Recently, I had a chance to share some album recommendations with fellow Substacker Dan Gorman, where I got to share my love and appreciation for Vivek Shraya’s 2018 collaboration with Queer Songbook Orchestra, Part-Time Woman. It was a chance not only to acknowledge that excellent record, but to give a little pre-release shout-out to New Models, Shraya’s latest release.

Ever the consummate storyteller, Shraya has never been someone at a loss for words. She’s the epitome of a multi-hyphenate: musician, author, playwright, filmmaker, academic, and visual artist. No matter what medium she’s working in, Shraya’s strength lies in her ability to connect with an audience. But what happens when words don’t do justice to one’s feelings? Of the themes behind her eleventh studio album, Shraya says, “How do you express the horror and helplessness of witnessing progress being rapidly undone—in words—when all you want to do is scream or cry?” New Models finds her “grappling with the state of the world over the past four years and eventually realizing that language, particularly English, had become so contorted and weaponized that the only way I could grieve, rage, and find comfort was to let go of it.”

Lyrics and language are not the only things scaled back on New Models. Working once again with producer and engineer James Bunton (who started his longtime collaboration with Shraya with Part-Time Woman), Shraya strips her sound down to its barest, most evocative elements. The two have built a relationship rooted in trust and curiosity, and you can hear that in every note. Bunton encouraged Shraya to experiment on her own before they came together in the studio, a process she admits felt “difficult and lonely” at first but ultimately freed her to play and explore in a way that invigorated her creative process.

Minimalist synths bend and flicker, percussion stutters and swells, and Shraya’s voice moves between words and wordlessness, like someone searching for a connection beyond language. “When I’m overcome with feeling / I have to break free from words and just sing,” she says in the album’s opening track, “When I’m Overcome,”✦ a sentiment that captures the album’s emotional core: the realization that, regardless of what language we speak, it’s feeling that ultimately connects us. New Models finds Shraya letting go of explaining; instead, she leans into expressing and trusting that the emotion embedded in her sound can articulate what mere words can’t. The glitchy eruption of “Apathy Crisis,” the aching pulse of “We’re in Pain,” the mantra-like repetition of “Moral Panic” trace Sharaya’s creative arch, following her instinct and impulses.

I’ve long admired Shraya’s ability to move between mediums, and how—no matter the form—her work always arrives in her own unmistakable voice. It’s fitting, then, that in returning to her first medium, music, she’s once again finding a new model for making art, sparking conversation, and nurturing connection. New Models reminds me that creation doesn’t always require explanation, and that sometimes the most radical act is vulnerability: to feel deeply and invite others to feel with you.

a little more [t]here [t]here 🪩

To read more about Vivek Shraya, check out my full review of Part-Time Woman, published in 2017, and a little something about Shraya’s 2023 single, “Good Luck (You’re Fucked).” As well, I wrote about Angry, the 2018 album Sharya released with her sibling Shamik Bilgi under the band name Too Attached.

All reviews were published originally on my former blog, DOMINIONATED, whose archives are now available on Substack.

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Remember COVID? More precisely, remember that feeling around May 2020 when we lost track of how long we had been in lockdown and completely forgot what pre-pandemic life was like? We couldn’t even pretend to have a real life on social media, because social media had become our real life and the only place most people could connect.

What does any of this have to do with Tears For Fears and Songs from the Big Chair? It was during this precise time in lockdown that an old university acquaintance shared the “10 Influential Albums in 10 Days” Facebook meme, in which he featured Tears For Fears’ 1983 debut album, The Hurting, with the comment, “Better than Songs from the Big Chair.” Taking the bait, I commented back, “Them’s fightin’ words, mister,” prompting him to reply: “They were meant to be.”

I’ll spare you the details about how this exchange set me off on a pandemic-sized quest to research and read every think piece I could about Songs from the Big Chair, and how I started formulating my pitch to write 331/3 for a book on it (at the time I was shocked there wasn’t already one in the series, and still can’t believe there isn’t one now). Suffice to say, when I make out lists of albums I wanted to write about on this Substack, Songs from the Big Chair is always close to the very top. I would argue it’s one of the defining albums of the 1980s, quintessentially of its time and a record that remains as relevant in 2025 as it was in 1985.

If there is one thing you need to know about Tears For Fears, amongst all the relevant details of their formation and influences, it is that the core duo of Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal formed in 1981, and were heavily influenced by the work of American psychologist Arthur Janov, who pioneered primal therapy and famously counted John Lennon among his patients. They adopted the name Tears For Fears from a central tenet of Janov’s work: that our repressed childhood trauma—our tears—informs the neuroses, phobias, and fears we develop as adults.

Orzabal turned his deep interest in Janov’s work into an exploration of his own childhood traumas on The Hurting, the band’s 1983 debut album. Song titles were lifted directly from chapters of Janov’s books (“Ideas as Opiates”), and his ideas bled into the music’s icy synth sheen through Orzabal’s lyrics on songs like “Mad World,” “Change,” and “Suffer the Children.” Not exactly the stuff of top 10 hits and Top of the Pops appearances, and yet Tears For Fears managed both. In 1982, “Mad World” peaked at #3 on the UK charts and “Change” at #4, and a re-recording of “Pale Shelter” (originally released as a single in 1982 that never charted) made it to #5 in 1983.

While Janov’s influence is writ large all over the concept of the Hurting, it wouldn’t be until Songs from the Big Chair that Tears For Fears managed to bring his message to the masses through that record’s juggernaut opening track. As the story goes, Orzabal programmed a relentless and repetitive rhythm into a drum machine, paired it with a simple synth line and spare percussive flourishes, and then repeated the song’s improvised central theme, inspired by Janov’s primal scream therapy.

A song more about political protest (according to Orzabal) than personal therapy, it is hard not to read either topic into “Shout,”✦ with its rally-cry-like chorus and pointed verses about railing against “the things [we] can do without.” “Shout” was a stone-cold hit on delivery. It is wracked by Cold War anxiety that feels almost more relevant today as fascism, racism, and a blatant disregard for the dignity of humankind spread like a supervirus in our own backyards as opposed to countries on other continents.

Over its six-and-a-half-minute runtime, “Shout” swells to a cathartic anti-climax that never fully resolves its tension. Instead, it segues into one of the album’s signature ballads, “The Working Hour,” a call-out to the music industry’s exploitation of artists that predates the current era of streaming injustices by decades. Though it glistens with the highly polished production values of its time, “The Working Hour” could just as easily be about today’s music industry landscape, as musicians face shrinking royalties, cancelled tours, and a marketplace where even celebrated releases struggle to provide artists a sustainable livelihood. 1980s excess and 2020s precarity are more closely aligned than they might appear.

In 1985, 11-year-old me hated “The Working Hour.” I also frequently skipped over “I Believe,” “Broken,” and “Listen,” a full half of the album’s eight tracks. Although I didn’t have the words or musical knowledge to describe it as such, I didn’t enjoy or appreciate the jazzy and proggy experimentation facet of Songs from the Big Chair until much later in my adulthood, when I would listen to the record as a continuous whole on CD versus vinyl that required flipping halfway through. In hindsight, my reaction wasn’t unusual: many listeners gravitated toward the big singles and dismissed the rest. Now, though, I value the balance they provide and the bridges they create that bind the complete album together—an element that I feel Tears For Fears’ debut album lacks.

“I Believe” slows the pace with a jazz-inflected ballad that spotlights Orzabal’s vocals in a way the bigger singles rarely do. “Broken” serves as both connective tissue (reappearing for a slight return immediately after “Head Over Heels”) and a reminder that in 1985, we weren’t entirely out of arty prog-rock’s grasp yet. Closing track “Listen” layers the band’s signature synth textures with new-age chants for a meditative finale that leaves you in a state of suspended animation. That said, its reliance on “world music” tropes feels like an artifact of mid-80s production trends that today comes uncomfortably close to cultural appropriation. Still, I always think of its last notes as a deep inhale, as if the album is holding its breath for whatever happens next.

Songs from the Big Chair is still very much of its mid-1980s time, and I’m sure that for many who came to it for the big singles, Side B’s more esoteric moments can feel a bit stylistically schizophrenic compared to its stacked Side A. Not surprisingly, the album’s title is taken from another relic of its time, the 1976 two-part TV movie Sybil, starring Sally Field as a woman living with dissociative identity disorder. Field’s character finds solace in her therapist’s big chair, and in much the same way, the band retreated into these eclectic recordings as a way to find peace from the critical lashing The Hurting received from Britain’s fickle music press.

One song that didn’t initially bring Orzabal any peace or joy ended up as Tears For Fears’ biggest hit ever. “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” was the last track completed for Songs from the Big Chair, and at first blush, its bubbly beat and light touch feel miles from the angular edges of “Shout.” Once the song’s extended intro settles into the first verse, and Smith begins singing, its bright surface is darkened by its lyrical unease: “Welcome to your life / There’s no turning back / Even while we sleep / We will find you.” The underpinning menace and threat of power, corruption, and the lies being sold to the general public to cover up both make “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” one of the most unlikely of Top 40 hits, but it conveyed the deep-seated anxiety and skepticism brewing at the time. With 1984 only just behind us, the cultural shadow of Orwell’s Big Brother was unavoidable. The book’s vision of state surveillance and truth being twisted to fit official narratives felt less like science fiction and more like a mirror of the era’s military, nuclear, and geopolitical tensions. Tears For Fears tapped into that climate of mistrust and uncertainty, packaging it in a song that somehow still became a massive mainstream hit.

As if to counter the skiffle beat and pearly piano riffs on “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” Tears For Fears follow it with “Mother’s Talk,”✦ the album’s dense and claustrophobic first single (released in August of 1984). Choppy rhythms and heavy synths compound the nervous energy of Orzabal’s fractured vocals. Lyrically, “Mother’s Talk” is the most paranoid moment on Song From the Big Chair, with anxiety-inducing imagery of nuclear-age fears, impending climate disaster, and a planet teetering on the brink of a global meltdown.

That intensity clears on “Head Over Heels,”✦ the album’s most unabashedly romantic track and arguably its poppiest moment. Built on a chiming piano riff and lush harmonies, “Head Over Heels” softens the sharper edges on Songs from the Big Chair. Still, Orzabal can’t help but undercut the sweetness with a sense of desperation, admitting that intimacy is fragile and fleeting in a world spinning out of control. Both tender and uneasy, “Head Over Heels” is as close to sentimental as Tears For Fears get, providing a late-album breather between the album’s moments of paranoia and confrontation.

Songs from the Big Chair is indelibly tied to the 1980s, thanks to its standout singles, but it is rarely appreciated as a collective work that stands on its own merits. It is frequently ranked in the lower echelons of best albums from the 1980s: an 87 from Pitchfork in 2018, and a more respectable yet criminally low 47 from Paste in 2020, where Josh Jackson rightfully acknowledges that many artists and producers at the time “toyed with the same tricks, giving songs a shorter shelf life.” But we are now in a time where age is immaterial, and music consumers are drawing from every era to curate their own personal playlists. Many of Songs from the Big Chair’s tracks, like “Shout” and “Mother’s Talk,” are poised to soundtrack our maddingly fast-paced, changing modern world, ready for their TikTok moment. What sets Tears For Fears’ sophomore album apart, though, is that beyond the hits and viral potential, it still speaks to the same anxieties about power, manipulation, and human connection that it did in 1985. Those themes have only grown sharper forty years on from its initial release, making Songs from the Big Chair feel less like a period piece and more like a warning we still must heed.

Funny how time flies, but the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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Rec Centre, Squash

As I was sitting down to scribble out some thoughts on Rec Centre’s new album, Squash, I had a kind of a-ha moment about the moniker musician Alex Hudson uses for his “homemade pop music” solo project. I always thought that the ‘rec’ in Rec Centre stood for recreational, in that Hudson’s day job is Editor-in-Chief of Exclaim!, Canada’s longstanding go-to source for music and entertainment news, and that Rec Centre has been his creative outlet for going on some fifteen-plus years now. But after hearing the synthy delights on Squash, I’m starting to think that ‘rec’ could just as easily mean ‘recollection.’

I know it’s been some time since Hudosn relocated to Toronto from Vancouver, so to hear his lyrics peppered with super specific references to both YYC and the past suggests that Rec Centre is very much in a reflective mood for this latest outing. “Fall 2015, I made plans to go / See a bachelor apartment at The Galileo,” he recounts of a visit to an eastside Vancouver apartment block on “The Galileo.”✦ Accompanied by tambourine and electric guitar, Hudson peppers his story-song with wry observations like “The wallpaper in the lobby / Was melted like a Salvador Dali,” “Huge gaps under the doorways / It’s like living inside of an ashtray,” and wondering “What did I expect from a Craigslist post without a photo?” Without a doubt, my favourite Vancouver reference pops off at the end when Hudson name-checks both Vancouver-based musician Devours and live music photographer Steve Louie, both well-respected and recognized names of the city’s independent music scene.

Elsewhere, the motorik motion of “Tiger” and the bouncy joie de vivre of “Reclaimed By Nature” infuse Squash with a retro musical sensibility to match Hudson’s memory poem lyrics that acknowledge the passing of time, letting go of expectations that will never come to pass, and accepting the reality that you are likely the end of the family line. It’s that last revelation, mentioned on the sterling, new wave-flavoured “Sadie,”✦ that resonates most with me: without any offspring of my own, the only mark I will leave in this world is my digital footprint, the remnants of my creative—and recreational—output.

And that’s okay, because that is enough.

Nation of Language, Dance Called Memory

There’s an altogether different discourse with recollection at play on Dance Called Memory, the fourth LP from Brooklyn-based trio Nation of Language. I felt a strong gravitational pull from their keyboard-based sound from the very beginning. OMD, Depeche Mode, New Order and Pet Shop Boys often get namechecked when discussing Nation of Language, and having grown up listening to those bands, it would seem like a foregone conclusion that I’d be all over Nation of Language. And I am, but for reasons that have less to do with their sonic palette and more to do with the emotional hues that colour their work.

Opener “Can’t Face One Another”✦ is an elegiac, understated resistance to the march of time that finds lead vocalist Ian Richard Devaney in a spot familiar to many: “The day’s begun / I can’t face another one / But on and on they come.” The woeful cry of an echo-drenched harmonica and a simple guitar melody mark the movement of shadows across the room, as a modest programmed beat and ever-expanding wash of synths break the monotony and mourning, the song sliding to its swelling conclusion.

“In Another Life”✦ breathes energy and tempo into Dance Called Memory, a peppy, poppy track on the verge of becoming a crossover top 10 hit, were it 1985. “Silhouette” raises the curtains while lowering the temperature; it feels cinematic and assured in the same way the Blue Nile’s Hats knows precisely what it’s doing and won’t be rushed into anything. Like that venerable Scottish synth-pop band, Nation of Language is self-aware of their strengths and how to leverage their sophisticated style to craft warm, human moments out of an artificial medium.

As Dance Called Memory reaches its quieter, more contemplative moments, it’s evident that Nation of Language’s power lies in what they leave unsaid. Their balance of precision-like arrangements and emotional vulnerability never feels calculated or forced. That’s a gift that their electronic forebears had as well: leaving space for intimacy and memory to plant its seeds amidst the circuitry and machinery.

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After more than three decades as masters of mellifluous, sometimes moody electro-retro-pop, Saint Etienne have released their thirteenth—and final—album, International. Upon hearing the news of Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley, and Pete Wiggs’s retirement, media reports suggested Saint Etienne is “calling it quits” or “calling it a day,” but the band is a tad less definitive in their press release.

