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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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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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.

a little more [t]here [t]here 🪩

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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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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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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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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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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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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Head Music was never going to be an easy album for me to write about. At some point in the 26 years since Suede released it, I convinced myself that, except for “Electricity,” I pretty much universally hated Head Music and had no desire to listen to any of its tracks, let alone sit through multiple playthroughs from top to bottom. Once I started re-listening and jotting down my preliminary thoughts for this post, I began to realize that it wasn’t anything about Head Music specifically that was alienating and putting me off, but rather its association with where I was physically and mentally in 1999, the year it was released.

1999 is as close as I get to having an annus horribilis. I was in the midst of a sexuality identity crisis, stuck at a job I hated that was causing me to kill myself with caffeine, nicotine, and mindless episodes of fog eating, helplessly watching my father succumb to cancer, and unaware that I was drowning in my own clinical depression. Honestly, through the first half of 1999, music was the only thing keeping me tethered to sanity. I would get home to my empty apartment in Waterloo, Ontario after a gut-churning day at that soul-sucking job, order in some grease-soaked fast food, smoke cigarettes and listen to records while thumbing through my collection of UK music magazines (in my mind’s eye, it’s always The Boy With the Arab Strap on the stereo and a copy of Q magazine in my hands). By the time the millennium clocks clicked over to 2000, I had quit my job and gone back to school to earn my teaching degree, dropped 30 pounds and was exercising regularly, moved home with my mom and was mourning and missing my father after his death in August. Not exactly good times.

By all accounts, making Head Music wasn’t exactly good times for Suede, either. After the success of Coming Up and the coalescing of the band’s new five-piece line-up, Suede took some much-needed time off to regroup and refocus before working on a fourth album. By this point in their career (late 1997, after releasing the Sci-Fi Lullabies B-sides compilation), though, Suede were a band with nowhere to go. Their previous records all had stakes to them. The 1993 self-title debut needed to meet (if not exceed) the expectations of all the hype that had come up around them; sophomore album Dog Man Star had to blow away every preconceived notion people had of Suede after their first record; Coming Up needed to humble and silence the skeptics who couldn’t conceive of a Bernard Butler-less Suede.

As much by choice as by design, every subsequent Suede album was a polar opposite response to the last, so the only real pressure on album four was to keep the pendulum swinging in the opposite direction of Coming Up, and the band themselves mostly imposed that. Despite their personal struggles, Suede remained committed to their music. But Suede were in no condition to fully commit themselves to making their fourth masterpiece in a row. At the time, Brett Anderson was entirely in the grips of an all-consuming drug addiction and dead-set on Suede becoming the music lovechild of Prince and the Happy Mondays, Neil Codling was struggling with a mysterious illness that would later be diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome, Richard Oakes was pouring liquid courage down his throat to even step foot into the studio where he felt his skills and talents weren’t wanted or needed, and neither Simon Gilbert nor Mat Osman seemed to have any sense of the direction Suede needed to go in. After parting ways with stalwart producer Ed Buller, producer-of-the-moment Steve Osborne (whose credits included Happy Mondays’ Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches, Lush’s Lovelife, and Placebo’s Without You I'm Nothing) was brought in to give Suede an EDM makeover and help bring out the funk that Anderson so desperately wanted to hear.

It all sounds like a recipe for disaster. And for many years, that’s how I thought of Head Music: a perplexing chapter in the Suede discography, marked by strained and troubled band relationships, drug addiction, and a rudderless sense of needing to reinvent themselves because that’s what’s expected of them. Yet, though Head Music in 2025 does sound like a band caught in an out-of-control spiral, it is a shockingly solid—dare I say impressive?—account of a band in utter free fall that (mostly) manages to stick the landing.

Neither lyrically profound nor musically groundbreaking, “Electricity” is a track I can’t help but love despite its simplicity. It’s a bona fide Anderson/Codling/Oakes classic that makes a solid case for having three songwriters in Suede. Its relentless drive and pulsing electronic squelches genuinely raised my hopes for what Head Music might sound like when I first heard “Electricity” as an advance single. Like “Trash” on Coming Up, “Electricity” serves as a tone setter for the album that follows, but any momentum gathered sputters and stalls on “Savoir Faire.” Anderson’s attempt to inject funk into Suede’s veins feels like a bad trip. The song’s lyrics are vapid and empty to the point that they diminish what could have been a groovy side-step. “Savoir Faire” (credited to Anderson alone) is quite frankly a clunker, and Head Music would be better off if it had been left off.

Three songs in, it’s pretty clear that Anderson’s lyrical well is running dry. As many have rightfully pointed out, “Can’t Get Enough” isn’t exactly inspired poetry. Still, it musically captures the Head Music spirit in a way that feels authentic, embodying a reckless, love-it-or-hate-it attitude that is one of the throughlines coursing through the album (an Anderson/Codling composition for those keeping track).

“Everything Will Flow” somewhat abruptly introduces Head Music’s other throughline, a more languid and fluid-sounding Suede that refines and recontextualizes elements of their musical past. An Anderson/Oakes composition, “Everything Will Flow” sounds like it could be from a wholly different album than the one the first three tracks were on. It’s far from my favourite Suede song, and not one I liked very much in 1999, but lately I’ve come to appreciate its elegance amid Head Music’s chaos. Similarly, “Down” was previously always a skip for me, but upon revisiting it now, it emerges as a highlight and standout. Anderson’s vocal performance is one of his best, set amid a boundary-pushing arrangement by Oakes that is unlike anything in the Suede canon up to that point. It’s raw, honest, and one of the most human moments on the record.

There is an alternate reality version of Head Music—with “Everything Will Flow” and “Down” as anchor tracks—that would have been a far more coherent and connected record, less overtly influenced by crack and heroin addiction. Whether this alternative is any good as a follow-up to Coming Up is debatable, but it’s one of those sliding doors moments where you can’t help but wonder what the consequences would have been for Suede if their instincts led them to take their electronic experimentation towards the more ambient and textured sounds on these two track instead of the abrasiveness on most of Head Music.

Either way, “She’s in Fashion” would (and should) have had a spot on the track list of whatever version they ended up releasing. Anderson and Codling’s summery pop standard remains a standout ear candy moment—a breezy and, yes, funky slice of joy that offsets the grit and grizzle surrounding it. “Asbestos” (Anderson/Codling again) also offers a welcome reprieve by way of its bluesy shuffle and horn embellishments. I don’t have strong feelings about the song, but I appreciate how Codling is introducing a different musical gear for Suede. While still not impressive on the lyrical front, “Asbestos” ends this solid four-song run on Head Music before the title track (penned by Anderson) takes a left turn and doubles back to the dirty synths and sinewy sequences it first started with.

“Head Music” is musically stronger than “Savoir Faire,” but the embarrassingly cringeworthy chorus (“Give me head / give me head / give me head music instead”) makes it the album’s second swing-and-a-big-miss moment. Codling’s “Elephant Man” is a T. Rex-inspired stomp that adds texture, dynamics, and swagger to the album’s latter half. It was considered as a possible single, but its brawn is better utilized as a gritty album cut.

While I don’t think it gets recognized as canonical Suede, “Hi-Fi” is, quite frankly, the linchpin holding any semblance of a theme or style together on Head Music. It’s the best Anderson solo composition on the album, and one of its boldest and best-executed stylistic leaps. Anderson’s second-last solo composition on the album, “Indian Strings,” is often cited as another creative milestone, but I have never found it to be anything special.

“He’s Gone,” on the other hand, is damn near perfect. Codling’s music is a haunting and nuanced setting for Anderson’s voice, which sounds confident and in the moment in its performance. Swinging back towards the sounds they were cultivating on “Everything Will Flow” and “Down,” it would have been the perfect note to end Head Music on instead of the utterly unnecessary “Crack in the Union Jack” (by far the worst Anderson solo composition on the album).

