(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
Mon 23 June 2025 4:00, UK
Trust a band as mercurial and puckish as Suede to turn everything we know about band reunions on their heads. Because we all thought we knew the drill, didn’t we? Legendary band goes down in drug-addled flames stoked with bad blood and continent-sized egos. For a few years, we wait it out. Suffering the bassist’s screamo-zydeco side project with gritted teeth because hey, it’s better than nothing.
The rumours start swirling that they’re getting back together and, joy of joys, they are! They spend a summer festival circuit as the most exciting band in the world. Then the honeymoon period ends, and we all pretend to like the new stuff because hey, it’s better than nothing. Then Suede got back together, spent the summer of 2011 as the most exciting band in British rock and then, just as we all settled in to stymie our disappointment at the new stuff, found out that we wouldn’t have to.
The band got off to one hell of a restart with 2013s Bloodsport, an absolutely cracking return to form that showed there was still life in the Suede beast yet. However, no one could have prepared for their second reunion album, 2016s Night Thoughts, to be an absolute screaming masterpiece. Not only one of the best rock albums of the year, but in with a shout of being the best album the band had ever made.
An album that manages to combine typical Suede bangers with atmospheric, almost cinematic production flourishes that more than justify the album premiering alongside a specially shot film. One that ruled so hard that its best, most exciting moment wasn’t even released as a single due to the album being so ridiculously stacked.
What is the most overlooked song by Suede?
After the lead single ‘Outsiders’ has finished its propulsive, beguiling stomp, one might already be thinking that something very special is happening. The chiming, distorted riff of ‘No Tomorrow’ swaggering in like Ziggy Stardust era Bowie doing ‘Motown Junk’ will prove that it is indeed the case. With that, Brett Anderson’s mob kicks off a song that deserves pride of place among their best songs.
On a purely musical level, there are more than a few notes of the buoyant guitar-pop that made up their mainstream breakthrough, Coming Up. However, while that record was made with an almost bloody-minded drive to write radio hits, there’s something much more natural about ‘No Tomorrow’. The hooks within hooks within hooks you find here come from nothing more than a desire to make art like that, rather than a need to prove that Dog Man Star hadn’t killed their career.
I mean it too, there’s barely a second of the song that doesn’t contain something that can get stuck in your head for the rest of the day. From Richard Oakes’ phenonomenal guitar line to Anderson’s skyscraping falsetto in the chorus. However, like any other Suede classic, there’s a darkness at this song’s heart that the ecstatic hooks aren’t so much covering up as Trojan Horse-ing your way under the listener’s skin.
This is a song about how nihilism is no excuse. That there may be ‘No Tomorrow’, but that doesn’t mean we can’t “fight the sorrow” all the same. You may be nothing more than “a cadaver in tracksuit trousers”, but we can find meaning if we do as Anderson’s doing and “Connect [him] to missing persons.” It’s a powerful message, one that was eerily prevalent for the entire year of its release and has only gotten more impactful as the years have gone by.
Because that’s always been the secret weapon of Suede. For all their reputation as hedonist dandies, there’s always been a streak of social commentary within them. One that put them above their Britpop peers in the 1990s, and one that they still show off to this day on classics like ‘No Tomorrow’. Give it a spin if you haven’t, you won’t regret it.
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