“The group aren’t splitting up as such,” the release says, “they still remain the best of friends after 35 years recording together—but they don’t feel like they want to go on forever and wanted to go out with a bang.” That same statement also teased that International’s closing track, aptly titled “The Last Time,”✦ is a “goodbye to their fans, on record, for the very ‘Last Time.’” Whatever Saint Etienne are suggesting (or not suggesting) through language like “aren’t splitting up as such” and saying “goodbye to their fans, on record,” they have stated clearly that International is their adieu; the final flight (if you will) for what I’m lovingly calling Air Etienne in this series. And that makes me sad.

It makes Cracknell sad, too. In a recent issue of Electronic Sound, where the band sat down to recap their thirty-year-plus career, Cracknell discussed the aforementioned final track, saying, “I can’t listen to [“The Last Time”]. I cry every time I hear it.” The interviewer admits to shedding a tear at “The Last Time,” too, and singles out “Fade” as a song that made him well up, as well. So it goes without saying that I, an old softie who is prone to crying at the drop of a bass, was totally anticipating the waterworks to turn on from the very first notes of “The Last Time.” I was expecting International to be an emotionally charged journey the whole way through, in much the same way hearing Strangeways, Here We Come after the Smiths break-up stabbed you in the solar plexus.

But I didn’t. There were no tears the first time, the fifth time, or the fifteenth time listening to International. And that’s okay. Saint Etienne does not owe me catharsis. Their records have never come with a 100% guarantee of transcendence and salvation, and I think that most objective fans (even Winona Ryder) will agree that the band has not always delivered at that level throughout their discography.

What Saint Etienne has consistently excelled at is the art of album-making—bringing together a collection of songs that hang together like a carefully curated gallery of still images, water colours, and abstract canvases that communicate with each other in seemingly supernatural ways. Dance music as a genre has often been criticized for making banger singles but stale long players. Somewhere along the way (and quite early on, I might add), Saint Etienne discovered the formula for making superlative album-length statements: each release must look to the past, live in the present, and lean to the future.

I didn’t quite hear the formula at work in my initial listens to International. While it’s far from a whimper, it wasn’t giving the full-album emotional wallop I was anticipating. It feels more closely aligned with their highly revered compilation albums (one of which, Continental, has ascended to official album release status); I was expecting International to be a banger of an album, but it played more like a collection of songs at varying degrees of bangerness (look at me out here evolving the language).

It does start with a bang (that’s the last time I use that word in the post, I promise): “Glad”✦ is an all-out ode to joy even on the bleakest of days. You could say its sunny optimism is chemically induced thanks to the contributions of Chemical Brother Tom Rowlands. The song also features Doves’ Jez Williams on guitar, which somehow adds to the cheery camaraderie pouring forth from its infectious positivity. Not that Saint Etienne couldn’t (or wouldn’t) come up with a song like “Glad” on their own, but the collaboration brings together Saint Etienne’s two pop worlds—indie and dance—on a song that essentially instructs fans not to be sad that Saint Etienne is over, but to revel in the fact that their music will go on eternally. Who could have a heavy heart listening to a melody so light and airy?

“Dancing Heart” treads similar themes while imploring you to dance away your troubles. “Now it’s time to live and move to the rhythm of heartbreak,” Cracknell sings in the most soothing of tones, her voice noticeably more reserved and more resonant than we’ve ever heard. She tells us, “Moments like these / They don’t last forever, turn them to memories,” encouraging us to keep dancing “‘til the morning comes.”

“Glad” and “Dancing Heart” are not the only songs on International to acknowledge that this is the last music we’ll ever hear from Saint Etienne, but they are the two that are most explicitly set in the present. Lest we miss the message embedded in “Glad,” they reinforce the finality of it all by aiming the disco ball’s refracted lights right into our eyes.

“The Go Betweens” features guest vocals from Nick Heyward, one-time member of 80s new wave band Haircut One Hundred and an accomplished solo artist in his own right. Better known in the UK as a pop icon, Heyward’s involvement probably won’t register with anyone under 50, but it clearly delights Saint Etienne: “[Heyward’s] one of my secret old crushes,” Cracknell admits in the Electronic Sound interview, and his harmonies feel like a knowing nod back, as if he’s equally as charmed. The song’s title and arrangement tip their bowler hats to the Australian band the Go-Betweens, early purveyors of indie jangle pop who helped shape the musical sensibilities of artists like Saint Etienne, who grew up studying the credits on 45s, watching Top of the Pops appearances, and tracking the UK charts. It’s a reminder that Stanley, the band’s resident pop historian, literally wrote the book on this stuff with Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop (2013), a chronological yet approachable survey of pop music from the 1950s onward.

I hear echoes of 2005’s Tales from Turnpike House on “The Go Betweens,” specifically the song “A Good Thing.” There’s no specific reference point that connects it to their seventh album; instead, it’s as if Saint Etienne are making a subtle callback to that particular project. There’s a similar familiarity to “Take Me to the Pilot,”✦ on which I hear the angular synths of 2002’s Finisterre, as well as the swelling rush of early '90s EDM via Paul Hartnoll of Orbital. Both “Sweet Melodies”✦ and “Why Are You Calling?” carry some of the ambient and amorphous textures of Sound of Water (2000). “Fade” has shades of their modern take on traditional folk from 1994’s Tiger Bay, and “He’s Gone” essentially gets its name from the hook off that album’s excellent single, “Like a Motorway.”

But perhaps the song that most clearly connects to the band’s past is “Brand New Me,” a collaboration co-written with Confidence Man’s Janet Planet, Reggie Goodchild and Sugar Bones. It’s a song about closing a chapter in one’s life, shedding old skin and starting over anew. To me, it has a striking similarity in tone and style to “Nothing Can Stop Us Now,” the band’s third-ever single from 1991, and the first time Cracknell sang vocals with Saint Etienne.

“Brand New Me” may have some fans feeling the warm and fuzzy glow of Foxbase Alpha’s nostalgic charm, but it’s my least favourite track on International, and, along with “Save it For a Rainy Day,” the one I’m most likely to skip. The opposite is true of “Two Lovers,”✦ co-written by Wiggs and the legendary Vince Clarke (Erasure, Yaz, Depeche Mode), who adds engineering and programming support to the track as well. Sleek, stylish, and highly sophisticated, it feels like a future-forward reimagining of their hit, “He’s On the Phone.” Of all the collaborators on International, Clarke brings Saint Etienne the freshest sound and feel. Sadly, like the song’s ill-fated paramours, it’s a fleeting sense of what could have been: “We were two lovers / Whose future was fantasy.”

And there it is, the last variable of the formula falling into place. It’s a glimpse of an unlikely future, an unsentimental nod to the past, and an unapologetic acknowledgement of the present. In the end, International lands right where Saint Etienne intended. They resist melodrama, even in the face of finality, and that feels fitting for a band whose best work has always been measured, wry, and quietly confident. I was expecting Saint Etienne to go straight for the heart, when I should have known the route they take has always been through the head. They leave us thinking rather than weeping, and break your heart in the way that only Saint Etienne can.

The cheeky devils.

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On September 5, 2025, Saint Etienne released International, their final studio album. After more than three decades of pop alchemy, in which the trio of Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley, and Pete Wiggs blurred past and present and played with memory and melody, their catalogue is now complete. What better time for a reflection on their words, music, and influence than now?

Air Etienne: INTNL → ALPHA is a series of reflections in reverse, tracing the story of Saint Etienne and my relationship with their music back to the beginning. Starting in 2025 with International and moving in reverse through their discography, I’ll spend the next several months rewinding the tape, so to speak, to peel back the layers, former lovers, and London conversations until arriving at Foxbase Alpha in 1991.

Why backwards? Why not? Saint Etienne have never been a band to move in a straight line. Saint Etienne’s music has always been about more than the records themselves. It’s about context, memory, mood, and the way certain sounds can place you in a time or a feeling instantly. Their albums have been a soundtrack for both lived experience and an imagined nostalgia. Working through their catalogue in reverse feels like the most natural way to honour that sensibility.

This flight from present to past may have some detours along the way. The aim is for monthly touchdowns, but I can't guarantee that there won’t be weather delays, missed connections, and the occasional lost bag. But we’ll get through it all with good humor—as only Saint Etienne can.

We’ll be airborne with my first impressions of International very soon, and from there, I’ll focus on each of their other albums in reverse chronology, sometimes through the lens of how it fits within their career, sometimes through the lens of what it has meant to me personally. I’ll also be curating an ongoing playlist under the same title, which will gather songs from each record as we pass through them, forming its own kind of unofficial travelogue at the end.

Welcome abroad. We’re cleared for takeoff.

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How do you love your September: hot and spicy or lightly toasty? Now that we’re at the mid-point of the month, it seems like we’re getting a little of both in equal measure. It feels like just last week my bottom was all salty from the summer sweats, and now I’m deliberating on how many layers are too little or too much to go out and get the morning paper. I know, I know: it’s so Canadian of me to bemoan the weather. But I am Canadian (and say that with all the irony I can muster), and that’s just what I do, along with picking out a pair of albums well-suited for the in-between times we’re in. The Hidden Cameras bring the sweaty, glittery, peak-summer heat, while Winter cools it down with something more moonlit and reflective. Together, they are a solid soundtrack for when you’re still clinging to the last of the long, hot days but secretly craving sweater weather.

Totally unplanned on my part, but sometimes the best double features just program themselves. Songs denoted with ✦ have been added to the hear [t]here playlist, available on  Music and Tidal.

The Hidden Cameras, Bronto

I keep seeing people moaning about there not being a song of the summer for 2025, which leads me to believe that every single one of them has yet to experience the euphoric high of the Hidden Cameras “Quantify.” This throbbing banger dropped at midnight on August 1, and it instantly soundtracked every one of my top-down, stereo-blasting road trips from that point forward (even if it was just a trip to the hardware store and back).

Bronto perfectly places Joel Gibb’s one-time “orchestral gay church folk pop” in that most holy of gay churches—the disco. The first Hidden Cameras album in almost a decade is a sonic evolution that makes perfect sense for anyone who has followed the Cameras since the project emerged from Gibb’s bedroom with Ecce Homo at the turn of the century. The nightclub is where the sacred and profane consecrate their love/hate relationship, and Gibb brings his signature wit and commentary on the queer human condition to a collection of songs that throb, pulse, swell, and explode in ecstatic synths and shudder-inducing rhythms. “Undertow” pulls you in with mid-80s electro-pop drama (that gets an essential remix by Mr. Vince Clarke of Erasure, Yaz, and Depeche Mode) and opening track, “How Do You Love?”, is a clean, crisp distillation of the decade’s synth-soul sound (perfectly suited for a souped-up remix from Pet Shop Boys).

Winter, Adult Romantix

As a counterpoint to “Quantify,” Winter’s “Without You” is the soundtrack to late-night, sleepy freeway stretches when the city’s lights streak by and it feels like every flicker in the night sky is a memory coming into focus for just a moment. Adult Romantix, the latest from singer-songwriter Samira Winter’s eponymous solo project, drifts through the space between glow and shadow, charting the highs and lows of love, longing, and connection. Rather than romanticizing love, Winter lays bare its sweetness, its ache, its quiet devastations—each song lingering like the afterimage of a flashbulb in the dark.

I love the way opener “Just Like a Flower” (and its accompanying intro interlude) lets distortion creep in at the edges, turning its delicate dream-pop into something more conflicted and alive. “In My Basement Room” feels like stumbling upon a box of momentos you forgot you kept. I also love how Winter sprinkles her native Portuguese throughout Adult Romantix; it feels like she’s sharing an intimate secret or memory without revealing it all. “Sometimes I Think About Death” plays with musical language, capturing the sense of “spinning in a dizzy whirl”- a state of late-night obsessions that leaves you wide awake when the sun comes up, without a sense of resolution.

a little more [t]here [t]here 🪩

I wrote this 20th anniversary retrospective review of the Hidden Cameras’ The Smell of Our Own for DOMINIONATED, which I’m proud to say was recognized among the best Canadian music writing of 2023 by Del Cowie.

One of the very first posts I did for DOMINIONATED was about the song “The Day I Left Home” from the last Hidden Cameras studio album, Home On Native Land, from 2016.

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When I took on this Suede retro-flection series, I thought it would start with their 1993 self-titled album and end with 2022’s Autofiction. I understood the scope of what I was undertaking. It would be both an album-by-album look back at the records I loved and loathed, and an introduction to who my old favourite band had become after I stopped listening to them. I expected there would be a fair amount of personal reflection, possibly self-examination and questioning old values and opinions. I knew that it would not be easy, but nothing worth doing ever is (or so we’ve been told). As well, I knew that hardly anyone would be reading this in real-time, if at all (and if you have, thank you), which gave me the freedom to set aside any expectations or responsibilities and let this project take shape as it unfolded before me.

What I couldn’t have predicted was how much the act of writing itself would change the way I hear these records. Albums I once dismissed revealed hidden corners (hello, Head Music and Bloodsports); others I had placed on pedestals showed their cracks (calling you out, Coming Up). Somewhere along the way, Suede’s catalogue stopped being just a relic of the past and became a mirror for who I’ve been, who I am, and maybe who I’m becoming.

This process has also been about more than Suede. Starting the act of just being [t]here meant consciously choosing to move my writing practice forward by looking backward. For the better part of two decades, I’d been immersed almost exclusively in contemporary Canadian music, living and writing very much in the present tense. This project gave me permission to step outside that cycle and reflect on the records that shaped me long before I was publishing anywhere. In a way, it’s the kind of writing I always wished I had done when I was younger, back when my life had a secret soundtrack that only I was privy to; back to a time where I didn’t have the confidence or the faith to believe that anyone would be remotely interested in what I had to say.

So, now I have the nerve to publish my thoughts online where anyone can (and still likely won’t) stumble upon them. And no, I don’t particularly care if anyone agrees with me or not (but a like or a restack would be nice from time to time). I feel as if this closing post in the first reflective series on a single artist is not the closing loop I had anticipated it to be. I feel like I have more questions than ever left to explore. Which is wholly appropriate given that mid-project, my subjects decided to throw an unexpected curveball at me and announce a new album.

Antidepressants turns out to be the perfect way to end this series. I began with albums I knew almost by heart (Dog Man Star), moved into ones I had never bothered listening to (Night Thoughts, The Blue Hour), and detoured into side projects that stretched the band’s orbit ( solo Bernard Butler and The Tears). Now I’m finishing with a brand new record, one I’m hearing in real time alongside everyone else. After a year spent writing in retrospect, I’ve come full circle to the present tense, which feels like the most genuine way possible to close this reflection (and, maybe, to open what comes next). In a way, this is where this project was always leading me: to the collision of then and there with here and now—memory and immediacy. It is a chance to close my reflection on Suede, not in the past tense, but in the present.

Antidepressants opens with “Disintegrate,” which wastes no time in throwing you into its tension and angst. A disembodied voice cycles between “connected, disconnected” over a pummeling one-note bass line that eventually swaths the song in distortion and torques it to life. Staccato guitars drive the track forward with a ferocious post-punk energy, yet there’s an underlying weariness, a sense of being caught in a loop that doesn’t let up. “Disintegrate” is abrasive, vital, and disorienting; it leans heavily on the dark vibes and sinister imagery of the album art and very much feels of a piece with Autofiction (prompting me to speculate that Suede still have another album in them to complete this latest trilogy.