Revisiting Head Music has been unexpectedly cathartic. What once felt like a chaotic, alienating listen resonates with a strange kind of clarity. Maybe it’s because I can finally separate the music from the moment. Maybe it’s because I now understand that the chaos was the point. Suede was falling apart (for a moment), and so was I (temporarily). We both made it through. In a funny way, Head Music doesn’t just feel like an album I initially dismissed when it first came out; I now think of it as a time capsule of survival, of trying to find beauty in the breakdown. It’s not Suede’s best record, but it might be their most human—flawed, vulnerable, and still standing.

Head Music is a fascinating study in creative overreach and internal disarray. It captures Suede at a crossroads, as they attempt to reconcile their glam rock legacy with the electronic zeitgeist of the late 1990s. Yet even in its messiness, it remains a compelling artifact that I can’t help but think hints at a more coherent alternate version, one where “He’s Gone” closes the album with grace, “Down” and “Everything Will Flow” form the emotional core, and ambient textures replace abrasive indulgences. That version is a thing of speculative fiction at this point, easily assembled through personalized DSP playlists, sure, but will always be lacking some sense of authenticity. Head Music, for all its flaws and idiosyncrasies, still manages to stand on its own shaky legs. Perhaps that’s what makes it the most Suede album of all: beautiful, broken, and still worth listening to.

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Released in 1997, Sci-Fi Lullabies is far more than a collection of B-sides. Suede’s B-sides are not just fillers. They are fully realized songs that often rivalled or even surpassed their A-side counterparts. These tracks gave the band space to experiment with mood, narrative, and sound, revealing an alternate side of their artistry that didn’t always fit on their albums but was no less essential to their identity.

In much the same way as the Smiths, renowned for elevating the B-side to an art form, Suede has always approached B-sides with the same seriousness as singles and album tracks. In a full-circle moment, Morrissey became an early champion of Suede, covering “My Insatiable One,” a B-side from their debut single, “The Drowners.” That endorsement was more than just flattery; it was a signal that Suede’s commitment to quality across all their releases had been noticed by one of their most significant influences.

For many fans like me, Sci-Fi Lullabies is an essential part of the Suede discography, and I can still recall the exact moment I learned about its existence. One Saturday in late 1997, I was home in Waterloo, Ontario, flipping through a recently purchased UK music magazine when I came across a full-page advertisement for the album. Until that moment, I had no idea Suede were releasing a compilation of B-sides. This was all before the Internet and social media, so it wasn’t unusual for me to learn about a new release by seeing an ad or reading about it in an imported magazine that was already weeks old. I immediately started calling around to the local record stores, hoping someone had it in stock. No luck. So I made a decision. I got in my car and drove to the HMV at 333 Yonge Street in Toronto. It was an hour-and-a-half trip each way, and I went with a single purpose: to buy the double CD. I'm not even sure if I called ahead to check if they had it in stock, but it was there when I arrived. After spending less than 10 minutes in the store, I turned around and drove straight home, listening to Sci-Fi Lullabies on my Discman, which was connected to my car stereo using a cassette adapter. That's how we did it in 1997.

While many bands treat B-sides as throwaways, Suede used them as a space to experiment, to explore new textures, and to craft some of their most emotionally resonant work. Out of the 27 songs on Sci-Fi Lullabies (which takes its title from a lyric in “Introducing the Band” from Dog Man Star), the ten tracks I’ve chosen here are among my favourite moments in the Suede canon, often outshining the singles which they supported.

“My Insatiable One”

(1992, B-Side to “The Drowners” UK 12-inch and CD single)

“My Insatiable One” holds a special place in Suede lore—and in my heart. As lyrically provocative as the A-side, it’s a quintessential early Suede track. While “My Insatiable One” wouldn’t have worked as the A-side, it’s a perfect companion piece for “The Drowners,” romantic, slightly silly and seedy, yet utterly captivating. It is the first great Suede B-side (no shade to its sister B-side, “To The Birds,” which was billed as the single’s AA on the 7-inch version), a truth that only became more prominent the following year by its absence from the self-titled debut and the inclusion of sub-par filler like “Animal Lover.”

“The Big Time”

(1993, B-Side to “Animal Nitrate” UK 7-inch, 12-inch, CD and cassette single)

“The Big Time” is a smoky, sultry ballad soaked in a noirish atmosphere that’s both seductive and slightly menacing. The lyrics allude to the trappings of fame that were closing in on the band, just as expectations and hype were reaching a fever pitch. Brett Anderson tends to agree with fans that “The Big Time” was a big level up for Suede: “I was really excited by it,” he’s quoted in David Barnett’s Suede: Love and Poison: The Authorised Biography, adding, “Bands like us didn’t get brass players in, or if they did they were playing some corny riff. Bands in our category weren’t making music that sophisticated.”

“The Living Dead”

(1994, B-Side to “Stay Together” UK 7-inch, 12-inch, CD and cassette single)

Another fan favourite, “The Living Dead,” didn’t sit well with Bernard Butler, who felt Brett Anderson’s lyrics about junkies and heroin addiction soiled his beautiful finger-plucked acoustic ballad. And while Anderson has gone on record saying that the song’s inspiration is a romantic couple he knew at the time who were drug users, he says, “They were really fun people. The song’s very tragic but they weren’t tragic in that sense.” It’s this contrast between the sweet, lullaby-like melody and the bleak subject matter that creates this haunting beauty.

“My Dark Star”

(1994, B-Side to “Stay Together” UK 7-inch, 12-inch, CD and cassette single)

Also from the “Stay Together” single, “My Dark Star” is a moody, mid-tempo track that could have slotted neatly onto Dog Man Star. Its problematic lyrics may not have aged gracefully, but the song’s atmosphere and arrangement are undeniably amongst the band’s best. “My Dark Star” is the kind of B-side that deepens the Suede mythology, as it’s always felt shadowy, romantic, and just a little bit dangerous.

“Killing of a Flash Boy”

(1994, B-Side to “We Are the Pigs” UK 7-inch, 12-inch, CD and cassette single)

Released with “We Are the Pigs” as part of the ground-shaking change-up that signalled the forthcoming Dog Man Star album, “Killing of a Flash Boy” is all swagger and snarl. It’s not my absolute favourite, but it’s undeniably catchy and has a staying power that sneaks up on you. I love hearing Anderson bark “And that shitter with the pout won’t be putting it about no more,” with such venom that it’s impossible to ignore. It’s a punk-glam anthem that could have been a standout on a different version of Suede’s second record, one that retained the punk vibes of the debut.

“Modern Boys”

(1994, B-Side to “The Wild Ones” UK 12-inch, CD singles 1 and 2, and cassette single)

“Modern Boys” is one of the most melodic and accessible tracks in Suede’s catalogue, and the only song that flirts with Britpop, but never fully commits. Destined for B-side status given how out of sync it was with most of Dog Man Star, it retains that signature Suede strangeness; an effortless curio that could easily be a standalone track. It’s a knockout for me, and a song I’ve always felt should have had its moment in the spotlight.

“Together”

(1995, B-Side to “New Generation” UK 12-inch, CD single 1, and cassette single)

The “New Generation” single was significant for a couple of reasons; it would be the final Suede release to feature music by Bernard Butler and also the first to feature music by new member Richard Oakes, in the form of the brilliantly catchy “Together.” It’s a song I had almost forgotten until revisiting Sci-Fi Lullabies, and now I can’t stop playing it. The story goes that with a day off on tour in Hamburg, Germany, the band and crew decided to have a night out in the town’s red light district, but exiled Oakes to his hotel room and told him not to leave until he’d written a song. When the band returned, Oakes turned in his assignment, marking a transitional moment in the band’s evolution, as it bridged the glam-pop of Suede 1.0 with the spikiness that would mark Suede 2.0 with Coming Up.

