Britpop progenitors Suede are set to return in the autumn with their eighth studio album, The Blue Hour.
Described by frontman Brett Anderson as “dank and troubling”, the album has been produced by veteran knob twiddler Alan Moulder and completes a ‘triptych’ of albums that began with 2013 comeback record, Bloodsports.
Explaining the drive behind the album, the band said in a statement: “The Blue Hour is the time of day when the light is fading and night is closing in.
“The songs hint at a narrative but never quite reveal it and never quite explain. But as with any Suede album, it’s always about the songwriting. The band, the passion and the noise: The Blue Hour.”
Elaborating on the album’s theme, Brett Anderson told NME that The Blue Hour was a written from a child’s point of view and inspired by his young son.
“It’s quite dank and troubling,” he said. “It was conceived as a record almost from a child’s point of view. 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.”
He continued: “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!”
Warming to his theme, Anderson spelled out the album’s unpleasantness: “ 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.”
Sounds like the perfect record for the post-summer blues, eh?