“Dancing with the Europeans” swaps that raw, punk-infused energy for something more anthemic and melodically taut. Cut from the same cloth as Suede’s signature sweeping tracks, it moves with rhythmic precision while maintaining a certain lyrical opacity. Brett Anderson leans into lower registers and spoken-word cadences (a style that first emerged on The Blue Hour and Autofiction), letting lines like “There's something inside, craves the artificial life / There's something inside that craves the blue and yellow lights,” drift through like hypnotic suggestions.

There’s a looseness to “Dancing with the Europeans” that contrasts with the volatility of “Disintegrate,” suggesting that Antidepressants might be a manic swing through emotions and styles. The title track is the first real clue of where we’re going. Employing more of Anderson’s now-signature sing-speak vocal style, “Antidepressants” ✦ is a kinetic blast of chaos and confusion that genuinely gives me the kind of butterflies that fluttered in my gut the first time I heard “Animal Nitrate.” I couldn’t help but hear some elements of PiL's wiry, angular sound in Richard Oakes’ guitar and Anderson’s deadpan drawl. By the time “Antidepressants” comes to a juddering halt, I felt as if both Suede and producer Ed Buller had made amends for the piss-poor production work on “Moving” from their debut, delivering a beautifully neurotic banger.

Antidepressants’ title track is the first instance where I started to hear faint tethers to Suede’s past emerge. These loose threads amid the energy and immediacy feel reflective without weighing the band down in nostalgia. The most obvious example of this is “Sweet Kid,” a song about Anderson’s son that feels the most Suede-coded of the lot. They could have easily plucked it from any point in their catalogue, but only a 50-plus Anderson can give it this particular fraught emotional resonance. He loves his son, sure—but Anderson is no weepy-eyed dad looking at the world through rose-coloured aviators. He’s a weathered, recovered addict who’s seen his fair share of shit and knows he “can’t promise [his son] a miracle,” and that once his “body belongs to the worms,” his bloodline will continue to flow through his son’s veins.

Just as “Sweet Kid” frames fatherhood as a continuation of the bloodline, Antidepressants as a whole feels like Suede reflecting on their own lineage. They’re a band keenly aware of their history, infusing elements of their back catalogue into the veins of new songs as a way of keeping their past alive while moving forward into the present. “The Sound and the Summer” sharpens that reflection with references to the band’s early rush of fame, “the sound and the summer that made me.” Fuelled by fan adoration and critical acclaim, bassist Mat Osman and drummer Simon Gilbert underpin the track with a revving rhythm. Oakes’ chiming guitar (reminding me of the Cult’s “She Sells Sanctuary”) cuts through like the whistling air rushing past an open window as Anderson, “trapped in this miracle of glass and steel,” likens their career trajectory to an out-of-control car careening down the motorway: “With the sound of police cars giving chase / Put your foot to the pedal, you are moments from disgrace / With our arsm out the window, our heels on the dash / ‘Cause you’ve never been loved til you’ve been loved in a crash.”

Antidepressants boasts the most solid run of opening songs on a Suede album since Coming Up. And though they shift gears down with “Somewhere Between an Atom and a Star,” they don’t let up on the intensity. Forgoing his lower register, Anderson pushes his voice heavenward when he sings “Between an atom and a star” like reverse punctuation. It’s one of two tracks under three minutes on Antidepressants, but one of its most affecting in its efficiency. Where an older model Suede may have luxuriated in extended guitar solos and over-orchestration, it is a sleek and slim slice of mellodrama that adds depth and dimension and just the right moment.

“Broken Music for Broken People” pumps up the energy with another treatise on the music industry churn and the saving power of a solid melody: “We believed in something rather than nothing / And our hell was our shame was our heaven, yeah / And I’d come alive in your arms.” “Criminal Ways” is a brief, muscular workout that wipes away the gloss of glam rock, launching into “Trance State,” a showcase for Neil Codlin’s glassy keyboards. Oddly, given its ballad-like tempo, “June Rain” is the one track on Antidepressants where Suede, and Anderson in particular, sound like they’re running out of time, racing to say everything they’ve wanted to say before the clock runs out.

Echoing the song cycle style Suede employed to impressive effect on Night Thoughts, Antidepressants segues from “June Rain” into its elegiac closing track, “Life is Endless, Life is a Moment.” For an album that roared into life with wiry, angular post-punk energy, it’s a strikingly dark conclusion, an admission that every burst of vitality eventually dissolves into shadows. “Hate me if you must / Love me when I’m dust,” Anderson intones over a Joy Division-paced dirge, before calling out the title’s declarative statement as if he’s running out of breath.

But that’s the thing: Suede are far from taking their last breath. As much as it teeters on the brink of mortality, Antidepressants is very much alive. My initial impression was that this is the sound of urgency, the product of a band determined to make something of substance. Whether that drive is a result of their survivalist mentality or an attempt to stave off the stench of nostalgia wafting off some of their cool Britanina contemporaries feels immaterial, really; now, as they always have, Suede exist in a category and class of their own. Who would have predicted the fey, androgynous glam rockers of 1992 would turn out an album in 2025 with this much passion and finesse, let alone it being their tenth? The closing second of “Life is Endless, Life is a Moment” captures the spirit and essence perfectly. Everything abruptly drops off as Anderson exhales the word “life,” leaving the last line hanging in the air, uncompleted. Is life endless? Is it a moment? Is there ever a definitive answer?

For me, getting to experience Antidepressants at the tail-end of my reflection on Suede’s history comes with a similar sense of urgency and uncertainty. What started as a backward glance has unexpectedly influenced the present more than I imagined it would. I know it’s only 14 essays, which is minor in the scope of how many posts and reviews I’ve written over the last 20 years, but it feels like it’s been the most involved and prolonged writing project I’ve ever taken on, one that I wasn’t certain I’d complete when I started it. I have repeatedly asked myself who would want to read what a 50-year-old man-boy thinks about a bunch of records from 30 years ago? What’s the point of putting all of this out there online, adding to the incessant noise already clogging our brains?

I don’t know the answer. I don’t think there is one. I also don’t care one way or another, quite frankly. What I do know is that writing about and living with Suede over the last year has helped connect my past and present self, closing a gap that I didn’t realize existed. There was a part of me that was abandoned on an island, feeling alone, isolated, and forgotten. This work has been a lifeboat, reuniting me with that lost version of myself. I can’t help but mourn for all the time I wasted being separated in that way, while also feeling full of gratitude that I’m finally here.

Songs denoted with ✦ have been added to hear [t]here playlist on  Music + Tidal.

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Back when Suede’s first run of B-sides trickled out on CD1s, CD2s, and limited 7"s, part of the thrill was the chase. Back then, being a completist meant scouring import bins, swapping with friends, or paying too much for a single just to hear one elusive track. That is why, for so many fans, Sci-Fi Lullabies was such a godsend in 1997, and why it's remained a seminal release in their catalogue all these years.

It’s also why the announcement of Sci-Fi Lullabies Vol. 2 as an exclusive Record Store Day 2025 release hits entirely differently than its predecessor. Many of these post-reunion B-sides and bonus tracks belong to the digital age, where discovery is only a click away, and you can bet that someone has uploaded even the most obscure and rarest of these tracks to YouTube.

What many of the songs on Sci-Fi Lullabies Vol. 2 lose in scarcity, they make up for in the story they help tell about how, even though the reformed Suede has evolved beyond the band they were the first time they released a B-sides compilation, they continue to rack up a treasure trove of rare and unheard gems worth getting to know.

“The Sadness In You, the Sadness In Me”

(2022, Autofiction digital deluxe edition; 2023, Autofiction: Expanded Disc 2)

“The Sadness In You, the Sadness In Me” served as an unofficial single when Autofiction received a 3-disc expanded edition in 2023. An instant fan favourite, it is a synthy slice of urgency that could easily have stood on its own. The strain in Anderson’s voice, while divisive for some, adds depth and a vulnerability that suits the band well.

“Let Go”

(1999, B-side to “Can't Get Enough” CD1 single)

“Let Go” is Suede at their most unabashedly pop—a charming anomaly that sounds nothing like its A-side. Its duality is what I like most: the way it unexpectedly gets you snapping your fingers and tapping your toes. I’ve found myself humming this song out of the blue a lot lately, which is saying something.

“Crackhead”

(1999, B-side to “Everything Will Flow” CD2 single)

One of two on-the-nose named B-sides from the Head Music era, “Crackhead” is a rawer, more vital track than much of Head Music. It captures the destructive grip of Anderson’s addiction with honesty that’s hard to fault.

“Still Waiting”

(2022, Autofiction digital deluxe edition; 2023, Autofiction: Expanded Disc 2)

Another bonus from Autofiction: Expanded, “Still Waiting” features cinematic and orchestral touches that suggest it may have originated during the sessions for The Blue Hour. At just under three minutes, it feels like a sketch of a larger idea, but one that hints at the expansive storytelling Suede excels at.

“Manipulation”

(2018, The Blue Hour box set 7" vinyl)

A spunky, rugged blast of proto-punk, “Manipulation” has melodic roots that echo The Blue Hour, even if its jagged urgency feels more aligned with Autofiction. Having been a vinyl-only release, there was much early anticipation that “Manipulation” would end up on Sci-Fi Lullabies Vol. 2. Those same fans are eagerly hoping this compilation gets a wider physical release as well.

“You Don’t Know Me”

(2022, Autofiction Japanese CD edition; 2023, Autofiction: Expanded Disc 2)

“You Don’t Know Me” was a Japanese bonus track for Autofiction that eventually appeared on the expanded edition. It’s brimming wit hallmarks of Suede’s best work: restlessness, a sense of alienation, and rough-edged urgency.

“Days Like Dead Moths”

(2022, Autofiction digital deluxe edition; 2023, Autofiction: Expanded Disc 2)

Many fans argue that Autofiction would have been stronger with “Days Like Dead Moths” in place of weaker inclusions, and I tend to agree. It blends Dog Man Star’s dystopian dreamscapes with the cinematic scope of Night Thoughts.

“Heroin”

(2011, Head Music remastered and expanded version)

Some prefer Dog Man Star’s “Heroine” to the Head Music B-side “Heroin,” but Anderson seems to value the latter’s emotional honesty. When revisiting Head Music in 2011, he admitted the record might have benefitted from more of this kind of raw resonance. Like “Crackhead,” it is one of the sharper moments to come out of the Head Music sessions.

“The Prey”

(2022, Autofiction digital deluxe edition; 2023, Autofiction: Expanded Disc 2)

“The Prey” is a beautifully restrained moment that shows what Suede can achieve when they follow their quieter instincts. Its acoustic textures might have felt out of place on Autofiction, but hints of “The Wild Ones” make for an intriguing listen.

“Blinded”

(previously unreleased)

“Blinded” closes the compilation as a haunting and emotionally resonant new recording. Echoing the grandiosity of “Still Life” and the muted ache of “Sleeping Pills,” it is spectral and intimate, with delicate acoustic textures and layered vocal echoes giving it a final, reflective weight in the Suede canon.

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For their Sunday Review on August 31, Pitchfork published their first-ever Tragically Hip review, awarding Fully Completely a well-deserved 9.4. Reviewer Alex Robert Ross expertly captured the musical power of what is arguably the band’s finest moment as well as the complicated dichotomy between the band and the die-hard fandom that elevated them to Canadian national icons.

I’ve already hinted at my own complex relationship with them, and how, for many music fans like me, the Hip have long been tainted by their association with beer-swilling frat boys drunkenly singing along to songs about wrongfully incarcerated innocents and anti-Semitic race riots. Ross suggests that pride in the band is more tied to external acknowledgement than an internal sense of accomplishment, which in part is why “the place names and even literal coordinates in their songs invite listeners to draw such connections” about what it means to be Canadian, but most fail to scratch beyond that superficial surface. “Rummage around in the songs themselves,” Ross says, “and things are more cryptic.”

Reading through the flood of 🇨🇦 emojis and fist-pumping comments on Instagram when the review went live, I saw the pride Ross describes writ large. One commenter called Fully Completely “the Canadian Holy Grail,” which makes absolutely no sense to me; another says, “As a Canadian, this is amazing!” It’s clear that some commenters took the time to read the piece, but the overall sense from most suggests that it meant more that the band—and, by extension, Canada—was being seen than understood. Then again, maybe I’m projecting, filtering their enthusiasm through my own baggage with the Hip and the ways I’ve bristled at their fandom.

I’ve often dismissed die-hard Hip fans as missing the deeper resonance of the music, or intellectually incapable of grasping the intricacies of Downie’s lyrics. Devotees call him a poet, but just how many of them truly understand him? That’s unfair of me, and I fully own it. Who’s to say my quiet, inward list of favourites is more authentic than someone else’s? Perhaps I’m overemphasizing the qualities that I think make the Hip worthy of discourse, and discounting what makes others love the Hip so fiercely. Maybe I’m the asshole.

I admire the unflinching love so many of my fellow so-called Canadians have for the Tragically Hip. While I’ve never been the sort to etch their lyrics into my skin or shout along at every public sing-along, I still keep a quiet list of Hip songs that mean a great deal to me. The trouble is, I can’t always shake the first impressions I formed in my teens and twenties, when the band’s music felt inescapably tied to a particular kind of fandom: white, heterosexual working-class cis men who blast their music from car stereos and backyard speakers as a way to claim the Hip as their own. That baggage lingers, even as I recognize the nuance and depth that a piece like Ross’s review helps bring into focus.

What I wish, more than anything, is that there was more space for conversations about the Hip that acknowledge both the pride and complicated beauty in their music, and the more complex truths about the country it reflects, truths that feel especially worth remembering when a review like this drops on the Sunday of the last long weekend of summer, just as my neighbour cranks up his backyard barbecue to soak up the last of summer’s sun while blasting “Wheat Kings” at full volume. I’d rather they put on some headphones and play “We’ll Go Too” ✦ on repeat for an hour and then come talk to me about what it all means.

Maybe I’m just as guilty of reducing the Hip and their fans to easy caricatures. I should probably wrap this up before I dig myself any deeper. Thankfully, hardly anyone will read this far, and I can only imagine the comments this might elicit from the fandom. The truth is, I was just as excited as that “Canadian Holy Grail” commenter to see Fully Completely get a Sunday review—it’s recognition that is both long overdue and well-deserved. And maybe that’s fitting: the Tragically Hip have always been a band that sparks devotion, argument, pride, and passion in equal measure, and the fact that this review has managed to do the same feels, in its own way, very Hip.

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Although I followed their work and had some favourite songs beforehand, it goes without saying that my genuine appreciation for the Tragically Hip began with Michael Barclay's definitive biography of the band, The Never-Ending Present: The Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip. It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the band’s history and legacy.

My fellow DOMINIONATED co-founder, Mackenzie Cameron, wrote about watching the last Tragically Hip concert and the lasting legacy and impact of the band in 2016.

One of the most popular posts on DOMINIONATED was this essay I wrote on “The Stranger,” a song from Gord Downie’s Secret Path project.

Downie’s music also inspired one of the most personal pieces I’ve ever written, specifically the song “Spoon” from his posthumous solo album, Introduce Yerself.

Songs denoted with ✦ have been added to hear [t]here playlist on  Music + Tidal.

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So here’s something: four brand-new releases I’ve been spinning lately, gathered together in one post because apparently I can’t pick just one to focus on this week. It probably won’t be the last time I do this, since the queue of music I want to check out keeps getting longer than the line outside of Oasis merch pop-up shops. Also, I’m staring down a long weekend, the official end of summer (for me), the pumpkin spice industrial complex is rubbing its hands in gleeful anticipation of fall (not for me). Frankly, I’m not ready for it (except for The Life of a Showgirl, let’s get a lead single out already, Tay Tay). Weirdly (perhaps fittingly?) every sleeve here is some shade of blue (almost every). The music, though, is anything but blue.