“Europe Is Our Playground”

(1996, B-Side to “Trash” UK 7-inch, CD single 1, and cassette single)

As excited as I was about the renewed vigour and energy I felt upon first hearing “Trash” in 1996, it was “Europe Is Our Playground” that fascinated me most about the band Suede were becoming at the time. Its music, written by bassist Mat Osman, felt revelatory and paradigm-shifting. It was loungey, louche, and paired with Anderson’s road-weary lyrics, “Europe Is Our Playground” became a decadent delight. I am explicitly referring to the original version of the song from the “Trash” single, not the re-recording that mars Sci-Fi Lullabies with its sluggishness and lifeless lumbering. The fact that they went with the new version remains my biggest complaint about Sci-Fi Lullabies, to the point where I’ve created a custom playlist that inserts the original (there, fixed it).

“Every Monday Morning Comes”

(1996, B-Side to “Trash” UK CD single 1)

“Every Monday Morning Comes” feels like a spiritual cousin to “Saturday Night” lyrically. Though it may not have fit the narrative arc of Coming Up, in another timeline on a different album, it could have been a grand opening or closing track, or even a top 10 single. Wistful and reflective, with a melody that lingers long after it ends, “Every Monday Morning Comes” is another one of those lost gems that Sci-Fi Lullabies shines a spotlight on as it opens CD2 of the compilation.

“W.S.D.”

(1996, B-Side to “Saturday Night” UK CD single 1)

Short for 'We’re So Disco,' “W.S.D” is an anomaly in the Suede canon up to its first appearance on the final single from Coming Up, but its funky and murky hypnotic qualities hint at where the band would be heading on its next album (1999’s Head Music). An Anderson solo composition, “W.S’D.” features some of the best stream-of-consciousness lyrics he’s ever penned; classic Suede subject matter that blurs the boundaries of gender, sexuality, addiction, lust, and romance and crystallizes it all in a singular, stand-out one chorus hook: “Oh, is it true what they say about you? / Oh, is it true what they say about you two?”

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The parallels are striking—almost blatant. A singer and guitarist, the former serving as the lyricist and the latter as composer, create what appears to be a preternatural, symbiotic songwriting partnership. Their sound builds upon the musical pillars of their youth, an amalgam of indie rock, shimmery pop, and a dollop of punk’s DIY ethos. Lyrically, their songs skew more brooding than their contemporaries; a moody mix of winsome wit and carnal desire wrapped in narratives and examinations of modern working-class struggles, peppered with references to sex and pharmaceuticals. An early demo piques the curiosity of a successful indie label, which signs the band and releases its debut single. That song gets the attention of the weekly inkies, who recruit the band to join a tour of up-and-coming artists. Four years and two albums later, the songwriting partnership and band dissolves, going into hiatus for over a decade before re-emerging for a live appearance and the promise of new music.

There was a sense of déjà vu in 1996 when Scottish band Geneva signed to Suede’s label, Nude Records, and released their debut album, Further, a year later. The hype and discord around Geneva (who also stylized their name in all lowercase) had echoes of Suede’s ascendancy in the UK music press in 1992. At the tail-end of the 90s, with whatever Britpop was fading into the sunset and Suede in between album cycles, Geneva must have seemed like a gift sent from the music gods to fill a void for the music press that was entirely of their creation.

Parallels between established and emerging acts, however slight or significant, were routinely and blatantly amplified by the UK music press in the last quarter of the 20th century. As hype and novelty around one band waned and dissipated, the press scrambled to find their replacement in a battle of one-upmanship that feels like an Olympic event, coming around every four years or so. And, like the good little lemming I was, I often bought into these hype cycles (earworm) hook, (jangly guitar) line, and sinker in my restless pursuit of the next best band. Before Geneva, there was Strangelove. And before that, Longpigs. And Gene, and Echobelly, and Denim, and the Auteurs before that. Point made? In 1994, every music journalist (and more than a few music fans, myself included) was busy trying to suss out which up-and-coming band would claim Suede’s throne; no one had any idea it would be Suede themselves.

Though regularly hailed as their high-water mark now, Dog Man Star was still something of a question mark in 1994. After Bernard Butler’s departure, and with the responsibility of touring a new album that had their former guitarist’s fingerprints all over it, Suede had the unenviable task of recruiting a new member quickly and trying to get as much distance between their Butler era and whatever was to come next as soon as possible. Enter Richard Oakes, 17 years old, who essentially got the gig as Suede’s new guitarist by sending his application (a demo tape of his playing) to the band through the mail. Weeks before Dog Man Star’s release, Oakes was announced as the Butler’s replacement and debuted in the video for “We Are the Pigs” before heading out on a world tour for his first foray into public performance.

It’s wild just how bonkers Oakes’s story sounds now; how incredible it was that a band at the height of their fame and influence could lose such a key figure in their sound and style and then find a replacement of equal skill and finesse and immediately elevate him from anonymity to instant fame. For Suede circa 1994, it all tracked. Nothing about their story at that point had followed any traditional narrative arc, so why start now?

Anyone who heard Oakes play during the long and gruelling Dog Man Star tour can attest that he exceeded expectations. While not as dynamic a performer as Brett Anderson, he more than held his own as the singer’s musical foil on stage, and found his place amongst the fold of the four-piece. Live, Suede were every bit as exciting and electric as they had been with Butler. The next test would be the studio. Oakes’s first songwriting contributions were solid B-sides for “New Generation” (“Together” and “Bentswood Boys”), but could he handle the pressure of co-crafting the follow-up to Dog Man Star?

In the end, he didn’t have to do it alone. One fortuitous day, while in the studio working on what would become Suede’s third album, Coming Up, drummer Simon Gilbert’s cousin, Neil Codling, dropped by to pick up a suit he was borrowing from Gilbert (so the story goes). Codling hung out for a bit, sat behind a keyboard and started jamming with the band. After chastizing Gilbert for not mentioning (and in his defence, not knowing) that his cousin was a polymath musician who could play multiple instruments, Codling was offered a permanent position in Suede, playing keyboards, rhythm guitar, and providing backing vocals and songwriting contributions on Coming Up.

If Dog Man Star was a pendulum swinging away from the stompy, bratty glam rock of Suede’s self-titled debut, Coming Up was an equally abrupt face on its predecessor’s dark, dystopian proggy epicness. With the music press’s attention focused on Oasis, Blur, and Pulp, Suede were just about relegated to the has-been bins in the wake of Britpop frenzy. The prospect of a Butler–less third Suede album being as well-received as its predecessors was low, as no one seemed interested in hearing Dog Man Star 2.0, least of all Brett Anderson.

“Dog Man Star was such an extreme album,” Anderson recounted to Suede biographer David Barnett for his 2003 book Love and Poison, “that the last thing we wanted to do was do something even more in that direction.” With the new line-up feeling essentially like a new band, Coming Up became a palate-cleansing record, streamlined and slimmed down to more straight-ahead three-minute pop songs that didn’t reject and disown Suede’s aesthetic as much as reinvent and reinterpret it. They still couldn’t get away from the Bowie comparisons (as the review in the Daily Telegraph likened the album to Suede’s Ziggy Stardust), but Coming Up still managed to connect with their core fans who recognized themselves in the damaged, glamorous protagonists of its ten songs, while expanding their appeal to those who would have found Dog Man Star too dire a prospect to dive into.

Any question about songwriting lightning hitting twice was laid to rest immediately with Coming Up’s first single and opening track, “Trash.” Like “We Are the Pigs,” ”Trash” is a first-person-plural rallying call, positioning Suede and their fans as members of a gang, “the lovers on the streets” and “the litter on the breeze.” Posing as disposable pop, “Trash” is anything but throw-away. In typical Suede fashion, “Trash” works on multiple levels: it is both a defiant V-sign to detractors who had written them off as deitriutus discarded to the sidelines in the battle of Britpop and a call-to-arms for anyone who doesn’t identify with Oasis’s laddism, Blur’s cockney caricatures, or Pulp’s plastic pop kitchen sink dramas. “Trash” is gritty, dirty, yet still glamorous and dangerous, a celebratory anthem for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider.

