In a feature in last month’s issue of Uncut magazine, Brett Anderson and Mat Osman spoke candidly about the spiritual and physical birth place of Suede’s ethos. “The Smiths aesthetic, I found that very powerful: “the riches of the poor”. There’s beauty in the brutality”, said Anderson. To simply amplify the lineage of Suede’s influences is a huge disservice though. Every aspect of the band was crafted, dramatized and delivered to the public as an expression of art; a kind of depraved decadence that took life lived in squalor at the metropolitan heart of London and emphasised it to a glammy and fleshy showcase of romance and showmanship. So human and relatable was the confidence and misery of Suede that, despite former guitarist Justine Frishmann’s disregard for their pretensions, appealed to anyone left behind by the increasingly distorted and screwed ethos of Britpop.
If 2013’s Bloodsports was the re-united band’s sharp and slick rejuvenation, then Night Thoughts is them settling into their place in the modern rock landscape. Far more cinematic in terms of instrumentation, scope and coherent flow, it’s an album that trundles through not only reflections of youth but the fears, anxieties, and regrets that come with mid-life adulthood.
Opener “When You Are Young” is as fine a precedent as any, it’s expansive, orchestral beginnings meandering into all the pomp and circumstance of Suede’s Dog Man Star era. The innocence in Anderson’s story-telling is cut short abruptly as he rounds the song off with “you will play in the maze, until your mother calls you away”. It flows straight in to “Outsiders,” which is Suede at their most identifiable, as Anderson’s poetry adheres to his template of being a companion to anyone who has felt loss over the band’s tight and explosive pop sensibilities.
Suede have consistently emphasised the more mournful themes at the heart of Night Thoughts, and certainly it’s those that the soul of the album revolves around. After the fragile synth-lead, drum-less beauty of “Pale Snow” comes the 6-minute off-kilter sprawl of “I Don’t Know How To Reach You” where Anderson draws on that inner-city romance as he sings “hiding from the cameras, in between the cranes”, before making himself more direct on the chorus as he sings “I don’t know where to look… I turn the page, I close the book”.
For anyone who has ever felt like their life doesn’t have any traction or direction, “Tightrope” could be the most affecting thing Suede have written since Dog Man Star. It’s a glacial, majestically gloomy slow-burner full of fear and remorse, not ever knowing what the next step or next phrase is going to mean. “Like Kids” stakes it’s claim as one of the Night Thoughts’ rare moments of jubilation, as Anderson soars aloft in the chorus “oh, it’s all there for us… it belongs to us… There’s nothing we can’t reach…”.
When the opening orchestral swoop rears its head again on “When You Were Young” and rolls into the colossal closer “The Fur & The Feathers,” all of Suede’s charm, denouement and tragedy comes full circle in a way that feels not only encompassing but also forward thinking. There’s no sense that doom and gloom is the perennial life force left in Anderson and his cohorts’ song-writing; rather one feels that this is a much-needed airing of emotion that encapsulates a time and place and, come the next full-length, will be refreshed and even discarded for new stomping grounds. It may take a few listens to reveal the entirety of its resonance, but when it does Night Thoughts marks itself as one of Suede’s finest releases.
Rating: 4/5