Songs denoted with ✦ have been added to my end-of-summer-survival, pumpkin spice-resisting playlist hear [t]here, living exclusively on  Music—and now also on Tidal—because fuck you, Spotify.

Hand Habits, Blue Reminder

All of my social media feeds last week were filled with posts about Hand Habits, a band I had zero familiarity with beforehand. I took that as a sign from the algorithm gods that they wanted me to check out their latest release, Blue Reminder, and gawd damnit, I’m gobsmacked. I immediately wanted to know everything there is to know about chief songwriter and principal member Meg Duffy, and I feel that I’ve only just scratched the surface of their talent and tenacity. Blue Reminder is a quietly confident record, with Duffy’s poised and dulcet voice at the centre of a dozen understated yet exquisitely arranged songs. “Jasmine Blossoms” has this alluring groove courtesy of a muted bass, and when Duffy crashes in on the chorus, the seduction was complete, and I was in love. “Way It Goes” ✦ seems to just come together out of thin air, like wispy tendrils of sound that curl and intertwine. I read that Blue Reminder is rooted in the first flushes of a new romance. There is that wide-eyed awe that comes with finding your person popping off in its cool melodies, but Duffy’s songs still have a hint of anxiety and tentativeness in the lyrics and their delivery that suggest being scared of going all in lest you end up getting your heart broken.

TOPS, Bury the Key

Montreal-based band TOPS’ fifth and latest release, Bury the Key, is a refinement of the sugary sweet pop simplicity they have been perfecting since their 2012 debut, Tender Opposites. They have been perennial favourites for the way their songs feel effortless and crackling with excitement without having to be loud, shouty, or overly showy. Mellow vibes and mellifluous melodies abound, particularly on “Call You Back” ✦ and “Your Ride,” and the Laurel Canyon-kissed opening track, “Stars Come After You.” Bury the Key makes for the perfect late summer soundtrack, its saccharine-coated songs catching and refacting the last lingering rays of daylight, while the breezy, detached delivery of singer Jane Penny offers a chilling—almost nippy—balm to soothe your sun-burnt soul.

Water From Your Eyes, It’s a Beautiful Place

What do you imagine would be the aural equivalent of your Atari 2600 console glitching out after your cousin Rory spilled his open can of Pepsi all over it (fucking, Rory)? For me, it’s “Spaceship” off It’s a Beautiful Place from Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based duo Water From Your Eyes. “Spaceship” jerks and sputters like corrupted code, but all the while, there is a fragile, dreamy pop sensibility floating just underneath the surface that’s mesmerizing. A lot of It’s a Beautiful Place often sounds like it’s falling apart, and that members Nate Amos and Rachel Brown are catching what’s breaking off and putting those pieces back into the songs in whatever spot they can make them fit. The effect is dizzying, whether in the jittery rush of “Life Signs” or the schizophrenic turns of “Playing Classics,” ✦ which opens like New Order’s “Fine Time” before exploding into a cacophonic dance-pop anthem blasted through blown speakers. Rory may be a sugar-water-addicted clutz, but you both have to admit that playing Defender and Berzerk through a haze of fractured pixels and with audio on the fritz is kinda rad, which is the same trick It’s a Beautiful Place pulls off: turning collapse into something worth hitting “Start” on over and over again.

Kathleen Edwards, Billionaire

Of these four albums, Billionaire is the one I’ve spent the least amount of time with, but Kathleen Edwards is the artist out of today’s post I’ve had the longest history with. I fell in love with her 2012 album, Voyageur, which also ended up being her last before an extended absence from the music business (TLDR: she opened a successful coffee house called Quitters in the Ottawa suburb of Stittsville, which she sold some time after releasing her 2020 album, Total Freedom). Don’t take my lack of engagement as an indication of Billionaire’s musical quality; Edwards is as sharp-witted and emotionally astute as ever. “Say Goodbye, Tell No One” ✦ is a stand-out: “People change, people grow / You can take it in stride or slam a door,” she sings over a spritely pop-infused roots rock melody (courtesy of producer Jason Isbell’s band, 400 Unit), before dropping this doozy of a double-edged observation: “The hardest part about the truth / Saying something that might hurt you / The hardest part about a lie / You can’t outrun it if you try.” Edwards’ rawness and honesty are so rare in music these days; it’s well worth a billion bucks, let alone the cost of a download.

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Early on in my research and prep for my retro-flection series on Suede, I read (and then re-read) Brett Anderson’s two autobiographies, Coal Black Mornings (from 2018) and Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn (2019). Music-related biographies are one of my favourite genres to read, but autobiographies are sometimes hit-and-miss affairs. I find them either dull due to a lack of imaginative writing or overtly boastful to the point of being unbelievable. Anderson’s memoirs were neither of these things. Poignantly verbose and lyrically poetic, these short tomes are essential reading for anyone remotely interested in understanding Suede’s creative arc and motivations. They are also a joy to read for the sheer thrill of Anderson’s handling of language, imagery, and humour, a skill that’s only hinted at by the very best of his lyrics.

It's no surprise that Anderon’s memoirs landed between 2018’s The Blue Hour and Autofiction in 2022. Delving as deeply into his pre-Suede past as he does with Coal Black Mornings and the chaotic rush of fame covered by Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn, it feels inevitable that any subsequent Suede album would become an autobiographical exercise of its own. Like Anderson’s sharply observed and deeply personal musings, Autofiction looks back to a time of youthful naivete and conviction that moves Suede even further forward after Night Thoughts and The Blue Hour. Anderson called Autofiction Suede’s “punk” album, a reaction to their more sombre, cinematic post-reunion albums. There is no denying that Suede in 2022 sounded raw, urgent, and reactionary while also contemplative, influenced by Anderson’s introspection as much as the desire for a musical reset. That balance lies at the heart of Autofiction, the next chapter in Suede’s evolution, reframing history and memory through the sharpened lens of age, experience, and renewed vitality.

Punk is such a loaded word. It has always been associated with youth in revolt, a rejection of societal norms and middle-aged complacency or anything that smells remotely like the establishment. In its mid-70s heyday, I don’t think any punk would have ever conceived of the possibility that a 50-year-old could be punk, let alone imagine themselves at that age. And yet here we are: John Lydon, punk poster-child, will turn 70 in 2026, and is still as anarchistic as ever. I’m over 50 myself, and guilty of smirking at the notion of ‘middle-aged punks.’ Still, I have to concede that, as someone who doesn’t identify with the soccer moms-and-dad set in the least, ‘punk’ has come to mean less a stage of age and more a state of mind.

So it feels somewhat subversive and oddly fitting that Suede would open their so-called punk album with a spiky, angular guitar anthem that wrestles with very adult themes: the consternation and contemplation that comes with the death of one’s parent. “She Still Leads Me On” bristles with Richard Oakes’ acerbic and wiry guitars, but beneath its punk posturing, Anderson wrestles with the very real experience of mourning his mother’s death while still fully engaged in a relationship with her through his memories. As he sings (after a barely audible spoken-word intro), “When I think of all the things my mother said / When I think of all the feelings I hid from her / Oh in many, many ways, I’m still a young boy,” a lump catches in my throat and tears well up in my eyes. Anderson’s mother died when he was in his early 20s; my father died when I was 26. Change the parent and pronouns, and he might as well be singing about my own experience.

At 6:00 am on August 7, 2025, I had officially lived longer without my father than with him. That shit is real. When those kinds of realizations hit, they hit hard, and they strike deep, and they leave you raw, wounded, and highly vulnerable. So when Anderson cries out, “Sometimes, oh when I just feel like screaming / She leads me on, she still leads me on,” I know exactly what he’s feeling, and the holy racket he and the rest of Suede are playing makes perfect sense to me. That’s pretty punk, no?

As its title suggests, Autofiction isn’t strictly a memoir set to melodies; it marries Suede’s flair for world-building with lived experience to shape 11 ​​sharp vignettes of modern middle age, each one shot through with punk’s restless energy. Not all of them land with the same emotional weight as “She Leads Me On,” but there’s no sense that Suede are resting on their laurels nine albums and thirty years into their career.

I love the spoken verses on “Personality Disorder,” as they feel so perfectly appropriate for the stark truths Anderson intones: “And our lives too will fall apart like this moment / Gone like the birthday cards on the windowsill / Brief as the pale light on the bedroom walls.” His lyrical imagery is as vivid as the prose in his books, and the band invests the song with spunk and teeth. The energy on “Personality Disorder” makes up for the somewhat formulaic and predictable “15 Again.” Anderson’s phrasing, in particular on the chorus, feels awkward, forced, and out of sync with an otherwise decent band performance.

Similarly, “The Only Way I Can Love You” is one of those songs that I feel neutral about. I get the sense that it's become a fan favourite, and it works in the context of Autofiction’s other songs, but it doesn't stay with me once it's over. “That Boy on the Stage” fares better as an earworm. Its highly meta lyrics and strident guitar riffing remind me a lot of Manic Street Preachers, with whom Suede co-headlined a North American tour in 2022, one I almost went to before COVID concerns got the better of me.

It’s not until Autofiction’s halfway point that my heartstrings really get tugged again like they did with “She Leads Me On.” The elegaic and elegant “Drive Myself Home” is Suede canon from its very first chords. It’s pure and simple, what Suede do best. Its subtle, sustained piano motif, chiming guitars, and Anderson’s tender, mournful delivery feel like a response to one of their early B-sides, but this time without needing to prove anything.

There have been frequent cold and winter references that come up in Suede’s discography since Bloodsports, and “Black Ice” is the most aggressive and pointed of the lot. For Anderson’s family’s sake, I hope “Black Ice” is more fiction than autobiography. “Well you made me a father / And I gave you my name,” he slurs on the opening verse before launching into the careening chorus: “We’re on the black ice with no headlights / With our hands off the wheel.”

Drummer Simon Gilbert and bassist Mat Osman keep the momentum moving with the taut rhythms on “Shadow Self,” where Anderson deploys more spoken word delivery on the verses. Of all the moments on Autofiction, “Shadow Self” feels most informed by a new generation of artists; I hear echoes of Fontaines D.C. in its ruggedness. “It’s Always the Quiet Ones” goes back to an earlier influence, channelling the ghost of Joy Division’s icy detachment through Neil Codling’s gossamer synths.

“What Am I Without You?” makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Gilbert’s soft cymbals give me chills, and Anderson sounds so intense and passionate on what’s arguably one of his best vocal performances. The verses are tender and muted, so when the chorus comes in all big and bold, the song instantaneously becomes a stadium-ready, lighters-aloft moment, their own “Fix You” (though I’m sure they’d hate me for suggesting the connection). I have not looked deeply into the album’s overall reception or how the fanbase feels about “What Am I Without You?,” but for me, this is canon, destined for any best-of-Suede playlist I make.

Suede ends their punk album with a song that is in no hurry to get to its payoff, and it’s all the better for it. “Turn Off Your Brain and Yell” has an elongated intro that, for some reason I can’t put my finger on, reminds me of the Cure. I found a poll on a Facebook Suede fan forum ranking their closing songs, and while it’s no “Still Life” or “The Next Life,” “Turn Off Your Brain and Yell” betters “Saturday Night” and is miles ahead of all the others. The shower of static and abrupt unplugging sounds at its end feels like a portentous note — a swan song if Autofiction had been their final statement, or a possible signal of the path they’re taking with the forthcoming album, Antidepressants.

Refusing to abide by expectations is not the sole domain of the twentysomething crowd, and Autofiction proves that old geezers can be punk into their pensioners’ era. Suede still sound raw and vital in their fifties, transforming the personal into universal experiences and building worlds that feel intimate and immediate. Anderson may have begun with his memoirs, but Autofiction feels more forward-thinking and progressive than reflective and nostalgic. I started this retro-flection series thinking Autofiction would be the last word, but the announcement of Antidepressants mid-way was proof that even in middle age, Suede are still capable of a bit of chaos. That’s pretty punk, no?

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You wanna talk shoegaze? Come at me, I can go for hours. I was there, man. Okay, not actually there in the UK, but I was there spiritually. Back in the early ’90s, I was into anything with a shimmering wall of guitar and haunted, indecipherable vocals singing in a language all their own. Whether listening on headphones, in my car with the shitty speakers cranked, or blaring out of the family sound system (when no one else was home), I was all in on any music I could sink into.

In my current grumpy-old-guy-into-80s-and-90s-indie era, I’m not interested in arguing about whether “shoegaze” is actually a genre (FYI: it’s not, but I’ll concede to it being a specific style of pop and rock for the moment) or who was the first “shoegaze” artist (Cocteau Twins, BTW). However, I am very curious to hear about other people’s entry points into that particular musical aesthetic. Mine happened on May 2, 1989: the day the Cure’s Disintegration came out. There are very few songs that I remember hearing for the first time, but the sense memory of having “Plainsong” literally crash down all around me is as vivid now as it was then.

And before you get your bloomers in a tizzy: no, the Cure are not traditionally considered a shoegaze band, but I ask you, what even is a “traditional” shoegaze band, when no one can adequately pin it down as a genre? The allure for me had less to do with the style of music and more with the feeling of falling right into the heart of the record, that sense that the musicians were not just composing music but constructing a world that you could live in.

Artists like Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine are world builders. The former constructed whole universes out of glossolalia (look it up, I had to) and shimmer; the latter bent guitars until they bled distortion and feedback like some kind of stigmata. World-builders have a musical vision and aural audacity distinctly their own, even when built from the same foundational template as their peers.

And yes, there are world-building artists throughout the history of popular music, not just the bands lumped together under the shoegaze banner, but that particular tag is the most germane when it comes to talking about Bugland, the bucolic beauty of an album from No Joy.

I would love to talk shoegaze for hours with No Joy’s Jasamine White-Gluz. That’s the tag I’ve most often seen used to describe the “band,” which is now ostensibly White-Gluz’s solo project, and it totally fits looking back through No Joy’s highly accomplished and critically lauded back catalogue. But what I’d most be interested in talking about after listening to Bugland multiple times over the last few weeks and reading some of its recent press is how I believe White-Gluz and I are kindred spirit-insects when it comes to appreciating world-building artists who transcend genre. I, too, believe Zooropa is the best U2 album hands-down (come at me), and I hear its influence in the way Bugland constructs a sonic language and history all its own out of familiar ingredients. As she explains to Range magazine, she “tried to avoid being too overly inspired by any one thing. I would instead be like ‘What if Boards of Canada were a four-piece noise band?’ and use that as a launching point to build on.”

What if—two magical words that differentiate between artists inspired to create and those who aspire to emulate. So while No Joy is throwing plenty of sonic cues that are ringing all kinds of nostalgic bells for me, Bugland sounds remarkably fresh and wildly unpredictable. The answer to White-Gluz’s hypothetical query about Boards of Canada? It could be Bugland’s frenetic title track. What if the fourth member of Cocteau Twins was Pop Will Eat Itself’s Clint Mansell? You’d likely end up with the biting and bombastic “Bits.” Ever wonder what would happen if Slowdive picked up a little more speed? You might end up with the careening pop crescendos of “My Crud Princess.” Curious about what Taylor Swift’s Midnights would have sounded like if produced by Curve’s Dean Garcia? I suggest getting acquainted with the sleek slice of synth-pop that is “Save the Lobsters.” ✦

You get the point.

