There are records that come at you like old friends you haven’t seen in years, and, as soon as you listen, you realise they haven’t been stuck telling the same stories. Antidepressants by Suede is like that: not the return of a glorious band, but the breath of those who have crossed storms and now aren’t afraid to show their broken bones and still-beating heart.
At fifty-seven, Brett Anderson sings like someone suspended between a boy staring at the city through the bus window and a grown man who knows life is all stumbles. His voice carries a whole library of anxieties, paranoias, illusions, but instead of turning them into consolation he flips them inside out, showing the seams. This is music that doesn’t try to heal: it tries to share the pain, to make it bearable because it’s shared.
The sound of Suede today is dark and glittering at once, like streetlamps along a rain-soaked ring road. The guitars are shards, the bass rumbles like walking under a flyover at two in the morning, and between verses come noises, interferences, distorted signals: the world bombarding us with notifications, reminding us of our solitude, even when we’re drowning in the crowd. Yet from that noise an energy rises, pulling you forward, even making you want to dance, even when the words describe fracture.
The strength of Antidepressants doesn’t lie in single moments but in the whole: a journey unafraid of getting stained, of being contradictory, of swinging between lyricism and brutality. Anderson no longer plays only himself: he puts on masks, inhabits characters, yet behind those theatrical poses remains the urgency of someone who refuses to surrender to the sterility of passing time.
And so listening to this record becomes almost a physical experience: you find yourself walking through the night with headphones on, rain needling your face, the lines tangling with your darkest thoughts. It isn’t an antidote, it isn’t a sedative. It’s a summons not to stop feeling, even when feeling hurts.
Suede aren’t a monument to be celebrated but a band still alive, finding truth in fracture. Antidepressants is broken music for broken people, and it’s precisely there, among the fragments, that the spark of real life shines.