More importantly, “Trash” signalled how strong Oakes and Anderson’s songwriting partnership was. It’s one of many examples of Oakes’s innate songwriting sensibility, matching Anderson’s lyrical style note for note. “Filmstar” feels just as divinely ordained as “Trash.” A more muscular take on the stompy glam attitude of “The Drowners,” “Filmstar” puts the rhythm section of drummer Gilbert and bassist Mat Osman front and center, breathing life into what is essentially a pretty basic pop song. “Lazy” (the fourth single off the record) doesn’t get nearly enough credit for continuing Coming Up’s “all-killer-no-filler” opening sequencing; I love it for its simplicity and style, and it’s essential scene setting for the rest of the album’s narrative arc.

“Lazy” is one of those songs whose tempo is always much faster in my memory than on record. It still feels sluggish when I first put it on, but it always ends up perfectly paced as it dissolves into “By the Sea,” one of my all-time favourite Suede songs. Both “Lazy” and “By the Sea” were Anderson compositions that predate Dog Man Star, which he held off using, telling Barnett, “I just wanted to save them because I thought they were too good” to be used as b-sides. The former luxuriates in the druggy hedonistic lifestyle Anderson was living in London; the latter is a fairytale about two lovers escaping the pressures of expectation and articfice in favour of a simpler life. “By the Sea” is a beautiful ballad that showcases each band member’s work evenly. It grounds Coming Up early on, its “touch grass” moment before diving back into the drunken, drug-induced joie de vivre for another round.

The second high of the night is never as good as the first, though. “She” is a decent song and “Beautiful Ones” (the album’s second single) ranks among the band’s very best, but there is a feeling of diminishing returns as Coming Up comes to its midpoint. Don’t get me wrong: any lesser band would have killed their granny to come up with “She,” but it’s too similar to “Filmstar” (the album’s fifth single) to stand out amongst the album’s tracklist. “Beautiful Ones” is the prefect choice to kick off Side B, much in the same “this is our gang” revelry of “Trash,” but “Starcrazy” (the album’s first Anderson/Codling composition) and “Picnic By the Motorway” don’t feel as canonically significant as many of the album’s other tracks. They’re not without merit, but on a 10-song album that spurred five hit singles, they inevitably take a backseat to Coming Up’s finer moments.

Which brings us to the album’s penultimate song, my favourite, “The Chemistry Between Us.” Barnett calls the Anderson/Codling composition “the album’s epic centrepiece.” I wholeheartedly concur. At over seven minutes, “The Chemistry Between Us” is a multi-layered mini-suite featuring some of Anderson’s best lyrical wordplay. “That song is about the emptiness of it all,” Anderson told the Telegraph in 1996. “It’s like one day you wake up in this haze, lying next to some person you don’t even recognize, in some altered state, not being able to remember the past year, and you think ‘what’s going on?’” “The Chemistry Between Us” is the ultimate come-down song, a hard look at oneself in the cold light of morning that mirrors the band’s history up to that point. Fame, like the euphoria from an E, is fleeting, and while it feels great in the moment, at some point, the high will wear off, and you’ll find yourself right back where you started. And so the cycle begins again—another night out, another hit of whatever mind-altering substance is on hand, another morning after. “I’ve taken drugs in the past,” Anderson said to the Telegraph, “but anyone who thinks that by dropping a tab of acid they are going to write ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ has got another thing coming.”

It may not be “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but “The Chemistry Between Us” is the perfect step down for Coming Up, languid and romantic in only the way Suede can make a song about emptiness sound. Its string-laden extended outro suggests “The Chemistry Between Us” would be the perfect close to an almost flawless album, but Suede still has one more ace to play. Most bands don’t usually anchor their albums with a single, but Suede have never played by anyone else’s rules. Anderson describes closing track “Saturday Night” (the third single, if your’re keeping score) as “a celebration of the simple pleasures of life” inspired by “wonderful, alcoholic winter London evenings that [he] had spent with [then paramour Sam Cunnigham] nursing pints in pubs and staning in foyers of cinemas.” Unlike previous album-closing ballads “Still Life” and “The Next Life,” “Saturday Night” feels like an intentional bookend to Coming Up, like a final stop on a metro line map that started with “Trash” 43 minutes earlier.

On the surface, the odds were clearly stacked against Suede in 1994. Between falling out of favour with the press and the musical flavours of the moment, a new line-up yet to be tested in the recording studio, and a high degree of scrutiny, the conditions suggested that Coming Up could very well fall flat. And yet, those same odds offered Suede an unheard-of second opportunity to make a first impression. It’s extremely rare for a band to get a chance at making a second debut, and Suede made the most of that with Coming Up.

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After Suede, Bernard Butler racked up a number of high profile production credits and contributions for other artists on their projects, but what follows below are the highlights of his own musical output, starting with his first post-Suede music as part of McAlmont & Butler, through to his latest solo album, Good Grief, released in 2024.

“Yes” by McAlmont and Butler (1995)

“Yes” is what happens when two artists, both recently and acrimoniously departed from their former bands, come together to give the proverbial V-sign to detractors and dismissers. After leaving Suede, Bernard Butler bumped into David McAlmont, who had just left his former band, Thieves, right before they released their debut album. Seeing an opportunity for both of them, Butler shared the basis for what would eventually become “Yes” with McAlmont and suggested they work together. Using wall-of-sound production and styled after the classic pop of the 60s, “Yes” is undeniably “one of the most utterly wonderful records” either artist has ever been associated with. The McAlmont and Butler partnership dissolved due to creative tensions and personality clashes by the time they released the 1995 album The Sound of… McAlmont and Butler. They reunited in 2002 for one more album, aptly titled Bring It Back, and “Speed,” a single from a scrapped third album, in 2006. (Very little McAlmont & Butler is available on the DSPs, which makes me very thankful I sprung for an import copy of The Sound of… a number years back.)

More by McAlmont & Butler

“You Do” (1995)

“Falling” (2002)

“Bring It Back” (2002)

“Speed” (2006)

“A Change of Heart” by Bernard Butler (1998)

His guitar chops and songwriting acumen were never questioned, but everyone wondered in 1998 whether Bernard Butler could sing. Not very well, apparently, but he got there by the time his debut solo album, People Move On, was ready for public consumption. “A Change of Heart,” the album’s third and final single, has long been my favourite Butler solo track. Musically, it is very much a Butler tune, sweeping and majestic without feeling overblown, but his vocal performance and style bring it a humanity and humility that ground “A Change of Heart.” A second solo album, Friends and Lovers, followed quickly in 1999, and then a quarter-century gap before releasing his third, Good Grief, in 2024.

More by Bernard Butler

“Stay” (1998)

“People Move On” (1998)

“Friends and Lovers” (1999)

“I’d Do It Again If I Could” (1999)

“Camber Sands” (2024)

“Deep Emotions” (2024)

“Pretty D” (2024)

“Refugees” by The Tears (2005)

I will spend more time with Here Comes the Tears in a future intermission post, but no recap of Butler’s post-Suede work would be complete without mentioning his (so far) one-off album project with Brett Anderson following Suede’s hiatus in 2003. Though the Tears’ songs lack the bite and swagger of “Animal Nitrate” and “The Drowners,” Butler and Anderson fall into familiar roles like hand in glove, complementing each other on the single, “Refugees.”

More by The Tears

“Lovers” (2005)

“Thinking About a Friend” by Trans (2014)

I admittedly knew very little about Trans when I started compiling this list and listening to their two EPs, but thanks to a couple of key pieces from The Quietus and The Guardian, it’s all starting to make sense. In essence, Trans is an improvised band featuring Butler and Jackie McKeown of the bands 1990s and the Yummy Furs. The two guitarists play through different channels (Glasgowian McKeown on the left, Londoner Butler on the right), backed by a rhythm section playing in a separate room. Trans’s direct-to-tape style differs from Butler’s other collaborations, but if you’re into noodly krautrock with a dash of feel-good party tunes with one-line repeating lyrics, you’ll probably dig their 2013 debut EP, Red. Its more succinct cousin, 2014’s Green, features “Thinking About a Friend,” which features more fleshed-out lyrics.