Bugland is teeming with familiar “shoegaze” markers, but doesn’t feel beholden to them. White-Gluz isn’t interested in simply recreating a specific sound; she’s constructing an environment. Rather than working on the album in a sterile, isolated studio environment, she decamped to a rural, rustic retreat to write and conceive most of Bugland, and you can hear the influence of the place and her process in every track. I don’t know if it’s just because I’ve been enjoying Bugland in the heart and heat of a humid, mosquito-heavy Southern Ontario summer, but songs like “Garbage Dream House” and “Bather in the Bloodcells” hiss and hum with humidity and feel squishy like a mossy bed found deep in a secluded forest.

Closing track “Jelly Meadow Bright” (which features experimental musician and White-Gluz’s co-producer, Angel “Fire-Toolz” Marcloid) is the kind of song that breathes as much as it pulses, which is pretty much true of the whole record. Where most shoegaze often feels like you are peering into an imagined dreamscape, Bugland is rooted in a tangible world that could only have grown out of its specific geography and lived experience. There’s an earthiness to No Joy’s music; even in the most synthetic moments, White-Gluz reminds us that electronic precision still feels alive when it’s fed by natural energy.

Here is where the genre label starts to crumble. Calling Bugland “shoegaze” is accurate in the same way calling Heaven or Las Vegas “dream pop” is accurate: it tells you something about its textures but nothing about its deeper architecture. Like the best world-building records, it invites you to stay awhile, to notice how the light, mood, and your own emotions change as the songs progress from one to another. It is why I’ve been coming back to it over the last little while: it reminds me of albums like Disintegration, Loveless, and Heaven or Las Vegas in how it just pulls me under its spell. Bugland is most definitely a modern-day example of musical world-building, a veritable menagerie of creep-crawly sonic craftspersonship.

Call it shoegaze if you want. I call it magic.

Songs denoted with ✦ have been added to the hear [t]here playlist, living proudly (and exclusively) on Apple Music, because fuck you, Spotify.

a little more [t]here [t]here 🪩

Not quite the main act, but still on the stage.

Though I’ve been following No Joy for quite some time, Bugland marks the first time I’ve ever formally written about them, so I don’t have any previous reviews to connect you to, but in the spirit of world-builders, here are four albums by world-building artists, two of whom you might consider shoegazey, two you most definitely would not. All, coincidentally, were released in 2023.

La Force, XO Skeleton

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La Force, XO Skeleton

XO Skeleton cross-examines our relationship with death and how that association affects how we engage with others…

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3 years ago · DOMINIONATED

Zoon, Bekka Ma’iingan

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Zoon, Bekka Ma’iingan

Restless and unrelenting, Zoon’s sophomore full-length is an exhilarating full-steam-ahead run into the world…

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3 years ago · DOMINIONATED

ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT, “Darling The Dawn”

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ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT, “Darling The Dawn”

ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT reminds us of the infinite possibilities and probabilities that make each sun rising a discrete and ephemeral one-time-only experience…

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3 years ago · DOMINIONATED

Sunnsetter, The best that I can be.

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Sunnsetter, The best that I can be.

Sunnsetter’s Andrew McLeod reminds us all that we are always at our best when we are most ourselves…

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3 years ago · DOMINIONATED

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Before starting this retro-flection series, I was as unfamiliar with The Blue Hour as with Night Thoughts. Unfamiliar actually sounds like an understatement; I hadn’t ever listened to either, and they were the two Suede albums I felt most apprehensive about discussing. Historically, my interest eight albums into any band’s career is pretty low. It happened with Belle and Sebastian, R.E.M., the Manic Street Preachers, and Radiohead. The list is longer than I’d like to admit. Still, I don’t think I’m alone in finding myself less than actively engaged in late-career releases, especially after a prolonged hiatus.

So I’ve come to Suede’s 2018 album The Blue Hour with a certain trepidation and a sense of distance compounded by another obstacle: long-form content creation fatigue. Don’t get me wrong: this series has been one of the most rewarding projects I’ve undertaken. It’s rekindling my enthusiasm for Suede’s music and has me already thinking about who I could do a similar reflection on next. That said, writing about The Blue Hour has lately felt more like a duty than a pleasure, and given that Night Thoughts ended up being an unexpected emotional peak for this project so far, I have been leery that this chapter on The Blue Hour will be something of a letdown and altogether less than the others.

Released in September 2018, The Blue Hour was produced by Alan Moulder (famous for his work with the Jesus & Mary Chain, Ride, and Nine Inch Nails), a break from familiar and frequent collaborator Ed Buller, who returned for Bloodsports and Night Thoughts. Musically, The Blue Hour trades some of Night Thoughts’ urgency for more expansive textures: full orchestras and a strong, if non-linear, undercurrent of rural unease. It’s a shift in setting from the urban decadence and nightlife living of classic Suede, and the more suburban, domestic scenes typical of their previous post-reformation records, which makes sense if you think of Suede in 2018 as needing to find refuge and a change of pace and scenery to keep the creative fires burning.

The Suede that made The Blue Hour in 2018 is not the Suede I fell in love with a quarter of a century earlier, but I tried not to judge the album in comparison to their past work, and instead to meet Suede where they were at the time of its recording. I made a point of listening without leaning on easy comparisons with work I’m more familiar with, to clear the slate of my affection for Night Thoughts, and to hear what they’d created with as little bias as possible.

“As One” opens The Blue Hour with a sense of cinematic grandeur that’s almost ironic, given that Night Thoughts, the album with an actual accompanying film, never quite reached this scale. The arrangement comes in high-stakes and unapologetic, Brett Anderson’s lyrics showing a storyteller’s restraint: suggestive, atmospheric, and rich in mood without tipping into over-explanation. Like the first chapter of a novel, it creates a setting, introduces a tone, and creates intrigue. The band themselves have described it as the “keystone” for the record, with Anderson calling it the song that suggested the path forward for the whole album, even if it is something of an outlier amongst the tracklisting.

That sense of narrative possibility flows into “Wastelands,” which plays more recognizably to the Suede template. That’s not a slight; “Wastelands” reminds me of just how firmly Suede have established their own musical DNA. It also introduces spoken-word elements that pepper the album, reinforcing the idea that The Blue Hour, more than any of Suede’s previous attempts at a “concept album,” is meant to function as a whole, eschewing individual earworm moments for a more cohesive, collective mood. Nowhere is that sense of storyline more evident than on “Mistress.” String-laden and nearly drumless, it’s the story of a boy discovering his father’s affair, steeped in melodrama and sounding like it could have been lifted right from the score of a tragic musical. That is a slight, but only a minor one, given that “mistress” shows a restraint and focus that keeps it from going too far over the top.

But when “Beyond the Outskirts” takes a sudden detour into heavy metal guitar riffing, that sense of cohesiveness momentarily starts to fracture. I experienced similar jolts of the unexpected the first time I listened to Night Thoughts (the transition between “When You Are Young” and “Outsiders” is the first that springs to mind), but the contrast of heavy guitar layers on “Beyond the Outskirts” feels slightly at odds with the song’s lyrical tone. The metallic streak continues into “Chalk Circles.” The band has spoken about wanting something weirder and more stripped down, and it delivers a chant-like detour that segues directly into the next track, “Cold Hands.” Riff-heavy, taut, and energized by Alan Moulder’s production, “Cold Hands” finds the sweet spot where I could hear it living happily outside the album’s framework.

That energy flows into “Life Is Golden,” The Blue Hour’s first single, accompanied by a video filmed in a Chernobyl-affected town. Anderson has called it one of the few tracks he can hear in isolation, and I hear that, too. I would happily add “Life Is Golden” to a Suede best-of playlist without needing the rest of the record around it.

“Roadkill” strips things back to Anderson’s spoken-word performance over unsettling atmospherics. It’s intriguing in concept, but it initially leaves me feeling like I’m losing the plot to The Blue Hour. Repeated listens help give the song a place in the greater context of the album overall. It’s a brief interlude that dovetails into the wide-screen scope of “Tides.” By the time I reach “Don’t Be Afraid If Nobody Loves You,” I’m aware of a certain sameness setting in. It’s a good song, but I can’t recall its nuances once it’s over. That is mostly true of all these songs, reminding me that these are first impressions, unshaped by nostalgia. Whether they deepen will depend on how often I revisit The Blue Hour, if at all.

“Dead Bird” is little more than a 27-second fragment, a field recording of Anderson and his son burning a dead bird. It adds a small, macabre brushstroke to the album’s overall mood. The interlude makes it clear that Suede isn’t playing by any one set of rules, and “All the Wild Places” reinforces this break with expectation and pop tropes by pairing Anderson’s voice with just an orchestra. The sweeping strings continue with “The Invisibles”, a lush, string-driven piece that feels the most Suede-coded on the album in part due to Anderson’s vocal longing for connection against a backdrop of isolation.

“Flytipping” closes the album in cinematic style, echoing motifs from “As One” and picking up on the storytelling and melodrama threads from “Mistress,” with its tale of a couple discarding their possessions to move on to a new life. “‘Cause the worms in the ground / And the crows as they circle round,” sings Anderson against the haunted arrangement, “Don’t need these things to cling to / The road’s their playground.” As the couple makes their way “to the verges,” so too does Suede, moving as far away from the council home where “he broke all your bones” as they’ve ever been.

Since starting to delve into The Blue Hour, I’ve had this nagging sense that it reminds me of something and elicits a feeling for me that I could not put my finger on. I was walking around the house with my headphones on, the overwrought and hyper-orchestrated coda of “Flytipping” swirling in my head. I walked into the living room where my mother-in-law was streaming something from her Britbox account, and that’s when I made the connection: The Blue Hour reminds me of those British countryside detective dramas my mother-in-law loves watching—pastoral, polite, but highly discomfiting and sometimes heightened to the point of surrealism. They aren’t my favourite types of programs to watch, but while she’s yielding the remote, I’ll indulge, but I rarely get as engaged in the story the way she does.

And perhaps that’s the point I’m at in my relationship with The Blue Hour. I can appreciate its vision and scope as a cohesive piece of work, the evolution of Suede’s world-building sound, and its foray into more personal narratives. It’s an album I admire, but not one that I love or feel compelled to visit often.

If my default setting truly is “eighth-album apathy,” then The Blue Hour isn’t going to be the reset record to break me out of that cycle. And admittedly, it’s dimmed my rekindled infatuation with Suede somewhat. Still, more importantly, it’s reminded me that, even in their more difficult moments, there’s ambition, craft, and a willingness to take the long way around that many bands wouldn’t ever dare explore.

Not every chapter has to have a happy ending to make the whole story worth investing in.

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I did not get the memo on Night Thoughts. Actually, I probably did get the memo, but I just didn’t read it. While Suede released their highly ambitious and emotionally charged follow-up to Bloodsports, I was utterly unaware of its existence. Today, it feels strange to think that in early 2016, Suede were playing live shows of their new music set to a full-length companion film, and I, a fan from the early years, would have eaten that up if I had been just the slightest bit tuned in. It likely didn’t help that Night Thoughts, like Bloodsports, landed in the shadow of another new David Bowie album, especially given that Blackstar would end up being Bowie’s epitaph when he died two days after its release. My memories from those first days of 2016 are vivid with awe, grief, and gratitude that I got to exist at the same time Bowie did. But the existence of a new Suede album? Didn’t register at all.

Turns out that memo was worth reading. Discovering and indulging in Night Thoughts now, nearly a decade later, feels like I’m meeting an old friend again for the second time. Hearing it now, far removed from the noise (and silence) that surrounded its release, I can appreciate its sprawling, symphonic, and emotionally lacerating splendour. I never expected that my immersion into Suede’s catalogue, both the records I knew and loved and the ones I ignored and dismissed, would lead me to a late-career revelation like Night Thoughts, but here we are.

For the most part, I’ve been focusing on each Suede album chronologically while working on this retro-flection series. My thoughts on Suede, Dog Man Star, Coming Up, Head Music and even A New Morning were pretty much in place by the time I got to writing about them. From Bloodsports on, though, I wasn’t sure what I was getting into or how I would react to these albums. I started dipping in and listening to the albums I was less familiar with as I was working on the early entries, and admittedly, Night Thoughts wasn’t doing anything for me at first. That’s because it’s not the type of work you can quickly skim through or listen to while doing something else. It requires your time and attention. So once I sat down to take it all in, I found myself not only enthralled with the music but also its origin story.

Recorded with longtime producer Ed Buller (who returned to make Bloodsports after a two-album absence), Night Thoughts was conceived as a seamless, orchestral suite, and paired with a feature-length film by Roger Sargent. “Instead of doing a series of videos to the singles for the album,” Brett Anderson told the NME in 2015, “we wanted to make [a] film that covers the whole record and glues it together.” He further explains how Night Thoughts is “basically the story of a man whose life falls apart. It’s quite bleak but it’s got uplifting moments as well.” The film’s storyline, which touches on suicide, loss, guilt, and the quiet devastations of family life, didn’t literally mirror Anderson’s lyrics, but moved in parallel, amplifying the album’s themes of fragility and resilience. It was an ambitious undertaking for any band, let alone one two decades past their commercial peak, and it showed just how committed Suede were to pushing themselves in their second act.

If, as Anderson suggested in that 2015 NME interview, Bloodsports serves as “another debut” (he called it Suede’s third), then it's hard not to see Night Thoughts as an album that mirrors Dog Man Star’s scope and drama. With the benefit of twenty more years of living, losing, and learning, Night Thoughts improves on one of the biggest criticisms about Dog Man Star in that, though its individual tracks are among the band’s very best, the album as a whole often felt like a grudge match between the big ideas and the big egos that created it. Night Thoughts flows like a single, unbroken thought, each song feeding the next, carrying listeners to new emotional depths and sonic textures.

Richard Oakes, no longer “the kid who replaced Bernard Butler,” is in full command of his voice on the guitar, and imbues the album with a signature style and sound that are now unmistakably his. Mat Osman and Simon Gilbert lock into a rhythmic confidence that keeps the grandeur from floating away untethered, while Neil Codling’s keyboards and sonic textures give Night Thoughts one of its lush, connective tissues; the other is Anderson, or more specifically, his voice. Where his yelps and howls were once weapons for provocation, his tone now conveys an earnest vulnerability that’s mature, weathered, and unmistakably confident. His lyrics aren’t telling a story; they’re telling his story.

From the very first swell of “When You Are Young,” it’s clear Night Thoughts is exploring a much different sound and story than “Introducing the Band” introduced on Dog Man Star. Tales of dystopian decay and the tragically glamorous are replaced by songs about responsibility, regret, and the shadow of memory; what you lose and what you learn when youth is no longer the currency you trade in. Anderson was frank in interviews around the record’s release about middle age, fatherhood, and the changing weight of time, themes embedded throughout Night Thoughts, but nowhere more so than on its opening song. Its steady, unhurried beat, like the measured march of time, sets the tone for the album’s meditation on age, responsibility, and the inevitable trade-offs of growing older.

The transition into “Outsiders” is a rush of air that literally sucks the oxygen out before Oakes’ guitar arrives in a bright, piercing cascade. It’s urgent and propulsive, with just a hint of ’80s hard rock swagger that fuses surprisingly well with Suede’s signature romantic abandon. As late-career anthems go, it’s a perfect fit: defiant, alive, and unapologetically big. That urgency shifts subtly on “No Tomorrow,” a glammy—you might even say trashy—track that clings to the fading edge of youthful exuberance while acknowledging the inevitability of its passing.

