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May 23, 2022 By Mark Redfern Photography by Dean Chalkley

Suede have announced a new album, Autofiction, and shared its first single, “She Still Leads Me On.” Autofiction is due out September 16 via BMG. At 4 p.m. EST today the band will debut “She Still Leads Me On” live, in Belgium at Brussels’ Cirque Royal, and the performance will livestream here. Check out “She Still Leads Me On” below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art.

The Britpop originators and survivors legally have to go by the name The London Suede in America, thanks to an American jazz singer also named Suede. Longtime collaborator Ed Buller, who has produced many of the band’s albums, including their first three, produced Autofiction. The album is the follow-up to 2018’s The Blue Hour.

Suede—Brett Anderson (vocals), Mat Osman (bass), Simon Gilbert (drums), Richard Oakes (guitars), and Neil Codling (keyboards)—began the album in a rehearsal studio in the Kings Cross area of London.

“Autofiction is our punk record,” Anderson says in a press release. “No whistles and bells. Just the five of us in a room with all the glitches and fuck-ups revealed; the band themselves exposed in all their primal mess.”

“Autofiction has a natural freshness, it’s where we want to be,” Anderson adds.

“When we were rehearsing and writing this record it was this sheer, physical rush,” says Osman. “That thing where you’re hanging on for dear life.”

“She Still Leads Me On” is about Anderson’s mother and the lyrics to Autofiction as a whole were fueled by Anderson’s two acclaimed autobiographies, 2018’s Coal Black Mornings and 2019’s Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn.

Suede initially broke-up in 2003 following the release of their poorly received fifth album, 2002’s A New Morning. They reformed in 2010 and made a full on comeback in 2013 with the release of Bloodsports, which was their first new album in over a decade and was very well-received by critics. That was followed by 2016’s Night Thoughts and 2018’s The Blue Hour. This makes Autofiction the band’s fourth album since reforming and ninth album overall (not counting 1997’s two-disc B-sides collection Sci-Fi Lullabies).

Read our review of The Blue Hour.

Read our interview with Suede on The Blue Hour.

Read our 2013 interview with Suede’s Brett Anderson on Bloodsports.

In 2019 we reflected on the 25th anniversary of Suede’s second album, Dog Man Star, and you read that retrospective here.

Autofiction Tracklist:

1. She Still Leads Me On
2. Personality Disorder
3. 15 Again
4. The Only Way I Can Love You
5. That Boy on the Stage
6. Drive Myself Home
7. Black Ice
8. Shadow Self
9. It’s Always the Quiet Ones
10. What am I Without You?
11. Turn off Your Brain and Yell

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