Suede: Autofiction review — Britpop survivors return with urgent ‘punk’ album

The association of middle age with boringness is one of the great conceptual tricks devised by that specialist in self-deception, the human species. The time of life when the body begins its inexorable decline, when parents grow frail or worse, when the question of what you have done with your earthly span starts to outweigh the question of what you will do with it — to call all this boring is a coping mechanism to help the middle-aged person get through the day without collapsing in a blubbering heap.

Which brings us to Britpop survivors Suede and their frontman Brett Anderson, who turns 55 at the end of this month. Long ago in 1993 their self-titled debut album arrived, opening with a song called “So Young” — an electrically charged ode to the intoxication of youth sung by Anderson in the yelping, moaning style of a glamorously doomed Romantic poet. Almost 30 years later we find him yelping and moaning again about feeling young. But this time his perspective is that of an older man cast back into childhood by powerful memories of his dead mother.

“She Still Leads Me On” is the first track on Suede’s ninth album Autofiction. It’s a superlative tear-jerker, couched not in the usual minor-key mode of mournful music, but dashed out with raw, smeary riffs and galloping rhythms. The lyrics are autobiographical, linked to the two fine memoirs that Anderson has written in recent years; his mother died in 1989. Meanwhile, the style is urgent and untidy. Anderson describes it as their “punk” album.

Themes of remembrance and self-reckoning recur. “That Boy on the Stage” is a big scowling stomper about the singer’s struggles to keep his performing ego in check. “Drive Myself Home” is a grand gothic ballad about being haunted by absent people. “It’s Always the Quiet Ones” is a thunderous anthem about emotional secrecy. Anderson sings in a flamboyantly alive fashion, flourishing verses like a matador’s cape. His bandmates perform as though the first take is the only take. Autofiction is Suede in middle age; none of it is boring.

★★★★☆

‘Autofiction’ is released by BMG