soup which once birthed them as one of the most pivotal bands of the 90s. The record opens with 'She Still Leads Me On', an expansive rumination on lead singer Brett Anderson's relationship with his mother.

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If Suede took their taste for high-concept grandeur to its logical end-point on 2018's The Blue Hour, a question lingered: how do you top that? The answer lay in the tour, where Suede's primal fervour paid sweat-soaked testimony to the engaged, energised vigour of a band who had nailed this comeback game. If they could bottle that visceral dynamism with Brett Anderson's newly deepened lyrical form, new ways forward would surely beckon. The proof is Autofiction, an album that taps into Suede's galvanic guitar-rock drama without falling prey to that dread declaration of stagnation, the back-to-basics album. Perhaps deceptively, Suede's approach here is forward-thinking.

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