The London Suede, Antidepressants Review

by Rudy Palma

 Antidepressants, The London Suede’s eleventh studio album, is an album built on forms of raw threads, loose stitches, and exposed lining. The eleven tracks are an emotionally volatile work built on resistance and an emerging from the sonic concrete of Autofiction. What makes Antidepressants of interest to vocalists is the gothic-pop scaffolding of Brett Anderson’s still-sinister croon. He conveys the tension that’s constantly rewired from track to track in his singing. Each song is a blueprint of emotional architecture under duress, and Anderson’s vocal interpretations are a controlled expression of the song’s character.

The album opens with “Disinterate.” The songwriting is jagged, glitch-ridden, and claustrophobic. Lyrics fold in on themselves with lines like “paranoid decay,” “mortality as melody.” The production answers with a stable undercurrent of a backbeat and crunchy rhythm guitars. Anderson sings through the emotion of dread; his phrasing is melodic and carries the energy vocally embodied by the song’s mood.

“Dancing With The Europeans” reflects Suede’s ability to merge oppositional forces. The lyricism flirts with 80s Brit Rock, with its forward-driving. “Run like a river” becomes the lyrics that paint an image, a movement in motif. Anderson alternates vocal temperature between the verse and chorus. He is a vocalist whose expressive shape is more than volume and range; it’s velocity, temperature, and tilt.

The title track, “Antidepressants,” has an attitudinal melody that is deceptively moody. The singing is Anderson inhabiting a character in a Lynchian dream. The lyrical scaffolding reveals the idea that songs themselves are drugs, temporary dissolvers of pain. Anderson delivers emotional restraint, turning in the chorus into a lyrical contrast to the tonal minimalism of the verse. Sometimes the most moving vocals are the least embellished.

The songwriting arcs upward structurally and emotionally with this catchy melody and feel. This is one of the album’s moments of semi-resolution. Anderson’s voice warms without softening, his tonal lightness feeling strategic for the tonal accents of the tune. It’s a moment of lightness in the midst of a record without dispelling the dark hues of the project.

“The Sound And The Summer” shows Anderson’s bold phrasing with lyrical evocation and impermanence. Anderson sits comfortably in his mid-register. Every note seems to carry an expression as he unfolds the roadmap of the song through phrasing. His accent on key syllables brings enough movement to the line without breaking the mood.

An outlier in color is “Somewhere Between An Atom And A Star.” This song leans heavily on atmosphere and lyrical concision. “Words are just a trick” becomes a manifesto. Anderson’s delivery is buried in reverb and delay. “Broken Music For Broken People” is a deliberate callback Coming Up’s glam-smeared anthems of outsider solidarity, but reimagined through a post-pandemic lens. The chorus has Anderson walking the line between confession and performance.

“Criminal Ways” and “Trance State” are the album’s most sonically malleable songs. Lyrics become less narrative, more impressionistic. Anderson’s voice becomes texture with breathy, looped, submerged vocals in effects. The production lets the vocals get weird, pushed through filters, layered like paint rather than sung like lines. This is where Suede’s experimental muscle flexes hardest.

A cinematic “June Rain” scales Anderson’s dynamic delivery from interior whisper to exterior scream without ever losing emotional authenticity. “Life Is Endless, Life Is A Moment,” the final track closes with an elliptical phrase that lingers. The rhythms and ambient spaces are narrative. Anderson suspends each phrase in space, making the listener wait.

Antidepressants is a concept album, a record that is a study in duality and decay, of how to write through emotional schisms without simplifying. Vocalists will discover an entire curriculum on pacing, phrasing, and the power of contrast. Where Autofiction bared its teeth, Antidepressants bares its nerves. And in a cultural moment awash in irony and retro-chic, The London Suede offer something braver, without sentimentality and raw songwriting that refuses to anesthetize itself.