When Brett Anderson, Mat Osman, Simon Gilbert and Bernard Butler arrived on the music scene with the seedy glam rock of “The Drowners”, the UK music press hailed them as the harbingers of a new, exciting musical movement that would surely kill off the remnants of grunge, shoegaze and baggy – a movement that would soon be known as “Britpop”. Suede were noted for Butler’s Smiths-esque guitar sound and Anderson’s Bowie-like vocals, in addition to his bleak and unsettling depictions of British life, and despite their best efforts to distance themselves from it, they unavoidably became one of Britpop’s major players.

They soon after began sessions for second album, Dog Man Star, but these sessions were uncomfortable, drug-fuelled and tense, resulting in Butler’s departure from the band. He was replaced by Richard Oakes, and Suede’s new line-up, which now also featured Gilbert’s cousin, Neil Codling, on keyboards, recorded two more albums. Throughout the ‘90s they were regarded as one of the Britpop “Big Four” (alongside Oasis, Blur and Pulp), but Suede disliked being associated with the Britpop movement:

We were never really at the party, and Britpop was like a big party: people slapping one another on the back and getting beery and jingoistic. We could not have been more uninterested in that whole boozy, cartoon-like, fake working-class thing.

– Brett Anderson, speaking to The Guardian

Codling briefly left the band prior to the recording of their poorly-received fifth album, A New Morning, and the band then went on a hiatus until their reunion in 2010. Since then they have released five more albums, adding strings, choirs and spoken word to their sonic arsenal, before an abrupt post-punk reset on 2022’s Autofiction.