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Jul 13, 2018 By Christopher Roberts Suede

Britpop originators and survivors Suede are releasing a new album, The Blue Hour, on September 21 via Rhino. Previously they shared a trailer for the album and a video for a dramatic new song, “The Invisibles” (which was our #2 Song of the Week). Now they have shared a second single from the album, “Don’t Be Afraid If Nobody Loves You,” which sounds like vintage Suede and seems to end with the sound of a teakettle whistling. Listen below via a visual for the song.

Suede reformed in 2010 and made a fantastic comeback in 2013 with the release of the excellent Bloodsports, which was their first new album in over a decade and was very well-received by critics. They released their last album, Night Thoughts, back in 2016. The Blue Hour is the band’s third album since reforming. Earlier this year the band also put out a 25th anniversary reissue of 1993’s self-titled debut album and frontman Brett Anderson also released his first book, the memoir Coal Black Mornings, via Little, Brown.

Alan Moulder produced The Blue Hour. In a previous interview with NME Anderson shed some light on the sound of the album: “I think we’re at this stage of our career where it doesn’t really matter what we do, as long as we’re engaged in doing it and making it interesting. Because of that, we can do quite extreme things. This is a very complicated record, much more so than the last too - and more diverse. It’s quite a journey. There are a lot of elements that we haven’t used before, like a choir and more spoken word and dialogue. There are a lot of field recordings on it too to thread the ideas together.”

Anderson also told the NME that his son inspired the album. “It was conceived as a record almost from a child’s point of view,” he said. “My son is my muse these days, and I write about him and through his eyes. He inspired the book I wrote recently, Coal Black Mornings. He was my inspiration on the last two records and this is a continuation of that. I’ve always written from different perspectives. A lot of this is about the terrors of childhood, so it’s quite unpleasant in lots of ways. I think Suede should be unpleasant, that’s the point of a band like Suede. Whenever we’ve tried to pleasant, it never works. We have to inhabit Suedeworld and it’s not a very nice place! It’s set in a rural landscape, on the hard shoulder of the motorway, among the B-roads and among the rubbish that’s been fly-tipped. It’s set by a chain link fence with a dead badger lying rotting in the ground.”

Suede made an immediate mark when they came on the scene in their native U.K., with them declared “The Best New Band in Britain” by the music publication Melody Maker in 1992 before their debut album was even released. That self-titled debut arrived on March 29, 1993 to critical acclaim and fantastic sales (it hit #1 on the U.K. album charts and at the time was the fastest selling debut album in over a decade). 1994’s sophomore album, Dog Man Star, is considered a classic of the era. 1996’s third album, Coming Up, continued the band’s success, also debuting at #1 on the U.K. album charts. The Blue Hour is the band’s eighth album.

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

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