Another seamless segue brings us to “Pale Snow,” one of the album’s shortest pieces, but also one of its most thematically loaded. Anderson’s lyrics confront the fears and spiralling thoughts of parenthood, the surrender of one’s own youth and innocence to the next generation, and the sobering weight of being responsible for another life. Its fleeting nature makes the transition into “I Don’t Know How to Reach You” all the more striking. In its unforced elegance, it recalls the grandeur of “Pantomime Horse” but stripped of the youthful Sturm und Drang that marked their early work. “I Don’t Know How to Reach You” is proof that Suede can revisit familiar emotional territory without repeating themselves.

“What I’m Trying to Tell You” offers the first real break in the record’s otherwise continuous flow. It’s funky, but not in a Head Music detour sort of way, more like a pivot, or the opening of a new act in the album’s arc. Its underlying moody, atmospheric current continues into “Tightrope,” a Neil Codling composition that recalls the haunted stillness of “Sleeping Pills” with its textured layers and slow-burn tension.

The album’s most ambitious composition, “Learning to Be” (an Oakes creation), is brooding and maudlin, yet expansive in scope. Its final moments collapse beautifully into “Like Kids,” a sharp jolt back into the rollicking brightness of more carefree days, when energy and ambition seemed limitless. The taunting chorus of children at its close echoes the ending to “We Are the Pigs,” again making a canonical reference without hitting you over the head with it.

“I Can’t Give Her What She Wants” pulls the listener out of that playful reverie and into the album’s darkest corner. Whether it’s a literal or figurative murder at the song’s core remains ambiguous, but the storm clouds roll in all the same. The penultimate track, “When You Were Young,” reframes the album’s opening, drawing the journey into a full circle before “The Fur and the Feathers” takes its place alongside the epic closing statements of Suede’s early work. It’s not as ostentatious and over-the-top as “Still Life,” but no less gripping or affecting.

The songs on Night Thoughts unfold like scenes in a single, unbroken film, each transition and shift in tone serving a larger emotional arc. It’s easy to see why Suede commissioned a companion film that mirrors its immersive, cinematic sweep. That same structure deepens the sense of being pulled into the dark, caught in the grip of insomnia with unresolved memories looping in your mind.

Missing the memo on Night Thoughts was my loss. Discovering it now has been my reward. What began as a pleasant surprise has turned into something more profound: a recognition that, like the band, I too have entered my own second—or maybe third—act. Suede not only survived their second act but pushed themselves far beyond the safe, solid reemergence of Bloodsports, proving that creative renewal is possible later in life and that reinvention takes more courage than trading on past glories. I’m finding that same spark in my own work now, even with a smaller audience and fewer of my past readers making the leap with me to Substack. If Night Thoughts is proof that the best chapters can come well after the story was supposed to be over, then maybe my own best work still lies ahead, too.

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Look, I know everyone’s a playlist curator these days, and this isn’t exactly an act of radical originality. But hear me out: this hear [t]here playlist isn’t meant to break new ground, it’s meant to mark where I’m at musically in the moment. Think of it as a lightly haunted jukebox of what’s currently echoing in my head: some new, some old, some weird little in-betweens. I’ll be updating it regularly (ish), but I’m not making any grand promises about schedules. Just good music, shared when it feels right.

Right now, it feels right releasing this as an Apple Music playlist exclusively. I still have a Spotify account, and I use it, but I’ve been feeling increasingly uneasy about the platform. If you missed it: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has invested heavily in defence tech, including a company developing AI-driven military tools, which has led several artists to pull their music and speak out against the platform. Add that to the longstanding frustration with how little most artists earn from Spotify streaming, and it’s hard not to feel conflicted. None of this is tidy, and I don’t have a grand statement to make here. I’ve just been spending more time with Apple Music lately, and for now, that’s where hear [t]here lives (click image).

Here’s what’s on hear [t]here right now:

The Hidden Cameras “Quantify”

Joel Gibb and the Hidden Cameras are back and fully into their club era. Their new album, BRONTO, is out on September 12, and the tease has been long, slow, and so, so seductive. Last week, they shared the track “Quantify,” which has been my absolute favourite of the three preview releases from BRONTO so far. A far cry from the indie-orchestral pop sound of The Smell of Our Own, this latest phase of the Hidden Cameras is all phasers, synths, and synthetic style, and I am down for it. Laser beam me up.

Saint Etienne, “Take Me To The Pilot”

Another very recent drop (it came out on Tuesday), “Take Me To The Pilot” is the second single from the forthcoming final Saint Etienne album, International (out September 5). I have a lot of feelings to process after having written that last sentence (the final album part), but in terms of upcoming releases, International is at the top of my highly anticipated list. Between “Take Me To The Pilot” and the previous single, “Glad,” I’m expecting this to be a powerhouse culmination of a thirty-plus-year career of immaculate pop, eclectic experimentation, and a peerless musical and visual aesthetic.

Vivek Shraya, “When I’m Overcome”

Speaking of welcome returns, the indomitable Vivek Shraya is set for a comeback with New Models on October 9, and has shared the first single, “When I’m Overcome.” The album is written, performed, and produced by Shraya, and she’s releasing it via Twin Fang Records, a label focused on representation for women, queer, non-binary and trans folks. I won’t call this synth-based and slower-paced sound a stylistic shift for Shraya, but anyone more familiar with her last couple of albums and less with her very early work is in for a treat.

Nation of Language, “I’m Not Ready for the Change”

It’s a couple of months old now, but so far, I’m most into “I’m Not Ready For The Change” from the forthcoming Nation Of Language album, Dance Called Memory (September 19 for those keeping track). The band have also shared two other tracks (“Inept Apollo” and “Under the Water”), but this delicate synthy song has all the hallmarks of what I love most about Nation of Language. Where so many synth-based bands end up sounding cold and clinical, Nation of Language have always felt innately human and flawed (in a good way), as if their synths are all held together by rubber bands and masking tape and powered by a couple of hamsters running on a wheel.

Jane Inc., “elastic”

Carlyn Bezic is back with a new Jane Inc. album on October 17. A Rupture A Canyon A Birth (how’s that for a title?) is inspired by a near-death car accident, a cancer diagnosis, and a breakup, and judging by the lead single, “elastic,” Bezic has bounced back from all those ordeals with a renewed sense of purpose, power, and presence.

Casey MQ, “Head Over Heels”

At some point in the Substack’s existence, I will discuss the important and persistent place Tears For Fears’ Songs From the Big Chair plays in my life, but for right now, let’s enjoy this subtle and synthy cover by Canadian composer/producer Casey MQ. Like the original, MQ’s version doesn’t end in the same place that it starts, but he comes to the track with a clear affinity for the band and the era that birthed it. That MQ’s also associated with Spoons, another artist from the 80s that’s played an important and persistent part of my musical foundation, will also likely be a topic of conversation around here before too long.

TOPS, “Annihilation”

I can’t wait for these Montreal-based pop purveyors to blow me away with their forthcoming album, Bury the Key (August 22). I had missed the fact that they had a new album coming until just recently (my attention has been elsewhere), and based on “Annihilation” and the handful of other tracks they’ve already shared, Bury the Key is dialling up the TOPs aesthetic of vintage chills, synthy thrills, and sugary bellyaches to 11.

wihtikow, “9”

amiskwaciy (the traditional name for the area referred to as Edmonton, Alberta) is home to electronic music producer wihtikow, who dropped ᐊᐦᒐᕽ (which translates in English as “soul”) earlier this year. He calls the album “a love letter to nature in all its beauty and ugliness,” and “9” is one of its most textured, shifting between those two poles.

Daphni, “Clap Your Hands”

Dan “Caribou” Snaith is sharing his first new music under the Daphni moniker since 2022. It’s a club-ready banger crafted specifically for a set at Japan’s Rainbow Disco Club, and Sanith says he’s “been playing it everywhere ever since,” prompting fans to ask for a recorded version. Presumably, there’s more coming from Daphni soon, as Snaith has “a whole bunch of unreleased stuff” ready for public consumption.

Big Thief, “All Night All Day”

I’ve never been a fan of Big Thief, which doesn’t mean I disliked their records; I just never got into them during the peak of hype around the band. But I’m digging what “All Night All Day” is putting down (or ‘going down on’ as per the lyrics?), and am curious enough to check out their forthcoming Double Infinity. “Swallow poison, swallow sugar / Sometimes they taste the same,” sings Adrianne Lenker, a line that hits the gut with a wallop.

Luke Haines and Peter Buck, “The Pink Floyd Research Group”

I had no idea Luke Haines and Peter Buck were collaborators, let alone that they’ve had multiple releases together over the last number of years. I’m still in the discovery stage of this curious collaboration, but I am intrigued by “The Pink Floyd Research Group,” the lead track off their latest release, Going Down to the River… To Blow My Mind, and thought it would be a nice fit here.

Included from recent posts:

Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, “A Perfect Pair”
The Tears, “Refugees”
Tami Neilson, “Borrow My Boots (feat. Ashley McBryde, Grace Bowers & Shelly Fairchild)”
Quinton Barnes, “Sober for the Weekend”
Ghostkeeper, “Astum Ota”
Ribbon Skirt, “Off Rez”
KAYTRANADA, “Call U Up (feat. Lou Phelps)”
Devours, “Canada's Next Top Fat Otter”
Michael Cloud Duguay, “Holy Mountains of Disbelief”
Suede, “My Insatiable One”

Before I started DOMINIONATED (2016-2025), my first music blog was called Quick Before it Melts (2006-2016). On March 18, 2013, I posted my Disc of the Week review of Edmonton band Twin Library’s Lowways. Of that particular record, I wrote, “The mix of garage rock and folk styling sounds familiar and comfortable, like the cadence of an old friend’s voice, roughed up by smoke and hard drinking. The grittiness of their pop songs doesn’t come from sloppiness or lack of skill; it’s the accumulation of experience and hindsight.”

At the time, my blogging focused exclusively on Canadian music, which meant I devoted nearly all of my music-listening time to Canadian artists. There were non-Canadian artists I was listening to and following at the time, but I rarely made the time to explore music outside the scope of what I was writing about.

And yet, in March of 2013, I was delighted and ecstatic about one such act making a surprise return after a prolonged hiatus. They were a fundamental cornerstone of my musical development and an iconic trailblazer whose unexpected return with new music after more than a decade had me dizzy with anticipation and more than a bit apprehensive about whether this new material would live up to their legacy. I needn’t have worried: David Bowie’s twenty-fifth studio album, The Next Day, released on March 8, was revelatory, self-referential, and proof that the 66-year-old legend was every bit the iconoclastic chameleon who influenced a thousand other artists over the decades.

One of those artists was Suede, a band whose earliest years were unmistakably shaped by Bowie’s glam-era ambiguity and art-school bravado. Strangely enough, while caught up in the return of their spiritual godfather, I barely noticed that Suede had staged a comeback of their own in March of 2013. Bloodsports, their first album in eleven years, was released on the same day I posted that Twin Library review. And re-reading what I wrote about Lowways, I’m struck by how closely that description mirrors what Suede were doing on Bloodsports: sounding familiar but changed, weathered but focused, seasoned by hindsight.

Though I was keen to hear what Suede were up to at the time, I gave Bloodsports little more than a cursory listen. I immediately fell in love with the first single, “It Starts and Ends With You.” My music-listening attention was focused elsewhere, though, and Bloodsports, like so many things not bearing the MAPL designation, fell through the cracks, another one of those albums I would get around to listening to “one day.”

That day ultimately arrived in the early months of 2025, more than a decade after the album's release, when I began revisiting the Suede catalogue in earnest for this retro-flection series. It’s taken a long time to get here, but I’m glad I finally arrived.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before delving too far into Bloodsports, we need to discuss how Suede arrived at their sixth studio album following their acrimonious breakup in 2003.

The road to Bloodsports starts on March 24, 2010, at London’s Royal Albert Hall. On that day, a reunited Suede performed in the annual series of fundraising concerts in support of the Teenage Cancer Trust. Expectations for the “one night only” reunion were cautiously optimistic, and reports from a couple of primer gigs (at the 100 Club in London on March 20 and the Ritz in Manchester on the 21st) were positive heading into the Royal Albert Hall. In his review of the show for the Guardian, Alexis Petridis commented that Suede, “sound better than they did at their commercial peak,” and “given that they're relying on songs nearly 20 years old, the power emanating from the stage isn't purely nostalgic. Whatever their past, they sound like a band who might conceivably have a future.” Luke Turner’s recap of the three-night run of shows for The Quietus is equally glowing: “It’s not yet clear whether there will be any further Suede gigs. In a way, it’d be perfect if there weren’t, if these three special nights in Manchester and London would make for Suede’s epitaph, a final vindication and celebration for band and for us,” he suggests before adding, “a rejuvenated Suede are on such astounding form that you can’t help but hope they do give it another go, and silence the doubters with a dose of this wonderful, beautiful, love and poison.”

Turner reports that a chuffed Anderson said to the Royal Albert Hall crowd, “I don’t have anything to say about all this except it’s been a lot of fun, ...let’s do it again in seven years.” But something clicked for him and the rest of the band that night. By August 2010, Suede were on the bill at Smukfest in Skanderborg, Denmark, kicking off a comeback tour that culminated—61 gigs later—on October 22, 2012, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Somewhere along the way, the idea of writing new material began to take hold. With Anderson’s songwriting partners Richard Oakes and Neil Codling now both back firmly in the fold, the creative itch became something of a mission around unfinished business. With all five members back in place (rounded out by stalwarts bassist Mat Osman and drummer Simon Gilbert), Suede brought Ed Buller, the producer of Suede, Dog Man Star, and Coming Up, back into the studio with them.

In a 2013 interview for The Quietus, Osman says the goal for Bloodsports was to capture the feeling of making “a fucking racket onstage.” At the time, press quotes from Anderson suggested that the album would be a hybrid of the drama of Dog Man Star and the punchy immediacy of Coming Up. That’s wholly understandable, given that Suede had spent the better part of two years mainly playing material from their first three albums, along with the odd B-side and cuts from Head Music (tracks from A New Morning conspicuously absent from the set lists). The end result, after a couple of false starts and a scrapped session, is an album that reconnects Suede with the essence that had made them such a vital act in the first place while avoiding any sense that they were just recycling past glories. Like its title implies, Bloodsports is ruthless in its battle against sentimentality and nostalgia. The sonic foundations remained comfortably familiar, but this was clearly a band of musicians and songwriters intent on making a comeback album that avoided any sense of looking back.

Nowhere is that clarity of purpose more evident than in the songs themselves. Although similar in length to their debut and Coming Up, Bloodsports feels lean and fighting fit; a tightly sequenced and consistent ten tracks that avoid the over-indulgent trappings of their more melodramatic earlier work. For the first time in a long time, Suede sound like a band with something urgent to say, and right from its opening moments, Bloodsports makes the case for why Suede still mattered in 2013.

“Barriers,” the opening number and the world’s first taste of new Suede (released as a free download in January), is a grand, anthemic us-against-the-world rallying cry. “Will they love you / The way, the way I loved you?” Anderson pleads in the chorus — a familiar position for the man who once sang “The 2 of Us” and “The Chemistry Between Us,” still circling themes of longing, loyalty, and love left unanswered.

