Speaking exclusively in the latest issue of MOJO – on sale now – Suede have discussed the making of their new album, Antidepressants.
Out September 5 on BMG, the band's tenth album is the follow-up to 2022’s acclaimed Autofiction, a record whose raw sonics and emotional purging made for one of the band’s most feral-sounding albums since their Britpop-heralding, self-titled debut in 1993. If Autofiction was, in frontman Brett Anderson’s words, Suede’s “punk” album, then Antidepressants is their “post-punk” offering – drawing from the likes of Pil, Siouxsie And The Banshees, Joy Division, Magazine and The Cure. It’s a musical DNA chain that brings the band right back to their origins in the sleepy Sussex commuter town Haywards Heath, where “15-year-old Cult fan-club member” Brett Anderson met bass-playing “teenage goth” Mat Osman at sixth form college.
“It’s the music of my and Brett’s adolescence,” Osman tells Keith Cameron in MOJO’s exclusive cover interview. “I had the full backcombed hair and paisley shirts, and I loved the Banshees and The Cure. But the weird thing is it’s Richard [Oakes, guitarist] who’s written most of it, and he comes to that music as history.”
Richard Oakes joined Suede when he was just seventeen, filling the sizable gap left after the departure of Bernard Butler when the relationship between Anderson and Suede’s guitarist/co-writer disintegrated during the dysfunctional making of the group’s ambitious second album, Dog Man Star.
“The first couple of years I was in Suede was about fitting in. Like, ‘You have to be this type of person now.’ That went down to everything. I was expected to dress a certain way. I was expected to listen to certain records,” Oakes tells MOJO. “I’d come straight from school and was basically a bedroom nerd, and that’s not cool. So I had to keep the bedroom nerd hidden, and create this cool, snotty, rock’n’roll attitude for myself. I look back now and it’s all a bit [winces], You could have just been yourself...”
“I think Richard is such an underrated guitarist,” Anderson tells MOJO. “He’s been in the shadow of Bernard so much, because Bernard’s persona is so huge, and Richard never competed but quietly got on with just being brilliant. He was always encouraged to make ‘Suede-like’ music, which meant he could never quite be himself as a guitarist. Autofiction is such a good record because it’s Richard. You’re hearing Richard for the first time. And again with Antidepressants, I wanted him to lead. Richard is the most natural musician I’ve ever worked with.”
Although ten years his future bandmates’ junior, Oakes was imbibing the music that Antidepressants draws upon – the bands Anderson and Oakes were out downing snakebite to – via his older sister’s record collection.
“My teenage influences – Keith Levene, John McGeoch, The Fall, Wire – didn’t really have a place in the writing in the early years. And I had to wait,” says the guitarist of initially having to fit into the Bowie-meet-Ballard blueprint laid out by Anderson and Butler. “When we did Autofiction, suddenly I felt it did have a place. The frame of mind when we started writing Autofiction was, Let’s try and play to our strengths, be a band in a room again. One of the most prominent features of the band is the guitars. That’s why my presence is a lot more obvious than it was. It certainly wasn’t me elbowing my way to the front – because I’m just not that guy.”
Songs on Antidepressants include Disintegrate, Sweet Kid, the Bowie-in-Berlin inspired Dancing With The Europeans, and the fractious Broken Music For Broken People, which was also the album’s working title.
“Thematically, it’s a lot different from Autofiction. More paranoid and neurotic,” says Anderson of his lyrics on Antidepressants. “This sense of being a citizen in a benign yet oppressive world. But also I like the joy in defying that control. Broken Music For Broken People is a the-weak-shall-inherit-the-earth song – a song of defiance.”
While Antidepressants finds the band in an alienated, post-punk hinterland, Suede’s tenth album could have landed them in a very different place indeed. In the Covid-initiated hiatus between Autofiction’s recording and its release, Suede wrote what they thought would be its follow-up – a ballet soundtrack, the polar opposite to the record they’d just finished. Such was the glowing response to Autofiction, however, that the project was binned. Yet, two of its grandiose mood pieces – Somewhere Between An Atom And A Star and Life Is Endless, Life Is A Moment – were repurposed as endpieces for each half of Antidepressants.
“I always feel like we can stretch Suede and get arty and do unusual things,” says Anderson, “but it always snaps back to being a rock band.”
“We were always a marmite band, even among our own fans!”
Get the latest issue of MOJO to read the full interview with Suede. “Stubbornness is in our DNA… ” they tell MOJO’s Keith Cameron. Plus! Get your hands on a very special CD of live, rare and previously unreleased Suede tracks, handpicked by the band exclusively for MOJO. More info and to order your copy HERE!
Photo: Kevin Westenberg