Night Thoughts

suede: a retro-flection, ACT SEVEN

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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