As I skirted around clusters of unsteady beer-drinking men draped in flags of St George, it seemed absolutely the correct time to be heading towards London’s Royal Festival Hall. It was the early evening of Saturday 13 September 2025. They were ‘protestors’, the lingering remnants of the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, not yet ready to return to home comforts; I was en route to watch British band Suede perform their new album, Antidepressants.

The disaffection of the aggrieved stragglers on the South Bank of the Thames was said to originate in disputes over who can legitimately claim to be a British subject and the accompanying argument that many ‘natives’ are being ‘left behind’. The jagged performance in the concert hall somehow reflected this societal unease: for a band well into its fourth decade, experiencing a remarkable renaissance, Suede remain adept at delivering ‘broken music for broken people’. A particular concern of Antidepressants is the fault-line of being either connected or disconnected, the hazards of merging in or standing apart from the group. ‘Disintegrate’, its opener, warns that those pushed to the margins can be cut down mercilessly, like daisies or tall poppies. Avoiding dull worthiness, subsequent tracks allude to the corrosive effects on individual well-being of a degraded environment, felt injustices arising from disparities in wealth and opportunity, and the undermining consequences of widespread loss of trust. ‘Dancing with the Europeans’ salts the self-inflicted moral wounds arising from Brexit yet calls for some fraternal restitution.

Taken together, the songs of Antidepressants seem imbued with a prevailing atmosphere of dashed hope and an awareness of time running out, and a fragile yearning for being blithe and careless. But not all is gloom: the album embraces a solidarity among the disadvantaged and oppressed, arising simply from knowing one is not alone. It contends that feelings of fearfulness and frustration can be transformed into ‘hand weapons’ when fighting for positive change, and that sustained parental love can buffer children against the effects of serial adversity. Further, consolation can be found in the knowledge of having stuck to personal principles, even when despondent, and some relief from suffering can be achieved through accepting that human existence is formless and weightless, both momentary and endless, as if ‘somewhere between an atom and a star’.

The songs are themselves antidepressant: the music is frequently characterised by a raw, muscular exhilaration and is sometimes playful, even celebratory. Antidepressant treatment is mentioned, explicitly. There is an ironic note on the shared expectation of an improvement while being ‘on antidepressants’: even when someone remains afflicted by troublesome fears and nagging worries, or subject to societal suppression, they should be performatively ‘singing a song’ to demonstrate their happiness. The stigma of being prescribed medication is acknowledged, as is the fear of abandonment in a psychiatric hospital. The antidepressant mirtazapine is named and blamed for possibly causing some loss of zest and sociability, and its accompanying warnings about drowsiness while driving or operating machinery and avoiding alcohol are listed, knowingly.

Brett Anderson, singer and principal lyricist in the band, has written two unsparing autobiographical memoirs. The first, Coal Black Mornings (2018), recounts grandparental alcohol dependence leading to destitution, paternal recurrent and ultimately unresolved severe depression, the joint deaths of a paternal aunt and her male companion from carbon monoxide poisoning in a closed vehicle, and the depression and suicide of a friend, together with instances of Anderson’s distressing childhood fears and teenage social diffidence. The second, Afternoon with the Blinds Drawn (2019), analyses his emerging opiate and cocaine addiction, then the steps towards recovery, while Suede underwent a slow mid-career decline before a 6-year hiatus. Now long abstinent, Anderson has – most recently in interviews coinciding with the launch of Antidepressants – expressed concerns about the widespread tendency to seek an ‘emotional numbness’, an escape from pain and suffering, through inappropriate use of psychotropic drugs rather than choosing to grapple with or embrace distress. Reasonable sentiments, admittedly, though even when afflicted by deprivation and discrimination, now often tinged by adversarial populism, many who might benefit from judicious antidepressant treatment do not receive it.