More by Trans

“Jubilee” (2013)

“Dancing Shoes” (2013)

“The Eagle & the Dove” by Jessie Buckley and Bernard Butler (2022)

Oddly, given that it is a Mercury Prize shortlisted album, I had no idea Butler and actress Jessie Buckley collaborated on the folk-inflected For All Our Days That Tear the Heart in 2022. Garnering high praise from the press and the aforementioned nod from the Mercury Prize jury, For All Our Days That Tear the Heart has some delicate and mesmerizing moments, most notably the single “The Eagle & the Dove.”

More by Jessie Buckley and Bernard Butler

“For All Our Days That Tear the Heart” (2022)

“Footnotes On the Map” (2022)

“The 90s” by Butler, Blake and Grant (2025)

Butler, Blake & Grant is a supergroup (sort of), seeing Butler, Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake, and James Grant of the Scottish band Love and Money playing together on each other’s songs. There’s a lightness to their self-titled collection of tunes that comes from the casualness of the project, to the point where the differences melt away, the only distinguishing indicator being which of the trio is taking on lead vocals

More by Butler, Blake and Grant

“The Old Mortality” (2025)

“There’s Always Something You Can Change” (2025)

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Some thirty years after its release, the gall of Dog Man Star impresses me most. Yes, yes, the music is spectacular—leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessor and a high watermark they have yet to eclipse. Yet, when you place Suede’s sophomore album in both the context of 1994’s musical landscape and the severing alliances within the band, Dog Man Star casts a long and legendary shadow that is hard to shake.

Before going any further starting, I heartily accept that anything I write about this period for Suede will feel woefully inadequate compared to Matthew Lindsay’s thoroughly engaging 2014 essay on the silver anniversary of Dog Man Star for The Quietus. For my part, I’m focusing in on two critical contexts for understanding why Dog Man Star is such a singular album: the internal state of affairs between the members of Suede at the time of recording it and the external state of the music scene in Britain at the time, widely—and pejoratively—referred to as Britpop.

7 March 1994: the UK is still in winter’s grip, cloudy, cold, and covered in drizzle, when Blur drops what will become the song of the spring, summer, and fall. “Girls & Boys” is the first single from their forthcoming third album, Parklife. For some, it perfectly articulates the patriotic attitude Select magazine reported on a year earlier when they pasted Suede’s Brett Anderson in front of the Union Jack on their April 1993 cover under the headline “Yanks go home! Suede, St. Etienne, Denim, Pulp, the Auteurs, and the Battle for Britain.” That issue of Select is widely credited with giving birth to Britpop, following a gestation period that arguably began with Suede's debut, “The Drowners.”

Anyone who read my earlier post about my voracious appetite for new music and my need to be ahead of the cultural curve will not be surprised that the April 1993 Select was a formative text in my musical taste development and a shopping list. That issue is why I went out and bought import copies of Denim’s Back in Denim, the Auteurs’ New Wave, and Pulp’s His N Hers (it would take a year and Tiger Bay before I got into St. Etienne, and, though Select did not include Blur in their article, another key album from 1993 for me was Modern Life is Rubbish). If Select wrote anything remotely positive about a band or album, you could bet I’d do whatever it took to hear it and own it. I will spare you a “Was Britpop a real thing?” debate; like most musical movements, it wasn’t a thing until someone started calling it a thing, and then it became something other than an actual movement. As the UK music press latched onto the idea of Britpop and began articulating what it meant in print, most musicians associated with it rejected the label, none more vociferously and adamantly than Suede.

Before Blur and Oasis (who debuted with “Supersonic” a month after “Girls & Boys”) would dominate the spring and summer of 1994, Suede released the non-album single “Stay Together” in February. It would be their last release while guitarist and songwriter Bernard Butler was officially a band member. While Brett Anderson dismisses “Stay Together” as “very much below par for [Suede] and lyrically … anodyne to the point of meaninglessness,” it is far from a stop-gap single. “Stay Together” sits squarely in the centre section of the Venn diagram where Suede’s internal dynamics overlap with the external musical ethos they were pushing against.

“Stay Together” is an eight-and-a-half-minute tug-of-war between Suede’s chief songwriters. It begins as a pop song that evolves into a complex, extended psych-rock jam. It was Butler’s most ambitious and dynamic composition and, self-admittedly, one of Anderson’s least inspired songs lyrically (“A collection of tired Suede-by-numbers urban landscape clichés and second-hand emotional posturing,” as he described it in his 2019 autobiography, Afternoons With the Binds Drawn). “Stay Together” essentially finds all of Suede with one foot in their former life as the do-no-wrong, next-biggest-band-in-Britain and the other planted in the murky abyss created by the expectations and pressures of following up the success of their debut.

As with most battles of wills, there is no winner. “Stay Together” gave Suede their highest placement in the singles charts up to that point, but even with a radio-edit version, its ambitious reach never caught the same euphoric highs of their early singles. It would eventually be overshadowed by its B-sides “The Living Dead” and “My Dark Star,” widely considered by fans as two of the best songs in the band’s canon. Still, its chart success gave Suede the go-ahead for what both Butler and Anderson had in mind for Suede’s next album. With “Stay Together” as a blueprint, Dog Man Star became a monolithic manifesto, a brilliantly sore thumb sticking up amid Britpop’s increasingly cartoon-like schtick that would forever be remembered for the end of Anderson and Butler’s songwriting collaboration as members of Suede.

The tell-tale signs of an imminent demise were evident well before the band stepped into the studio to record Dog Man Star. While chasing the dragon of American success on their 1993 North American tour, Butler felt at odds with his bandmates’ indulgent and decadent behaviours. He reportedly spent his off-stage time alone or with the crew and opening act, the Cranberries, rather than with Anderson, drummer Simon Gilbert, and bassist Mat Osman. When his father died that fall, Butler found himself in an emotional tailspin that pitted his band and family responsibilities against one another. As Anderson, Gilbert, and Osman admit in the 2018 documentary Suede: The Insatiable Ones, it was a mistake to forge ahead with tour plans and not allow Butler the time and space to grieve. Instead, he channelled his sorrow and loss into “Stay Together” and the demos and sketches destined for Dog Man Star.

The chasm opening between Butler and his bandmates was emotional, philosophical, and physical. Dog Man Star was primarily composed by mail; Butler would send cassettes of instrumental demos to Anderson, who in turn would work up lyrics and send the tape back via return post. An interview Butler gave to Vox magazine, in which he appeared to criticize Anderson openly, exacerbated the acrimony and growing fissure between the two collaborators. Not surprisingly, studio sessions usually had the two on separate schedules, with Butler working alongside—and by many accounts, over the top of—producer Ed Buller, and driving further wedges between himself and Gilbert and Osman with his hyper-focused, dictatorial attention to their playing. It’s clear with hindsight that Butler’s frustrations with Buller’s production and his exerting control over the musical direction and production style of the record were a means of satisfying a need for stability and control in his personal and professional life. Yet, by summer’s end, with the bulk of production work done, Butler and Suede officially parted ways. Buller and the rest of the band completed the final touches on Dog Man Star without him.

You would think that a record created under such circumstances, where the principal songwriters need stamps to communicate with one another and cannot see eye to eye on what the producer is doing, would be an unmitigated mess, a disjointed disaster, and a critical failure. It’s what the press was smelling when they first caught wind of the split: a spectacular fall from the impossibly high pillar they put Suede upon some twenty-four months prior. And though it had its detractors (Butler chief among them), Dog Man Star achieved what many believed impossible at this point in Suede’s story: a sophomore album of cinematic scope and breadth that eclipses its predecessor.