“Snowblind” struts with a confident swagger, driven by sharp guitar riffs and the taut rhythm section of Osman and Gilbert. They are often overlooked when discussing the Suede songbook, but their years of experience playing together are responsible for the irrepressible heartbeat at the core of Suede’s songs. That drive and intensity are most evident for me in “It Starts and Ends With You.” Releasing “Barriers” as a free download was a gift to fans patiently awaiting new music; dropping “It Starts and Ends With You” as the lead single for Bloodsports signalled to a broader audience that Suede were back and meant business. Feeling both instantly familiar and surprisingly direct, “It Starts and Ends With You” is a clean hit of pop heartbreak. It’s concise, melodic, and emotionally accessible, yet still quintessentially Suede.

“Sabotage” opens with a moody, gliding guitar line that calls Joy Division to mind, a band whose influence has always hovered around Suede’s edges but rarely comes through as directly as it does here. There’s a touch of “The Chemistry Between Us” in the melody too, but it’s the song’s sweeping, almost cinematic coda that gives it weight. It’s the kind of slow-burn crescendo Suede excel at when they’re firing on all cylinders. “For the Strangers” (also released as a single) trades in a different sort of familiarity; it’s one of those songs that sounds like you’ve known it forever. Jangly, romantic, and steeped in the band’s early DNA, it wouldn’t feel out of place tucked away on the B-side of “The Drowners.” “Hit Me” doesn’t hit quite as hard as its title suggests. It’s one of the lyrically lighter moments on the record, but Anderson delivers it with such conviction that it still lands. It’s a reminder that even Suede at their most straightforward can still be surprisingly evocative.

“Sometimes I Feel I’ll Float Away” is the closest the band comes to recapturing the atmosphere of Butler-era Suede, with its slow build and emotional crescendo. It’s also where I hear the influence of Ed Buller’s production most prominently. Like “For the Strangers,” it sounds like a track that could have come out circa Dog Man Star or even Suede, but there’s a clear feeling that this “Sometimes I Feel I’ll Float Away” is more refined than any earlier incarnation of Suede could have pulled off. Structurally, it’s not the kind of song I’d usually gravitate toward, but I’ve fallen for it completely, especially the line “Let me take you through each stage of the male mistake.” It’s theatrical, intimate, and a standout moment on the album. “What Are You Not Telling Me?” follows with a brooding elegance, its moody string arrangement and Anderson’s restrained vocal giving it a stately, almost haunted quality. It’s a late-album highlight and a reminder that Suede in 2013 weren’t just chasing their past, they were stretching their sound in quieter, subtler ways that still carried emotional weight.

The final two tracks, “Always” and “Faultlines,” feel like the bridge between Bloodsports and what would follow on Night Thoughts and The Blue Hour. At the time of release, they may have struck some listeners as slightly out of step as moodier, more spacious, and less tethered to the classic Suede sound. But in hindsight, they’re firmly rooted in the band’s evolution: theatrical, textural, and emotionally layered. They round out the album with a sense of forward motion and experimentation (especially the wild vocal effects at the end of “Always”). In retrospect, they sound less like outliers and more like signposts for where Suede would head next.

It is not lost on me that Bloodsports was the first Suede album released in the digital music era. The ease with which I can now access new music on its release day, without having to leave the house, let alone get dressed, is a far cry from driving from Waterloo to Toronto just to get my hands on Sci-Fi Lullabies. I often think about how I've lost the thrill of the hunt for physical music due to digital downloads, and how that’s not only impacted the intensity of my emotional response to new music, but also the frequency with which I listen to it and the duration it stays in rotation nowadays. Even when I do want to own the physical media, I’ll often be able to hear the audio well in advance of the needle hitting the vinyl.

It’s almost a certainty that even if I had given Bloodsports its due at the time it was released in 2013, I would never have immersed myself in the record that way I have now because of this series of reflections. At the time of its release, I was tuning into other sounds and committed to a different kind of listening. I would not have loved it as much then as I do now. Coming back to it with distance and perspective, it feels less like I’ve been missing out on it and more like arriving at the right moment for an alignment.

It’s a shame that it’s taken me more than a decade to hear Bloodsports the way it deserves to be heard, finally. It’s become one of my favourite of the band’s albums, and I consider it a highly cohesive record that crystallizes a lot of what I loved about Suede in the first place: their vivid portrayals of outsider longing, the tension between sleaze and beauty, and the unconventional glamour they gave to the most ordinary moments.

Bloodsports isn’t the sound of a band retracing old steps. Even when the music gestures to the past, it does so with a sharpened edge and renewed clarity. In a way, it’s like Suede’s own version of Bowie’s The Next Day—a reappearance, a reinvention, a reevaluation, a reckoning.

It wasn’t a final act. It wasn’t even a middle. It was the spark of new life and new blood. For a band so often defined by dramatic entrances and exits, Bloodsports is a testament to how some stories don’t really end; they just find new ways to begin.

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Is Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter Fortunato Durutti Marinetti’s most direct record yet, or his most elusive? It’s hard to say, given how the record plays itself out like an emotional palindrome, its title suggesting listeners will find comfort in familiar sounds at first but will ultimately end up with a sour taste in their mouth (and they’ll like it).

Then there is the whole matter of just who Fortunato Durutti Marinetti is. Is he the “Toronto-via-Turin cantautore” responsible for a string of “poetic jazz rock” albums, including 2020’s Desire, Memory's Fool from 2022, and his 2023 release, Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean? Or is he musician and songwriter Daniel Colussi, a stalwart of the Canadian indie music scene for years, both as a solo musician and with his bands the Shilohs and the Pinc Lincolns?

Colussi is Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, and Marinetti is Daniel Colussi, of course, and Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter isn’t going to resolve that identity loop anytime soon. Instead, it leans into its exploration of dualities right down to its mirrored title and its split-label release (We Are Time handling the North American version, Quindi Records taking care of Europe). The same record, twice. Almost.

It’s challenging to unravel the artist from the art when the two are as intertwined as Colussi is with Marinetti, but that is ultimately the point of making music, is it not: to blur the boundaries between persona and person, between what’s revealed and what remains obscured. Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter lives in that blur, and it does so with opulence and commitment —a “dive into excess,” as described in its release notes.

Colussi’s collaborators are an ensemble of soft-focus assassins who saturate his songs with sax, strings, synths, percussion, and euphonium that move through the arrangements like gentle, shifting weather, giving the songs colour and contour without overpowering them. The music becomes the heavy, pleated, velvet drapes enveloping Colussi’s colossus of a baritone, his timbre crisp like a freshly cracked knuckle, his tone raspy and worn like weathered hands.

If it all sounds a bit much—the heavy drapes, the cracked knuckles, the soft-focus assassins— that’s because it is. Deliberately so. Colussi is intentionally pushing his songwriting “to absurdist extremes,” and he lands there with complete conviction. Not by turning everything up to full blast, but by digging deeper into the quiet human dramas of his songs.

Colussi’s voice and vocal style are often compared to those of Dan Bejar of Destroyer. While Colussi thoroughly acknowledges the similarities he shares with his namesake, there is a distinct difference between the two. Colussi’s sing-speak style is more guttural, like the words are catching in his throat as he says them. When he breaks out into singing midway through the opening track “Full of Fire,” Colussi switches gears to an impassioned lounge singer who's got a story to tell, but you have to lean in close to hear it. The funky Rhodes on “Beware” finds Colussi shifting style, sounding something like a gangster offering up a litany of warnings with a chewed-up cigar stub between his teeth. It’s lovely and endearing, and when vocalist Victoria Cheong (aka New Chance) duets with Colussi on the later half of the track, we get further insight into the duality at play on the album: “Be cautious, too much closeness can be dangerous / But too much distance is also a risk / And be careful of too much contradiction / and remember, accidents happen when you’re not paying attention.”

Lead single, “A Perfect Pair,” is the closest Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter’s seven songs and two instrumentals come to having a classic pop song structure. That it’s followed in the running order sequence by “A Rambling Prayer,” the album’s longest and most stream-of-conscious track, only makes sense because Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter is constantly folding one feeling into its opposite. The album basks in the tension between its polished musical tones and the murky fog of Colussi’s memory poem lyrics. Duality is not just the theme of Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter; it shapes the whole record, looping Colussi’s detached delivery with the intimacy of his arrangements, highlighting the absurdity and precision of it all.

The conceit all comes to a head on the head-scratchingly meta“Call Me the Arthur,” where Colussi nonchalantly instructs listeners to make what they will of Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter: “Call this a story / Call it comedy or tragedy / Autobiography or fantasy / Bad poetry… call it anything you want.” He goes on to identify as a dog that refuses to bark, a bird afraid of the sky, and suggests listeners can call him a “dirty bird” (if they so choose). There’s also the story of failing to secure a role that was written for him, likely because Colussi is “a screw that wouldn’t fit / a mirror that did not reflect,” and “a fly drowning in this ointment.”

Absurd? Without a doubt. Purposely? Perhaps, but the crazy thing is: it works. For all his lyrical follies and foibles, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti feels authentically at home as the awkward outsider slipping through these immaculately arranged songs. It all sounds so natural, so right: sweet turns bitter, bitter turns sweet, and around it goes again. And you go right around with him, happily and willingly, drowning in the ointment right alongside him.

the act of just hearing [t]here 🎧

a little more [t]here [t]here 🪩

Not quite the main act, but still on the stage.

As I suggest above (or maybe I didn’t?), I’ve been a fan and follower of Dan Collusi’s music for quite some time and have reviewed a number of his releases for DOMINIONATED over the years.

It started with a review of Joy to the World, from the Pinc Lincolns in 2017:

DOMINIONATED

The Pinc Lincolns, Joy to the World

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9 years ago · DOMINIONATED

That was followed by a couple of reviews for Fortunato Durutti Marrinetti’s Desire (2020) and Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean (2024).

DOMINIONATED

Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, Desire

It’s hard not to listen to Desire without imagining Fortunato Durutti Marinetti has seen the present when it was the future…

Read more

6 years ago · DOMINIONATED

DOMINIONATED

Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean

Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean is transformative, slightly transgressive, and delightfully marches to an original beat…

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2 years ago · DOMINIONATED

I also suggest checking out this review of Memory’s Fool from my fellow DOMINIONATED colleague Tia Alandra, who's also new on Substack:

DOMINIONATED

Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, Memory’s Fool

Memory’s Fool is a real-time exploration of life’s leaps and falls, and is a reminder that we’re all time travellers…

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4 years ago · DOMINIONATED

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Kinetic. Volatile. Unstable. Noble.

There’s no denying the chemistry between Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler, for better or worse. At the height of their creative powers, the pair were untouchable, as evidenced by Suede’s self-titled debut. At their most frayed and fractured, their animosity fueled Dog Man Star, an album that, in 2005, The Guardian described as initially “camply dramatic,” but which matured into a record of legendary status: “the last of those grand, intriguing, destructive follies.” Their falling out was so final, so absolute, that an amicable reconciliation—let alone a second creative partnership—seemed unthinkable.

And yet, a decade later, Here Come the Tears arrived, not with the swagger of a reunion, but with the quiet confidence of unfinished business. Released in 2005 (just a month shy of the tenth anniversary of Butler’s departure from Suede), the first (and so far only) album by the Tears rightly played down any kind of triumphant return angle. Instead, Anderson and Butler’s new band, which included bassist/guitarist Nathan Fisher, drummer Makoto Sakamoto, and keyboardist Will Foster (who is rarely credited in print even though he’s listed on the album’s credits), felt more like a reflective recalibration.

The Tears may not have been trying to recapture the past, but it’s hard to outrun it when the principal songwriters had so much history between them. Perhaps more so now in 2025, knowing that there’s unlikely to be a second Tears album, Here Come the Tears feels like a glimpse of what might have been had the Anderson/Butler implosion not occurred so early in their collaboration. The result is an album that’s both haunted and hopeful, steeped in the grandeur of their earlier work but tempered by age, experience, and a surprising tenderness.

By the early 2000s, with Britpop a relic of the previous millennium, there wasn’t a musical ecosystem open to or interested in an Anderson/Butler beyond devoted Suede fans who may or may not have been mourning the band’s dissolution (depending on their reaction to 2003’s A New Morning), instigated by Anderson. Butler, meanwhile, had carved out a respected career as a producer and collaborator but had largely faded away from the spotlight. In North America, Arcade Fire’s Funeral and Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois were topping Pitchfork year-end lists, while back home in the UK, the likes of Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party were all the rage in the music papers. To paraphrase Butler, people had most definitely moved on from any interest in a Suede revival. Still, in 2004, there were trace rumours of a reconciliation and time together in the studio, confirmed in October 2004 with an announcement and live debut that December.

I recall hearing about Here Come the Tears and trying to process a rush of conflicting emotions. On one hand, the idea of a Suede revival was highly enticing, but the prospects of anything coming close to the flash and brilliance of Suede and Dog Man Star were dim. The chances were high that the Tears would only tarnish Suede’s legacy or somehow cheapen their memory for me. It didn’t help that I could still taste the bitterness of A New Morning and hadn’t been interested in anything Butler-related since his debut solo album in 1998. Wolf Parade, the Dears, and Stars were on heavy rotation on my iPod at the time, and I likely hadn’t touched a Suede CD since the turn of the century. Here Come the Tears was a curious proposition, though: a reunion album that wasn’t quite a reunion, arriving in a musical landscape dominated by garage rock revivalism and post-punk pastiche that would come to be known as indie sleaze. In that context, the Tears felt both utterly out of step with the times and defiantly themselves, a place familiar to Anderson and Butler.

While pleasantly impressed by the first single, “Refugees,” the rest of Here Come the Tears didn’t spark my interest in 2005. Once I ripped it to MP3 and filed it in my iTunes library, the CD sat on my shelf until 2013, when all my collections underwent a massive (and regretful) purge ahead of moving house. It wasn’t until I started working on my deep dive into Suede’s catalogue in January of this year that I came back to this curiosity of an album. As with A New Morning, I approached Here Come the Tears with open ears and an open mind. To my surprise, I found cohesion and clarity in the songs that I wasn’t expecting.

The key, I think, is that Here Come the Tears doesn’t try to recapture or reclaim any kind of former glories. It can’t. Instead, the Tears let their history dictate their present (circa 2005), so that the songs shimmer with melancholy melodies, resilient riffs, and a gritty grace that winks confidence and chutzpah that Anderson and Butler exuded in their younger days. The album, produced by Butler, features his trademark lushness, and although it sometimes teeters on the edge of melodrama, it never becomes overblown or exaggerated. Butler’s guitar work is expressive and impressive. Anderson’s vocals are all weathered elegance that feel connected to his lyrics in a way that was missing from the last two Suede albums. There is a maturity in their dynamics that makes me think Anderson and Butler were truly working in service to the songs, all of which thematically speak of connections, conciliation, and concession. In that 2005 Guardian interview, Anderson is reticent to suggest the pair had healed old wounds. “We've still got a lot to sort out between ourselves,” he said about his and Butler’s relationship, while Butler stressed that they were focused more on the work than working on themselves: “It’s about making a record. It's not about keeping our golfing holiday on hold for 2007.”

The record in question is rife with hallmarks of classic pop: big riffs, sweeping strings, and swoony singing. “Refugees” is still a strong opening track, but after digging deeper into Here Come the Tears, it turns out the real treasures were buried deeper in the track list. I’ve taken quite a shine to “Co-Star” and “The Ghost of You,” both of which feature some of the album’s stronger lyrics and textured layers that remind me of 1960s pop grandeur. “Two Creatures” smacks of the same blue-eyed soul Butler deployed on McAlmont and Butler’s “Yes.” “Imperfection” checks all the musical boxes as a stadium-rocking anthem, even with the unfortunate couplet, “You taste like orange chocolate / you always put your hands in my pocket.” Anderson’s lyrics stay close to the heart and close to the surface for the most part. I can’t help but imagine the two songwriters standing over the lyric sheet for “Autograph” and laughing at how fans will parse its words for coded messages about the state of their friendship:
“And it’s all just complication / And too complex to ever last… And if this kiss dissolves into the past / And if we don’t have a future just leave your autograph.”

