Steam rose from an in-the-round stage to dark, glitching beats. 650 Suedeheads checked their tickets. Either the Festival Hall’s Clore Ballroom had somehow been double booked with Skrillex or, on the first of their six-night South Bank takeover season, a very different sort of Suede was approaching.
A dramatically revitalised one, it transpired. “We are The Suedes,” singer Brett Anderson joked, as if playfully marking out a bold and celebrated new era for the art-rock legends. While their Nineties peers have been busy plundering Britpop-era catalogues for nostalgic stadium lagerthons, Suede have instead been reconnecting with the savage spirit that originally made them Britpop’s big bang in 1992.
As a defiant mark of intent, they opened their takeover with a complete performance of their as-yet-unreleased new album Antidepressants, the second in a trilogy that singer Brett Anderson would later dub their “black and white period”. A period which has already been hailed as a second major career peak by band and critic alike.
Where 2022’s Autofiction was a sharp, punkish left turn for a decade-long reunion previously characterised by atmospheric concept albums (2016’s Night Thoughts, 2018’s The Blue Hour), Antidepressants is their post-punk record, steeped in Wire-y riffs, PiL-popping dynamics and the dark energies of early Cure. Long the wildest onstage performer of his generation – flipping Jekyll-like from rabid to romantic amid much lycanthropic contortion – Anderson was driven ferocious by these pounding new sounds, panther-prowling and wolf-howling through “Disintegrate”, revelling in the gruesome tone of car-crash romance “The Sound and the Summer” (the sonic equivalent of David Cronenberg directing True Romance) and clambering into the crowd to mosh along with the full-frontal glory rock of “Broken Music for Broken People”.
These were songs of pain and paranoia which stared humanity in its blank, self-medicated eye (on “Trance State”) and mortality in the face (on glowering album finale “Life is Endless, Life is a Moment”). But Anderson beamed through them like a star re-ascended.
“We are the anti-nostalgia band,” he declared, launching into a second set of songs drawn from their reunion period only, and similarly alchemical: Suede alone, it seemed, can sound both grime-smothered and immaculately graceful at once. This was an exercise in building a new set of classics, the “Animal Nitrate”s and “Beautiful Ones” of their second era. “She Still Leads Me On” detonated with new wave vitality. “Personality Disorder”, “Shadow Self” and “No Tomorrow” were intense and impassioned punk howls.
“Tides” was as vast and turbulent as a disaster flick tsunami and 2013’s “It Starts and Ends With You” the new “Trash”, prompting Anderson to leap out into the venue and find a spotlit space in which to dance with the devoted. As they closed with an anthemic “Outsiders”, London decidedly claimed by the freaks for the month, it was a great relief that – as Anderson announced – “there will be a third black-and-white album and then we’ll go into a different colour”. Prepare to be dazzled.
Touring, suede.co.uk