Dog Man Star amplified every extravagant dystopian idea Anderson had in reaction to Britpop while showcasing Butler’s expansive experiments in atmosphere and textures. As acrimonious as it was, Butler and Anderson’s frayed relationship pushed them higher and further with each song. They may have been at odds personally, but artistically, they were two hearts under nuclear skies reaching for a transcendent state of artistic achievement that few of their contemporaries dared to consider. More Joy Division, less Smiths. Less Gary Glitter, more Scott Walker. Infatuated with old Hollywood chic, contemptuous of cool Britannia. Dog Man Star put everything on the line with audacious confidence and bold, brash imagery and style. Where Suede felt more like a collection of songs, Dog Man Star was a complete package.

Their musical evolution is evident from the outset, as witnessed in the opening track, “Introducing the Band.” Butler’s dirge-like, repetitive droning music sounds nothing like the chiming guitar riffs of the debut album, and Anderson meets the moment with a Buddhist-chant-inspired mantra culled from dystopian fiction and rooted in self-mythologizing bravado. Dog Man Star gets its name from the opening line of “Introducing the Band:” “Dog Man Star took a suck on a pill / And stabbed a cerebellum with a curious quill.” The title is the first of the album’s cinema references, cribbed from Dog Star Man, a series of short experimental films directed by Stan Brakhage, that presented in its entirety, is a single work in four acts and a prelude. Intentionally or not, there is a similar structure to the sequence of Dog Man Star, with its first two songs in the role of prelude. Whether you hear it as a warning or a war cry, “Introducing the Band”’s implicit tone sets the stage for the world burning that’s to come.

Suede wastes no time in setting the fire with Dog Man Star’s first single and second track, “We Are the Pigs.” A riotous call to arms, “We Are the Pigs” positions Suede as the anti-establishment, working-class saviours come to rescue us all from the middle-class posers. Released as a single in September 1994, “We Are the Pigs” could not be any more opposed to what was happening in the UK music scene at the time. While Oasis were feeling supersonic and flush with the first washes of fame and Blur were following the herd on holiday in Greece, Suede were setting police cars on fire, waking up with guns in their mouths and declaring themselves swine and “stars of the firing line.”

As Dog Man Star moves from its Orwellian prelude to its film-themed first act, its music and subject matter (at least superficially) become more cinematic. The action moves from riots on the streets to tumbles in the sheets, so to speak, where “Heroine” finds Anderson’s Byron-quoting narrator in the throes of “pornographic and tragic” obsessions. The lyrical layers and competing subtexts in “Heroine” come fast and furiously and can leave you as mentally spent as its rub-and-tugging teenage protagonist. Aside from the ambiguity and interchangibility of ‘heroine’ and ‘herion,’ Anderson is purposefully opaque as to exactly which Marilyn (Monroe or porn actress Marilyn Chambers?) he’s referring to in the lyrics. What is clear is that “Heroine” signals a level-up in Anderson’s songwriting away from the simpler verses and catchy hooks of the debut album and into more developed character studies and innuendo.

“Daddy’s Speeding” is more straightforward lyrically, training its spotlight on actor James Dean, the patron saint of dissaffected and alienated youth the world over. It stands out as one of Butler’s most unexpected compositional turns, straying away from Suede’s guitar-driven pop formula, employing texture, ambience, and production overlays to deliver a careening and explosive interpretation of the car crash that claimed Dean’s life.

If the unconventional composition of “Daddy’s Speeding” was Butler taunting Anderson to come up with suitable lyrics, then “The Wild Ones” (borrowing its name from the 1953 Marlon Brando film) is the synergistic apex of the duo’s songwriting collaboration, and, as writer Miranda Sawyer suggests in her book Uncommon People: Britpop and Beyond in 20 Songs, Suede’s best single ever. A gorgeous ballad of timeless beauty that portends the end of Butler’s stint in the band (“And there's a lifeline slipping as the record plays / As I open the blinds in my mind, I'm believing that you could stay”), “The Wild Ones” serves double duty as Dog Man Star’s second single and spiritual heart. Amidst all the dystopian chaos and careening car crashes surrounding it, “The Wild Ones” is an affecting and deeply moving portrait of the tug-of-war between human relationships.

Like a muddy puddle that’s best stepped over than into, Dog Man Star’s next act is its most skippable. “The Power” is a cookie-cutter piano-led self-congratulatory slap on the back, celebrating Anderson’s successful climb out of his working-class heritage, finished in the studio after Butler left. “New Generation” is equally anodyne and disposable (and oddly, the album’s third and final single). In Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn, Anderson suggests it is about his former romantic partner and ex-Suede member Justine Frischmann’s success with Elastica: “It was meant as a song of love and encouragement for her, the bitterness forgotten, the scar tissue healed.” Passable as pop songs as they are, in the overall context of Dog Man Star, “The Power” and “New Generation” leave a mark on the album that dulls its shine.

It’s not until Dog Man Star’s second, most thrilling and challenging half that the stark contrast between where Suede was in 1993 and the prevailing musical climate around them is thrown into bold and beautiful relief. For anyone listening to Dog Man Star on cassette or vinyl in 1993, flipping it from Side A to B was like entering the Upside Down on Stranger Things: oddly familiar and frighteningly foreign. The distorted horn blast at the top of “This Hollywood Life” serves as a warning that what’s coming is darker, seedier, and seductively more alluring than hip-swaying, hand-clapping fans of “Metal Mickey” might be bargaining for. Built upon a solid blues rock riff and featuring one of Osman and Gilbert’s best turns as a rhythm section, “This Hollywood Life” kicks off the album’s third “careful what you wish for” act with a rags-to-riches-to-fall-from-grace story of a “she-rocker” riding the wave of fame, a parable of the band’s trajectory. Somehow, the band made it sound raunchier and snottier when I saw them play it live as the opener at Toronto’s Warehouse on February 17, 1995, Anderson wielding his walking cane (due to a fall earlier in the year) like a carnival barker enticing his prey into his big top of terrors and delights.

“The 2 of Us” turns down the volume and energy but never lets up on the emotional throttle. For many, “The 2 of Us” has become a poignant allegory to Anderson and Butler's story, centred around a pair of high-rolling financiers who find themselves flush with cash and devoid of fulfillment. In Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn, Anderson recalls watching the song come together in the studio and being in awe of Butler’s gifts and grasping the alchemy the two had as songriters: “The parallel with my and Bernard’s position, even though not at the time consciously intended, has over the years revealed itself to me as possibly its true meaning, but like I have said before, songs will often slowly and mysteriously uncover themselves, even sometimes to the writers.” In an unexpected and odd bit of sequencing, the subpar and somewhat disposable ballad “Black or Blue” follows “The 2 of Us” to its detriment. Where “The 2 of Us” is Anderson and Butler’s collaboration in full bloom, “Black or Blue” withers as they turned their backs on one another, with Butler’s contributions recorded after his official split as a final contractual obligation.

Where Dog Man Star’s final act starts is immaterial; whether it’s before, after, or mid-way through the penultimate track, “The Asphalt World,” the album’s two-song coda is the crowning glory on both Dog Man Star and Butler’s time as a member of Suede. In 2013, Stereogum omitted “The Asphalt World” from its list of the 10 best Suede songs, a correction the Guardian fixed in 2014. Both omission and inclusion are likely due to the same reason: the song’s un-Suede-like nature. Butler envisioned an epic and audacious 20-minute guitar-driven elegy that would fill an entire album side; producer Buller and the other members pushed for the nine-minute version that made the album. According to many accounts, the track became the catalyst for Butler’s departure. In later years, Anderson would reveal that he recorded the song’s sordid lyrics about a lover’s flagrant betrayal on the same day he read the aforementioned interview Butler gave Vox, pouring his emotions into his best performance on the album. It took time (20 years, almost) and perspective for me to fall in love with “The Asphalt World,” a song that is now such an essential part of Dog Man Star for me that I need to stop what I’m doing whenever it comes on and fully give myself over to it.

