Coming up’s 25th anniversary tour last spring reminded us that Suede was a band that fiercely challenged a generation and was a confessional dialogue with the public that was kept alive from one album to the next. The new one, Autofiction (BMG), brings us the deep thoughts of an almost 55-year-old Brett Anderson who has shaken off his melancholy and cranked up the guitars: “This is our punk album” clearly defies the promotional note. . Yes, Autofiction is very different from its predecessor, The blue hour (2018). Instead of these grandiose orchestrations, the band moves in favor of the diabolical riff and drifts towards the rarefied piece and more post-punk tracks, especially in the second part. While there’s something about some fast-paced songs like the first single, She Stills leads me, it wouldn’t be fair to bring it back to its roots. Switching to a powerful melody that stirs old ghosts: Anderson looks at himself in the mirror and painfully evokes his version in his twenties when his mother died in 1989 and was unable to attend the funeral. “When I think about all the feelings I’ve been hiding from him / Oh, in many ways, I’m still a kid,” she sings as the album’s porter. The most obvious hallmark of suede is brightly visible in The Only Way I Could Love You, with its blade-cut melodrama, and The Grumpy Boy on stage with sinister guitar and falsetto.
power of pop
But the novelty of the quintet’s live-recorded album is the darkness that slowly takes over, starting with Personality Disorder, where Anderson sacrifices his natural melodic talent to throw words with theatrical fury, just like Shadow. self is a tirade about resounding guitars and a Joy Division style bass. Beyond the midpoint of the repertoire, gothic rock cues (which may refer to the early days of Killing Joke or The Cure) abound in critical pieces like Black ice (“life without danger is not life,” Anderson says), with always opaque layers of riffs and synths. with quiet ones. It’s an aesthetic bet that tells us about his youthful influences, filtered through the band’s rhetoric and exploded in the closing theme, fusing it with his true love for the thin chorus, like shut your brains and shout, amidst the heavy guitar. curtains.
With songs like these, Suede is commendable in conveying a believable concern beyond poise. So Autofiction, a rejuvenation, a recovery of essences, or more than an album of any of these clichés, is serious work that tells us the power of pop to grow with you for a lifetime.