Bloodsports

suede: a retro-flection, ACT SIX

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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