Neither Stereogum nor the Guardian include “Still Life” on their list of best Suede songs, which doesn’t surprise me, given the closing track’s affected and over-the-top orchestration. Over the years, I have vacillated between feeling like “Still Life” is “too much” and “not enough.” Currently, I’m of the mind that it could have benefited from some editing in the song’s final moments, but it is still exquisite even in its imperfection. Anderson revisits the maudlin lives of unfulfilled housewives he first introduced listeners to on the debut album’s “Sleeping Pills,” and enfuses their kitchen-sink drama about looking outward at a what-could-have-been existence with vocal acrobatics heretofore untested on record. The orchestra swells as he pushes the limits of his range, and so too does the song and the album’s emotional rush. Where “Introducing the Band” kicks off Dog Man Star with a foreboding and menacing attack, “Still Life” floods the senses with serotonin that never ceases to bring tears to my eyes. It’s ridiculous to think that what’s essentially a pop song like this can choke me up every time I hear it, which is a testament to Butler’s musical acumen; he doesn’t get nearly enough credit for how attuned he was to music’s power to move the listener’s emotions, which is essentially the secret sauce that makes his work with Suede so special.

Some albums end with a suggestion of where the artists are heading next, while others put a bow on a chapter and leave a clean slate moving forward. Even if Butler had somehow managed to remain in Suede and the band members repaired their relationship enough to move forward, Dog Man Star would be one of those latter albums. In a musical landscape where their contemporaries were more focused on competing in the singles charts, Suede set about creating a proper record —a fully realized concept album that went so far against the prevailing trends that it remains timeless and peerless.

Dog Man Star is the ideal denouement to the Bernard Butler chapter of Suede, and a thoroughly satisfying conclusion to the musical partnership that set their trajectory in motion. It put everything on the table, and though it left the relationships between Suede fractured, there is no unfinished business left to explore; it is imperfect, but it is enough.

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The parallels are striking—almost blatant. A singer and guitarist, the former serving as the lyricist and the latter as composer, create what appears to be a preternatural, symbiotic songwriting partnership. Their sound builds upon the musical pillars of their youth, an amalgam of glammy rock, shimmery pop, and a dollop of punk’s DIY ethos. Lyrically, their songs skew more brooding than their contemporaries; a moody mix of winsome wit and carnal desire wrapped in narratives and examinations of modern working-class struggles, peppered with references to sex and pharmaceuticals. Their workhorse dedication to songwriting fuels the growing buzz around the band, and when the press takes a shine to them, the fanaticism builds quickly. A deal gets inked, and the accolades pour in with each successive single. The music papers declare them saviours from the schlock and pap of the pop charts, harbringers of a new aesthetic.

There was a sense of deja vu in 1992 when Suede emerged as “the best new band in Britain,” the press anointing them the second coming of the Smiths despite not having released any music at that point. By the start of the 90s, the first wave of shoegaze had already come and gone, the Stone Roses were still MIA, and Nirvana and their ilk had (momentarily) overtaken the broader musical discourse. The UK music press was ripe for a new homegrown obsession, and Suede perfectly filled that void, dressed for success in too-tight crimpolene blouses and worn Wallabees right out of the high street charity shops.

Suede’s early singles set a high bar for their debut self-titled album, one that most fans and critics felt they surpassed or met at the time, especially as it earned them the coveted Mercury Music Prize in 1993 (beating out PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, New Order’s Republic, and, er, Sting’s Ten Summoner's Tales). Whether intentionally or not, Suede’s early singles and the feverish anticipation for the debut album mirrored the early rise of the Smiths, making it hard for the press (and fans alike) to ignore the similarities. In his memoir, Coal Black Mornings, Brett Anderson is open about his love and admiration for the Smiths and their influence on Suede’s sound, style, and visual presentation. Both Anderson and Morrissey understood the power and allure of album art. Morrissey cheekily employed a backside photo of model George O'Mara to underscore homoerotic themes on the sleeve for “Hand in Glove.” Anderson used the image of a naked woman covered in body paint to resemble a man’s suit, her face dabbled with faux stubble and holding a cigar in one hand and a gun in another, nods to the ambiguous sex and violence suggested in the lyrics to “The Drowners.” Both classic sleeve designs defined the aesthetic styles forever linked to their bands, epitomized by each eponymous debut's cover art: a still from Andy Warhol's 1968 film Flesh, featuring actor Joe D'Allesandro, for The Smiths; a photo from 1991’s Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs taken by Tee Corinne of an androgynous couple kissing on the cover of Suede.

In many respects, Suede and The Smiths feel like bookends of a story I entered mid-way through. The Smiths were my gateway to a musical world beyond the American Top 40. Having discovered them circa The Queen Is Dead, I simultaneously made my way backwards and forwards through their catalogue, exploring the myriad other bands collectively filed under “alternative.” While there are many artists I found and fell in love with during this period, something fundamentally changed with Suede. They flipped a switch. Suddenly, it felt like Suede turned on the lights in the dark room I had been living in, and I was seeing a side of myself that I had been trying to avoid. I could no longer deny my sexual confusion or avoid the struggle between who I felt I was inside and the person I was presenting to the world. Suede understood what it felt like to be hiding in plain sight, how the fear of violence, rejection, and disdain can lead someone to suppress their desires and true nature simultaneously as they search dark alleys and back pages of newspapers for both physical and emotional connections. Illicit, implied, and immeasurably thrilling, “The Drowners,” “Metal Mickey,” and “Animal Nitrate” spoke of a world in which I was yearning to be the main character but was far too skittish and ashamed to ever explore. Those singles soundtracked my first year of university, almost exclusively through headphones, as I worried that playing them out loud in my dorm room would draw unwanted attention and disdain from my overly macho and masculine dormmates.

Suede came out on March 29, 1993, just as the winter semester ended and I headed home for the summer. I listened to it incessantly, mainly in the solitude of my car, dubbed onto a cassette with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars on the flip side. A few months later, on June 5, I got within touching distance when Suede made their Canadian debut at Toronto’s Palladium. I still have a sense of the electricity in the air that night, of a palpable feeling that some kind of chemical reaction was happening to me in real-time as they finished each song. It wasn’t longing or lust after the band members, but a desire to experience the youthful abandon I heard and felt in the music. They were the living embodiment of the self-acceptance and self-confidence I was still years away from granting myself; through the music, I could practice — if not fully embrace — becoming the person I yearned to be.

Listening to it today, Suede feels far fresher than a 32-year-old record has any right to be. It’s not a perfect album by any stretch (I have similar criticisms to those Anderson shares in Coal Black Mornings). Still, given the immense pressure and scrutiny, Suede delivered a solid, supreme debut. “Animal Nitrate” never fails to excite me; it’s far and away my favourite of the early singles and in contention for my favourite Suede song of all time. “Pantomime Horse” offers stiff competition in that race, thanks to Anderson's and Butler’s efforts to one-up each other. The former delivers both his most affecting lyrics and vocal performance of the album; the latter cements his status as a guitar god with a bridge that makes my knees quiver. They find that exact synergy on the piano ballad closer “The Next Life,” the song they opened with on the tour in 1993.

Conversely, the recorded version of “Moving,” blistering and highly-charged in their live set at the time, suffers from some regrettable production choices that leave it flat but nowhere as dull as the anodyne, by-the-numbers “Animal Lover.” Suede had far superior B-sides that would have better served the record as a whole, but my early critiques of “She’s Not Dead” (“Meh,”) and “Breakdown” (second-tier “Where the Pigs Don't Fly”) have softened in the intervening years (“Breakdown” features one of my favourite Anderson lyrics: “Does he only come? / Does your love only come? / Does he only come in a Volvo?”)

You could say that the best way to experience any band’s oeuvre is to listen chronologically, but when it comes to Suede, it’s the only way. Whether you go in for the poppy burlesque strip-tease chorus of “The Drowners” or the maudlin prog-rock grandiosity of “Pantomime Horse,” Suede was (and still is) the perfect introductory record for their catalogue. Time and hindsight highlight the signals and signs of the inter-band dynamics and the break-up and re-inventions to come, but in 2025 as in 1993, Suede’s debut bristles with the energy and vigour of a band setting down the first chapter of their story, one whose end no one could have predicted at the time, parallels to other band be damned.

