When Suede got back together for their Teenage Cancer Trust gigs in 2010, the reunion felt justified as the band really had a point to prove, and a reputation to rescue. Now, we at the Quietus are not keen on bands hanging around endlessly flogging their back catalogue on the tour circuit (yes that’s you there, Pixies) and think that if you’re going to get back together, you’d better note that man does not live by making 30-somethings cry at your big hits.
So it’s with great interest that we bring you the news that Suede are back in the studio recording a new album. "We’ve been working on the new Suede album, which has been really exciting," Brett Anderson told Luke Turner last week. "We’ve been writing for the last year, and recording on and off. We recording one session in May, and we’ve got another at Sarm studuios for a few weeks this month. It’s where they did a load of 80s pop things, like Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Seal, stuff like that. It’s Trevor Horn’s studio. Is he producing it? Yeah right, though we actually had a meeting with him in the 90s, Saul from Nude wanted him to produce Head Music. But no, Ed Buller is producing it."
How has the recording been going? "I’ve been loving it," said Anderson. "Any album is brutally hard, and this one has been pretty hard. The first couple of months were us trying to get on the same wavelength, is this working, trying to develop the sound we wanted. A lot of the writing process for me is throwing stuff away, because you’re finding out what you want to do. There was a lot of that, and we discarded quite a few songs. Early this year we started hitting on the sort of songs that we were aiming to write, and it’s sounding really good now."
And what is that sound? "Without wishing to be facetious, it sounds like Suede," Anderson said. "We’re not trying to reinvent the sound of the band, that’d be a disastrous thing to do. I think that’s possibly where we went wrong on the last two albums, we didn’t know where to go with the sound so we were looking for another direction, with mixed results. With this it’s about great songs, it’s about great guitar hooks, it’s about a very powerful band sound. So it sounds like Suede. I think you’ll like it. Don’t worry, it doesn’t sound anything like the last album [laughs].
"It sounds like a cross between bits of Dog Man Star and bits of Coming Up. It’s not as light as Coming Up, not la la la hooky, though there’s pop moments. Ed Buller is a real fan of pop music that really connects, the [Marc] Bolan sound, so it’s edging in the big pop chorus direction. It feels like it’s going to be good."
