Suede’s Antidepressants reviewed: Britpop outliers on exhilarating, grandiose form

There was unfinished business…

Before it was about sonic cathedrals, sex vampires and superhold hairspray, goth was the invention of distressed souls going slowly mad in cramped suburban homes on the southern fringes of London. It was David Bowie haunted by his brother’s asylum in Coulsdon’s Cane Hill Hospital on “The Bewlay Brothers”. It was Robert Smith wandering out of the new town dream of Crawley into the ancient European night of “A Forest”. And, most of all, it was Siouxsie And The Banshees divining an uncanny psychic vortex in a Chislehurst sitting room on “Happy House” and “Christine”.

Watch the video for “Antidepressants”, filmed at Suede’s show at London’s Alexandra Palace in July 2024, see Brett Anderson prowl the stage with supernatural vigour, and you realise that Haywards Heath was always on that same cursed North Downs leyline. “This is the house that you saved up for,” Brett drawls, with all the estuary hauteur of Siouxsie in her prime. “There’s a room in the back in case you get scared.” There’s a perfectly judged pause, then the withering kiss-off: “Prisoner.”

For all that they’ve been tagged as Britpop heralds or glam revenants, and for all Brett’s talk of Antidepressants being the post-punk successor to the raging, ragged punk of Autofiction, the undeclared hinterland of Suede has always been goth. With their 10th album, they finally, gloriously, make no bones about it: Antidepressants couldn’t be more goth if the band appeared on the cover in frightwigs and winklepickers. (In fact, Brett appears bewinged by a split carcass of meat, like a vegetarian Francis Bacon – which is, fair play, even more goth.)

The most intoxicating, unhinged Suede album since Coming Up…

After Autofiction, the band had apparently been plotting a perverse career zigzag from the moshpit to the arthouse, with, of all things, a ballet soundtrack – perhaps their own version of The Fall’s I Am Kurious Oranj, which so impressed the teenage Anderson. But the immediate, electrifying effect of “Antidepressants” when first debuted last summer, on both the band and the audience, made it clear there was unfinished business.

Beyond the imagery and lyricism, the serrated edge of Antidepressants is provided by Richard Oakes. Suede’s impressive second act has, in large part, been the sound of the guitarist stepping out of Bernard Butler’s long shadow and redefining the band in his own image. Rather than Ronson-y riffs, it’s an exploration of the rays and hail radiance John McGeoch conjured in Surrey Sound Studios as he voyaged from Magazine to the Banshees.

It’s there from the start, on opening track “Disintegrate”, in the brutal, pounding riff that might have fallen from the first Public Image Ltd album. “We walk on polluted beaches,” Brett declaims, with stately sprechstimme gravitas, “feeling our bodies disintegrating.” It may not sound like the most auspicious opening gambit, but in practice it’s irresistible. Antidepressants is the most intoxicating, unhinged Suede album since Coming Up.

“Disintegrate” into “Dancing With The Europeans” into “Antidepressants” into “Sweet Kid” and “The Sound And The Summer” could be the best side of a goth album since the first side of the Banshees’ Juju. It’s a surging wave of desolation that miraculously keeps growing ever grander. When it finally crashes, on “Somewhere Between An Atom And A Star” (one of two survivors from the ballet project), it does so in the form of their most grandly languid ballad since “Sleeping Pills”.

This music is thrilling in its heedless grandiosity

If the second side can’t quite maintain that pell-mell pace, it still includes “Broken Music For Broken People” – a rattling, redemptive anthem for chicken-dancing midlife goths – and “June Rain”, which unashamedly gives Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain” a run for its money and, by rights, should come with a swooping drone video of Oakes playing the guitar solo outside a church.

In a certain mood, for all that this music is thrilling in its heedless grandiosity, you might wonder if it’s all a bit, well… silly? Goth, after all, is the quintessential music for sullen suburban teenagers feeling the existential weight of the world on their skinny shoulders. Is this shrieking, hysterical music really a suitable outlet for men hurtling towards 60?

But Suede are surely onto something. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the 21st century, it’s that the mythical midlife of pipe-and-slippers comfort and boredom we feared as teenagers barely exists anymore. Life after 50 turns out to hold more terror and intensity – precarious love, loss and loneliness – than you ever imagined. Some days, the world of Antidepressants, full of panic rooms and hospital wards, paranoia, shame and Mirtazapine, feels more like documentary realism than beautiful dark fantasy. “You will never be blithe and careless,” Brett sings forebodingly on “Disintegrate”, “and your music will never be long and sweet and low.” In other words: Suede, goth for life.

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