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Welcome to the first dispatch from the act of just being [t]here, aka my mid-life crisis. Mind the mess; scraps of my psyche are scattered everywhere. I meant to tidy up before inviting folks over. You know how it is, though; cleaning house is the last thing on your mind when the bottom drops out of your drive to write, and you are left staring into the void created by the disappearance of all that once felt comfortable, safe, and soothing. But I am here now, safely ensconced in 2025, with soul-crushing writer’s block a thing of the (still pretty recent) past, and ready to write about music released in -checks notes- 1992.

I never intended to start with Suede. They weren’t even on my radar when I began hatching the idea of a Substack focused primarily on the formative musical obsessions I never got to write about in real-time. Starting with Suede (and with a B-side rather than a single or full album) makes a lot of sense, even though they are not at the start of the timeline I intend to cover here.

If you know me from my work on DOMINIONATED, you're aware that I've spent most of my adult life writing (almost) exclusively about Canadian artists. However, my early infatuation and love affair with music discovery knew no geographical boundaries. Starting around age 10, I fell deeply in love with music, beginning with Top 40 pop and quickly branching into “alternative” music of the time. Always interested in discovering new and up-and-coming artists, it didn’t take long for me to fall into a pattern I think may be familiar to many of you reading right now: needing to discover and know about an artist before anyone else around me. It got so intense at one point that one of my neighbourhood friends made up a song by a fake band and asked me if I had heard of them, to which I replied, “Yes.” In my defence, she made up a generic band name (I don’t remember what it was) and said the song was “Heaven.” I thought maybe she was talking about “Heaven” by Psychedelic Furs.

Regardless, the drive and desire to be the first in-the-know musically among my peers was strong; insatiable, you might say. Which brings us to 1992, when 19-year-old me was heading off to university and leaving home for the first time. I was (and still am) a classic introvert, part of a couple of small social circles with no close connections to anyone save for one close friend. He and I shared a love of music, comic books, Twin Peaks and anything David Lynch-related (may he rest in peace). Our friendship mainly consisted of going to the movies, shopping for records, and (for me, at least) trying to one-up each other by discovering the latest “coolest band in the world” before the other.

At the end of the summer in 1992, our tribe of two was breaking up: he was off to the University of Toronto, and I started at the University of Waterloo, but we had tickets to see Morrissey at Maple Leaf Gardens in support of Your Arsenal on September 15th. That night, Morrissey covered “My Insatiable One,” a B-side off of Suede’s debut single, “The Drowners.” I was unfamiliar with Suede, but in the two short weeks we had been apart, my friend had already one-upped me, discovering and falling madly in love with them. He had gotten hold of “The Drowners” single a few days earlier. He was rhapsodizing about them all night, so when Moz launched into “My Insatiable One,” my friend lost his shit, and my envy kicked into turbo gear. Who was Suede, and what was so great about them? And how could it be that he had discovered them first? (It still stings my ego to admit that all these years later!) I got a copy of the single as soon as possible. I searched every bookshop for any UK music magazine and the weekly inkies I could get my hands on that mentioned Suede. It didn’t take long to sell me on “The Best New Band In Britain,” as declared in Melody Maker in April 1992, weeks before they put out their first single.

Suede checked many boxes for me: glammy indie rock that reminded me of Bowie, sly and ambiguous sexuality that smacked of Morrissey, and cheeky showmanship oozing with confidence and style. Suede’s singer, Brett Anderson, was so intriguing to me. He had a smile and a sneer that I found utterly fascinating. It was the kind of look you see on someone’s face when you turn a corner and catch them pulling up their fly and adjusting themselves after doing something illicit. It was the look of someone who didn’t care if they got caught with their pants down, someone so assured in who and what they were that it didn’t need a label or explanation. I wanted to be as cool and self-confident about their style and sexuality as all of Suede appeared to me.

In the era before YouTube, I relied solely on print media to get to know my musical heroes. We didn’t have cable TV at home when I was growing up, so I didn’t have easy access to MuchMusic. I didn’t have a way of seeing music videos or live performances as frequently as my friends did, so my impression of the band members came solely from their records, what I read in interviews, and what I saw in print. As a frontperson, Anderson was— and still is —magnetic. I found Bernard Butler, their modest and ridiculously talented guitarist (and Anderson’s co-composer), just as compelling. I identified with Butler’s stand-at-the-back-and-be-brilliant aura and was not surprised to learn he’s a fellow Tauran. Like me, he appeared to be a quiet and highly observant creative individual, brimming with energy and ideas that needed to find an outlet. Bassist Mat Osman and drummer Simon Gilbert both struck me as atypical rock stars, and for that reason, I loved them. Long-haired and lanky Osman always seemed to be photographed with an impish grin that suggested a playful and light-hearted soul, bringing levity and light to the band. At the same time, stoic and stalwart Gilbert appeared to be their steady and stable base, grounding even the most sweeping and gossamer moments of their sound in the lived reality of the band’s humble origins.

I don’t know if it’s due to “My Insatiable One” being my first exposure to Suede, but for the longest time, I much preferred it to “The Drowners,” the official debut single’s A-side. “My Insatiable One” is the sound of someone teetering on stacked heels for the first time, confidently marching into a crowd of gawking onlookers and leaving them slack-jawed and in awe. To me, it is a song that has always sounded soaked in sexuality, less so in direct lyrical content than in attitude and delivery. The internet is littered with references to Anderson saying the song is about “gay anal sex,” but in his first memoir, Coal Black Mornings, Anderson admits that it’s written about himself from the perspective of his ex-lover and former bandmate Justine Frischmann (who left him for Blur’s Damon Albarn and went on to front Elastica), “fictionalising a situation where she was regretting her choices.” Though he initially says “My Insatiable One” was “a bit of an afterthought,” it’s validating to read in his second memoir, Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn, that Anderson feels it to be one of Suede’s more superior songs: “relegating ‘My Insatiable One’ to the status of a B-side was the first in a long line of bad judgements that [Suede] made, exiling classics to the wastelands of the flipside.”

Very louche, very exotic, and very English, Suede felt like a level up from the musical tastes of everyone else around me. Loving Suede among my university dorm's Tragically Hip-worshipping brotherhood made me feel sophisticated and worldly. Suede fed into my compulsion for new musical discovery more than any other band before or since, because they came along at just the right time. Living away from home, on my own, with the freedom and pocket money to shop for records and music magazines whenever and wherever I wanted, I dove head-first into a quest to discover and consume as much music as possible—the more obscure the artist, the better. The less well-known a band was in North America, the more I needed to be an authority on them. The harder it was to track down an import-only CD single or album, the more time, energy, and focus I devoted to the quest.

Time has tempered that compulsive fire somewhat. Still, some 40 years later, a part of me vibrates when I make a new musical discovery. It’s harder to claim these discoveries as my own in the internet age. I no longer have anyone like my high school friend to compete with, so it’s less about the rivalry and more about the thrill of discovery. Nowadays, the first person I think of when I come across an interesting new artist is my 15-year-old nephew, who reminds me of me at his age, looking to establish his own identity through the music he loves and connects with.

Of all the artists in space and time he could discover for himself, he’s developed a love of the Church, the Australian band from the 80s, who are still active today. I never got into the Church and know almost nothing about them. I saw some of myself in his appreciation and interest in their music when he first disclosed his interest in them. Shy and reticent, I interpreted his hesitation as fear of revealing this particular and very personal side of his tastes and interests. There was zero judgment on my part. Far from it, actually. If I was feeling anything, it was envy. Though I am mature enough to let a 15-year-old have a 40-plus-year-old band as his new favourite without getting into them myself, I still felt the familiar twinge of jealousy listening to him talk about his newest musical obsession.

Maybe that feeling won’t ever go away. Maybe I never want it to.

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