Released on the star-studded day of September 16, Suede’s Autofiction may be the best album of the season, if not the year.
An album I didn’t really see coming, much less anticipate until the release of its singles, Autofiction is the year’s biggest shocker to me. Suede is never a brit-pop band I especially latched onto. Being a massive fan of the whole Brit-pop genre, I obviously love the entirety of 1996’s Coming Up, but Suede largely always felt far too operatic and theatrical to me.
But with this release, Suede has mastered their glam rock tendencies but has not gone overboard into excess like they often did in their youth. Meanwhile, they also didn’t fall into the aging rock band trap where they abandon their old sound and themes due to “aging” (cough cough Death Cab). It’s a tough balance to find, and is rarely found by older bands nowadays. And perhaps that is what makes this album the masterpiece it is. Autofiction isn’t a rebirth of Suede, it’s an evolution.
I’m not going to lie and say I’m a Suede expert. I have not listened to their 2018 or 2016 albums. I don’t know the band lore. But this album has won me over, and will most likely lead me to go through their whole discography looking for more.
Let’s begin at the beginning with the first track on Autofiction, She Still Leads Me On. It’s probably the poppiest song on the album, not that is pop-y by most means. She Still Leads Me On sounds the most like a Coming Up era Suede song, but not in a recycling-old-sounds way, but in a perfected-what-we-do-best way. In the song, Brett Anderson describes his continuing attachment to his mother and his childhood in a way that almost anyone can relate to. The song itself is a wonderful, upbeat opener that gets the listener introduced to the slightly darker Autofiction Suede sound without jumping into the more new-wave Suede tracks.
But as She Still Leads Me On fades, the listener gets swept into a much angstier Personality Disorder. Dropped straight into a driving guitar riff and Brett Anderson’s chanting sing speech, the listener gets a proper introduction to Autofiction’s audio environment. The highlight of the song has to be Brett Anderson’s sing-speak. In a recent interview with Super Deluxe Edition, Brett Anderson said “I’ve wanted to try that style of singing for a while. I’ve always loved The Fall and Mark E Smith was the master of that style of singing… I wanted to try to make it my own. That’s what you have to do: take influences from other music and make your own crappy version of it.”
more to come later this week…