Seven albums into a 27-year career is not generally when you expect a band to hit a career high, but Night Thoughts is probably the finest Suede long player since their 1994 sophomore epic, Dog Man Star, or their glorious eponymous debut. Indeed, Night Thoughts combines the immediacy of early seven-inches like ‘Animal Nitrate’ with the more sonically ambitious ‘Daddy’s Speeding’.

On opener ‘When You Are Young’, the first minute and fifteen seconds of ominous effects and sad strings gives way to a monumental guitar line, before Brett Anderson’s tortured Bowie-esque vocal enters stage left. For that first few bars, you could be transported back to 1993, when Messrs Anderson and Butler were set to conquer the world. Except it’s 23 years later and Bernard Butler is nowhere to be seen.

The fact that Night Thoughts doesn’t suffer from his absence is testament to the quality of the musicianship of the other Suede-heads, Mat Osman (bass), Simon Gilbert (drums), Neil Codling (piano and synths) and particularly lead guitarist Richard Oakes, whose solos are epic enough to hold Anderson’s brooding ruminations aloft, from the driving rock of ‘No Tomorrow’ to the dramatic, bruising ‘Pale Snow’, with its regret-filled coda, “It never happens to me”.

This is not a band merely going through the motions, cashing in on middle-aged nostalgia for the leather-clad days of their youth. There is an immediacy and vibrancy to these songs, their second collection since reuniting five years ago, that gives the distinct impression that they needed to be written, so the band could get them out of their system – from the insistent staccato rhythms of ‘Outsiders’ to rollicking lead single ‘Like Kids’, with its wonderfully memorable guitar hook that proves the missing link between ‘Trash’ and ‘We Are The Pigs’.

When they slow things down, the results are particularly effective. ‘I Don’t Know How To Reach You’ is six minutes of longing; ‘Tightrope’ is the kind of string-drenched yearning ballad Anderson makes his own; and the aching ‘I Can’t Give Her What She Wants’ drips regret from every bar. Best of the lot is the closing piano ballad, ‘The Fur And The Feathers’, a wide-screen masterpiece of romance and “the thrill of the chase”, where Anderson confesses, “I’m so scared of touching you, but I’m too scared to not”.
It’s dark, it’s moody and it’s bloody brilliant. Suede have grown older but not necessarily wiser, replacing teenage angst with mid-life soul-searching.

Key Track: ‘The Fur And The Feathers’

Out Now

8/10