FILTER ALBUMS

Enduring dark stars shake out their psyches on “punk” ninth album.

By Victoria Segal.

Suede: squaring up to mortality and meaning.

Suede ★★★★ Autofiction

BMG. CD/DL/LP

SPEEDING DISASTERS, flash boy killings, broken bones in council homes: ever since Brett Anderson demanded a gun in the opening seconds of Suede’s debut The Drowners, a sense of doom has lurked at the edges of their music. Even at their most delirious or numbed, there was always trouble rumbling through their tower block walls, sex-and-glue psychos around every corner.

Since their 2011 reunion, however, that blurry existential threat has come into sharper focus, more specific, grown-up fears jolting through their music. 2016’s Night Thoughts cold-sweated through the terrors that flood in just before dawn; 2018’s The Blue Hour ran even further with Brett Anderson’s fatherhood anxieties, a spectacular folk-horror forage through England’s grotty hedgerows. The singer’s evocative memoirs, Coal Black Mornings and Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn, also seem to have shaken something loose – an older, wiser, sadder desire to dig into what it means to be a father, a son, a partner, an artist. With The Drowners having turned 30 in May, it’s a good (or profoundly terrifying) time to make a record that squares up to mortality and meaning as furiously as Autofiction.

Dean Chalkley

Anderson has described Autofiction as Suede’s “punk album”, the five band members hashing it out in a King’s Cross rehearsal room with little rock-star insulation. You can hear the metal and cement in That Boy On The Stage’s filthy rockabilly guitar, or 15 Again’s vertiginous dynamics; on Personality Disorder’s gothic aggro, Anderson rages so hard against the dying of the light it has no choice but to back off. Shadow Self’s brutalist cabaret, meanwhile, sounds like Pornography with John Lydon MC-ing, both early Cure and Public Image Ltd swirling thickly through Autofiction’s close atmosphere.

The Chameleons-like closing track, Turn Off Your Brain And Yell, might once have been a mission statement, a reminder to recalibrate after The Blue Hour’s references to Penda’s Fen and Penderecki. Yet Autofiction is not back-to-basics cosplay, the band equivalent of a bad midlife tattoo. While it’s dangerous to call any art – never mind an album titled Autofiction – “honest”, Anderson’s lyrics have rarely sounded more transparent. She Still Leads Me On and Blinded open a metal memory box, complex, full-hearted testaments to his late mother. The exquisitely lonely Drive Myself Home and Black Ice grasp the metaphorical steering wheel to describe two sides of a relationship, one tender, one dangerously out of control; What Am I Without You? is as mournful as its piano. “I’m not the kind of person who never feels uncertain,” sings Anderson on The Only Way I Can Love You, “so many ways to do what I do wrong.”