A sect of music writers and fans was over the moon with Here Come the Tears. The album entered the UK charts at 15 (dropping out two weeks later), and “Refugees” debuted at nine, its highest position in its four-week stay in the singles charts. Every review I have found of the album has been more than favourable and flush with praise for its casual elegance and the ease with which its songwriters clicked back together after so much piss and vinegar. Whatever it was that the Tears had set out to prove—to themselves, to critics, or fans—they proved it. And then, just as quietly as they had returned, they let it go. Anderson released his first of four solo albums in 2007, and Butler returned to production work before forming a new band, Trans, in 2013 with Jackie McKeown of the Scottish indie rockers 1990s. Neither has ever mentioned a follow-up to Here Come the Tears.

In hindsight, Here Come the Tears feels like a necessary bridge, an emotional and creative clearing of the air that laid the groundwork for Suede’s eventual 2010 reunion. The Tears may be a brief blip for both Anderson and Butler, but it feels like an important one. Here Come the Tears is proof that even fractured partnerships can yield something unexpectedly graceful when given the space to heal.

That it exists at all is remarkable; that it still holds up as a solid and enjoyable listen after 20 years is truly impressive. Here Come the Tears will never command the same kind of reverence as Dog Man Star, but it does deserve a place in the greater Suede conversation. It’s a document of reconciliation and craftsmanship, as well as the enduring power of creative chemistry.

Measured. Bonded. Elemental. Resolved.

a little more [t]here [t]here 🪩

Not quite the main act, but still on the stage.

After the Tears disbanded in 2006, Brett Anderson announced his self-titled solo album, the first of four albums he would release under his own name, culminating in Black Rainbows in 2011.

Brett Anderson (2006) is a mixed bag of melodramatics. The NME dismissed it as “11 tracks of the same old maudlin balladry,” while Pitchfork was even more cutting: “Unfortunately, the Anderson of old appears to have been definitively replaced by the Anderson of Old,” wrote reviewer Mark Pytlik, adding “this eponymous record marks the singer’s first solo release, and demonstrates handily why its taken him this long to do something on his own.”

Wilderness (2008) is a hastily assembled, stripped-down collection of voice, piano, and cello. It was never going to be a commercial success, but, according to Anderson, that was the point. “I have no record company, no publisher and a smaller audience, but I have never been more confident and focused about what I am doing as an artist,” he said of the album, calling it “a beautiful suite of songs untethered by second-guessing markets and playlists and music biz bullshit.” There’s a sense of liberation and freedom here that makes it a far more engaging listen than its predecessor. For those willing to separate the artist’s past from his present, Wilderness offered a side of Anderson that hadn’t yet been seen or heard.

Slow Attack (2009), a collaboration with producer/arranger Leo Abrahams, picks up where Wilderness left off. Heavily influenced by Spirit of Eden-era Talk Talk, Anderson leans into texture and atmosphere, keeping the instrumentation sparse and gauzy. He sounds at home in these songs, inhabiting their quiet worlds with the same intensity he once brought to the melodrama of Dog Man Star.

Black Rainbows (2011) arrived a year after Suede’s one-off reunion show at the Royal Albert Hall for the Teenage Cancer Trust. Perhaps encouraged by the warm reception, Anderson returned with a fuller, more robust band sound. Q Magazine called it “unashamedly Suede-esque,” while Mojo dubbed it “a pretty good dress rehearsal,” a nod to what many fans were already anticipating: that new Suede music was on the horizon.

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For all but seven years of my life, I have lived within a 20-minute drive of Niagara Falls. As of this writing, I am close enough that I can see the mist of the cataracts rising above the rooftops of my neighbourhood, and I can be standing at the intersection of Clifton Hill and Falls Avenue, looking up at the neon-lit thoroughfare teeming with tourists in less time than it took me to type this sentence. Being a local, I’ve never fully understood the draw and awe that visitors here feel. I think that’s common when a major attraction or landmark is commonplace to some and not others. What’s just “the Falls” to me is a once-in-a-lifetime marvel for many, a provocation and challenge for a daring few. And that’s the thing about landmarks of this sort: they’re emotional mirrors as much as they are physical structures and geographic locations. For some, they symbolize dreams, ambitions, or the life they’re chasing. For others, they’re just an oversized waterfall. Or a big neon cowgirl.

For Tami Neilson, the iconic neon cowgirl sign at Broadway and Third Ave. in downtown Nashville has always been more than just a kitchy icon or Instagrammable photo op. For Neilson — Toronto-born, raised on the road performing with her family as the Neilsons, and now residing in New Zealand — that landmark sign has been a symbol of aspiration. That sign has borne silent witness to Neilson’s hopes of one day gracing the stage at the nearby Ryman Auditorium. Every time she visited the city, she saw that glowing figure watching over her, a reminder of the stage she hadn’t yet reached.

Neilson got to walk across that Ryman stage, opening for fellow New Zealanders Crowded House in 2023, and if there’s any justice in this world, she deserves the chance to do so again soon in support of her crackling new album, Neon Cowgirl. Like many great albums, Neon Cowgirl comes with a serendipitous story so improbable and aligned that it feels scripted. Neilson had high hopes that the Crowded House opening gig would give her the chance to make inroads in North America in a way that her previous touring schedules just wouldn’t allow. Bringing her young family on the road with her, the plan was to capitalize on this “once-in-a-lifetime chance to really give it [her] all with [her] career,” but an unexpected run-in with sepsis had her fighting for her life in the ICU just two months before the tour started. Neilson recovered enough to head out on the five-month tour with her family, but her focus and priorities shifted: “Our trip changed from one of me going full throttle to make a good dent in my career to one of recovery and slow healing. It became a time of embracing life fully and savouring the precious time with my family in a way one does only after a near-death experience.” Suffice it to say that Neon Cowgirl is more than just a record of songs; it’s a reckoning of resilience and destiny, charged with an all-or-nothing spirit that suggests Neilson isn’t waiting for that neon cowgirl sign to call her number.

From the opening track, “Foolish Heart,” Neilson channels the spirit of Patsy Cline, her towering and tender voice belting out the song’s heartbreaking bridge: “They follow me, they let love lead / But I only lead them astray / And when they lose and come back bruised / There’s only one fool that they blame.” “Borrow My Boots” is a fiery anthem of empowerment, featuring Ashley McBryde, Grace Bowers, and Shelly Fairchild. Backed by a rocking rhythm section and foot-stomping beat, Neilson advises the sisterhood that “Sometimes the only way through / Is to knock it down, break it loose / Kick it in, you can borrow my boots.”

That same honky-tonk energy courses through “U-Haul Blues,” a song that connects to Neilson’s upbringing on the road performing with her family (“Gotta sing for your supper, gotta sing for the Lord / Sleeping on a mattress on a stranger’s floor / 3 kids on a Greyhound, rolling outta town”).

“One Less Heart” is cut from the same cloth as the best work of kd lang or Roy Orbison. It is a lovelorn ballad about learning lessons the hard way and vowing never to make the same mistake twice. It’s just one more example of Neilson’s storytelling prowess on an album rife with lyrics steeped in the kind of authenticity that comes from living between worlds. Each track on Neon Cowgirl feels like a postcard from a different stop on her journey, not just the 2023 North American tour, but her life’s trajectory so far.

On the title track, joined by Crowded House’s Neil Finn, Neilson asks, “Can I be the girl lighting up the sky / Shine like a star with a neon smile,” wishing for the fortitude and presence of a 20-foot, unmoving and unmovable giant. With Neon Cowgirl, Neilson gets her wish. Shining with the brilliance of someone who has weathered storms and come out luminous, Neilson is now a beacon in her own right, and a landmark others will measure themselves against.

the act of just hearing [t]here 🎧

a little more [t]here [t]here 🪩

Not quite the main act, but still on the stage.

Here’s is a review I wrote of Tami Neilson’s 2022 album, Kingmaker, for DOMINIONATED:

DOMINIONATED

Tami Neilson, Kingmaker

Kingmaker is a bundle of dynamite that should propel Tami Neilson into the stratosphere…

Read more

4 years ago · DOMINIONATED

And here’s one my DOMINIONATED colleague Laura Stanley did for her 2020 banger, CHICKABOOM!

DOMINIONATED

Tami Neilson, CHICKABOOM!

It takes a lot of self-control to not stand up, clap and shout along with Tami Neilson’s CHICKABOOM…

Read more

6 years ago · DOMINIONATED

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A New Morning is the Suede album I forgot existed. That’s not hyperbole. Before starting this retrospective review series, I couldn’t even recall the album title, let alone a single track (except for “Positivity,” which I remembered only because of how negatively I felt about it). At the time of its release in 2002 and in the 23 years since, I had never made it through A New Morning in one sitting. I’ve managed to do it now for the posterity of this review, but I will never do that again. Ever.

In 2002, Suede was a band well past its imperial era. Brett Anderson had recently gotten sober, ending years of drug use that had shaped much of the band’s earlier work, most notably during the making of 1999’s Head Music. While this marked a personal turning point, it also left him creatively adrift. He wrote the lyrics for A New Morning in isolation, drawing on literary influences and nature, but the resulting songs lacked the urgency and spark of Suede’s earlier material. The departure of keyboardist and guitarist Neil Codling in 2001 due to chronic fatigue syndrome further destabilized the group. His replacement, former Strangelove keyboardist Alex Lee, supported the band on tour and officially joined as a member for the recording of A New Morning, but his presence couldn’t restore the band’s chemistry. Guitarist Richard Oakes, bassist Mat Osman, and drummer Simon Gilbert were still on hand, but after the tumultuous years surrounding Head Music, Suede seemed unsure of who they were and what they wanted to be. Not even legendary producers Stephen Street (The Smiths, Morrissey) and John Leckie (The Fall, The Stone Roses, Radiohead) would be able to extract any redeeming qualities from its uninspired songs. Suede was a band running on fumes, and their breakup the following year felt inevitable and—most sadly—an overdue blessing.

I want to be as fair as possible to A New Morning. I listened without bias or prejudice as much as I could, which surprisingly revealed a couple of songs and moments that I think are worthy of a spot in Suede’s canon (albeit nowhere near their top-ranking songs). Still, a look at the top songs Suede played live in 2002 reveals the sorry truth: 7 of the top 10 came from albums other than A New Morning, not exactly a ringing endorsement from a band ostensibly touring in support of their new material. Make of that what you will.

In the 2018 documentary, Suede: The Insatiable Ones, Anderson holds nothing back when discussing the two most contentious albums in their catalogue: “I don’t disown [Head Music] at all, I just regret that it wasn’t seen through with the right kind of conviction… Even though I made [Another New Morning] in a very clean state, there was still a shadow of addiction present… It just didn’t work at all, and I do disown it. Unlike Head Music, I wish we never made it.” As much as I dislike A New Morning, I do not begrudge Suede for making it, but I wholly concur with Anderson; I, too, wish they had never made it.

“Positivity,” a song I lovingly refer to as “Positively Pap,” opens the album with a whimper. Although borne out of a renewed sense of self and purpose coming out of Anderson’s addiction, it’s the kind of song that tries so hard to be uplifting that it ends up sounding hollow and insincere, which was never an adjective that one would associate with Suede. The album’s second single, “Obsessions,” follows and somehow manages to be even worse. I find it vapid, repetitive, and utterly devoid of charm. Its worst offence is how formulaic and self-derivative its lyrics sound, as if Anderson were trying to write another “Trash,” albeit one without any semblance of a hook or chorus. “Lonely Girls” is a soft-focus mess that, for some reason, sounds to me like it could very well have been an outtake from Julio Iglesias’s 1100 Bel Air Place. Like a shirt two sizes too small, it sounds constrictive and an overall poor fit for a band that is best when their music is allowed room to flow and expand.

“Lost in TV” aims to be moody and atmospheric, but ultimately sounds like background music in a dystopian department store. Which is a crying shame, because this Anderson/Osman composition has the potential to be a decent Suede song. “Beautiful Loser” follows, a misfire in every sense. If you’re going to put the word “loser” in a song title, you better make sure the song doesn’t live up to it. This one does. Unfortunately, the downward trend continues. “Streetlife” is dead on arrival, a track that feels like it’s going through the motions without any real conviction. Poor “Astrogirl” is adrift in space with no one to save her (is it too harsh to call it “Astroturf”?)

I don’t fault them for the unoriginal moniker of “Untitled,” given that naming the song after its chorus—“I’m just a stupid guy crushed like a butterfly dead-eyed at the drive by in a car”—would have felt a little too on the nose. “One Hit to the Body” and “When the Rain Falls” are both unremarkable; I didn’t bother to write any notes about them worth repeating.

I did say there are moments on A New Morning that surprised me with just how much I liked them. “...morning” is a song that hints at something better than it ended up being. I don’t mind the mostly acoustic guitar arrangement; in fact, I think it would be a much stronger song if the band had stripped it back to just guitar and voice. I can hear it as a deeply emotional and heartfelt closing track on a different album, one with a better group of songs that had more in common thematically. I was even more impressed with “Oceans,” which features some of the album’s best lyrics, treading familiar ground in the exploration of relationships in ruin with a cinematic eye for scene-setting that is irrepressibly Anderson’s forte. Suede buried the song as a hidden track on the CD, ten minutes after “When the Rain Falls,” but someone had the right mind to let the NME tell everyone about it before the album came out in case listeners abandoned A New Morning (like I did) before making it through to the end. “Oceans” is a quiet, subtle gem of a song that, unlike much of the album, actually sounds like it’s a Suede track.

On a better-produced album with a better class of songs, I could imagine “Oceans,” “…morning,” and even “Lost in TV” serving as anchor tracks on what would be a pretty respectable Suede release steeped in subtle folk flourishes and muted tones. It’s likely what they were aiming for with A New Morning: a stylistic shift away from the industrial harshness of Head Music in the same way each of their albums had been a reaction to the last. But two decent songs and one meh track can’t save a predominantly bland album. Or the band that made it.

A decade after gracing the cover of Melody Maker as “the best new band in Britain,” Suede were sounding like a band that had lost its purpose, and A New Morning suggested that they had nowhere new left to go. When Suede officially announced their split in late 2003, it barely registered as a surprise. What was surprising, though, was how it happened: backstage at The Graham Norton Show, Anderson reportedly leaned over to fellow founding member Osman and whispered, “Let’s not do this anymore,” effectively ending the band with a shrug rather than a bang.

My initial reaction to A New Morning in 2002 wasn’t so much disappointment as indifference. The bloom for me had already started wilting with Head Music; by the time A New Morning came along, my musical tastes were shifting, my personal life evolving. Much had changed within Suede—and within me. I couldn’t imagine ever caring about Suede with the same passion and vigour I once did, but time has a way of reshaping things. Their eventual return, over a decade later, was something I never would have believed possible back then, let alone something I would have been interested in. And yet, here I am, grateful for Suede’s second act. Still, A New Morning remains a challenging listen, but one that I now appreciate as a misstep that plays an essential part in the band’s journey. It’s just one I never care to revisit, but I’m glad I finally did.

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