Drowned in Sound's 15 Favourite Albums of 2018". Drowned in Sound. 9 December 2018 . Retrieved 12 September 2019. The Blue Hour charted at number five on the UK Albums Chart, which is the highest-charting album by the band since Head Music in 1999. [20] The album has sold 27,396 units as of July 2021 according to the Official Charts Company. [20] Year-end lists [ edit ] Publication To Anderson, they’re not so different. “I wanted The Blue Hour to be set in a very bleak, unpleasant landscape of roadkill, B roads and fly tipping,” he says. “As a city dweller, you can kind of romanticise the countryside as this kind of Arcadian idyll, but having lived there for a couple of years, I can tell you it just isn’t like that. There is a lot of ugliness and cruelty out there.” Expansive and ambitious, sprawling but reassuringly familiar, The Blue Hour is the work of a band who are comfortable in their middle-aged skins but have never lost the joie de vivre of their younger selves. Copsey, Rob (30 April 2018). "Suede announce new album The Blue Hour". Official Charts Company . Retrieved 30 April 2018.

The Blue Hour isn’t afraid and it isn’t trying to be what it’s not. It’s that melodic bass, sustained yet riff laden guitar, synth and piano sound that only Suede have mastered. Add to that lyrics that touch a hopeless Englishness that’s both romantic and doomed, and you’ve got the record in a nutshell. I find it everywhere. It’s everywhere in life. No one wants to hear about the nice things in life. It’s not that my life is particularly unpleasant, but I just find those things more interesting. That’s where the tension lies. It’s about the push and pull. No one wants to write about harmony. It’s dull. Well, I can’t do it very well so I choose not to.”Brett Anderson canta de nuevo a los perdedores, a los solitarios, a los amantes, a los que vagan a la deriva, sin embargo lo hace dejando siempre un hueco a la esperanza y a la redención. No está todo perdido, Life is Golden. “As One”

It builds up to a kitsch finale, Anderson indulging his Bowie fixation amid the swirling strings and harp of All The Wild Places (“Of all the wild places I love / Yours is the most desolate”) and The Invisibles, all lush strings and impassioned vocals, a Still Life for the second generation of Suede fans.Dark, moody, and bloody fantastic. Richard Oakes has proved himself to be every bit as good as Butler ever was. And these last two albums also show that Brett was the beating soul of the band all along. In the same interview, Anderson continued to discuss the inspiration for the new record, as well as its character: Bloodsports came along, and while it was decent, it kind of felt like an improvement, it also seemed like a middle-aged and mildly predictable progression from where they were before. Solid. Not bad. But there's so much else out there to listen to, so why bother? Truly, I thought I was through with Suede. This is a new Suede, expanding on a sound that’s different to both the debut and DMS, and the post Bernard records. This is Blood Sports and Night Thoughts taking the next step. The Blue Hour is its own record but at the same time it works with the previous two releases in what feels like a whole. Homewood, Ben (26 September 2018). "Suede poised for Top 5 entry with The Blue Hour". Music Week . Retrieved 9 December 2018.

Few things in the musical calendar are quite so intriguing as a new Suede album, and this has been as much the case in their second act as in their first. They may have been lumped in with the Britpop movement, but it was something they always seemed to see through. They saw through its lumbering blokishness, its boorishness, its groaning, lead-footed, sing-a-long choruses. Suede were of a different color. Yes, you could hear a bit of Scott Walker and the odd Bowie-ism in their sound, but everyone has influences. Not everyone transcends them. Suede did and still do. Brett is candid about his son’s influence on him in creative terms: “It used to be friends or lovers but these days my muse is my son. I see life through his eyes. I imagined a fearful world, the way that a child sees it, and in a way, this was a reflection of my own childhood.” Al igual que los anteriores cortes, éste empieza con calma, con la voz de Brett secundada por teclados, guitarra, y bajo. La batería los recoge para meterlos poco después en un estribillo–himno majestuoso y armonioso. Una armonía que se rompe a mitad de la canción con la introducción de un potente riff-solo que ensalza, todavía más, el último tramo del tema. Finalmente, encontramos “Flytipping”. Un tema que sigue la tónica predominante del disco. Una guitarra con reverb y tremolo junto a la voz de Anderson ocupan la mitad del tema, hasta que a mitad del mismo llega la catarsis, donde todos los instrumentos a la vez dan forma y fuerza a un estribillo que termina languideciendo en un nuevo falsete. Después, un solo de guitarra de Oakes nos hace volar por hermosos paisajes durante más de dos minutos. Uno de los mejores cierres que hemos escuchado en los discos de Suede.

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Today I found a dead bird,” sings Brett Anderson on this album’s Scott Walker-esque centre-piece, ‘Roadkill’. Poor bloody bird, with its “ brittle bones like snapped twigs / Savaged by the tyres and tossed in the tar / Broken in the English dirt / A carcass for the carrying crow”. Set atop a haze of strings and drones, Anderson’s spoken-word lament and the surrounding atmosphere of fog, doom and death capture the essence of ‘The Blue Hour’. Excellent single ‘Life Is Golden’, whose video captures the abandoned post-apocalyptic town of Pripyat after the Chernobyl disaster and which soars in the same way that ‘The Wild Ones’ did, is a perfect example of where Suede are at in 2018. Having turned to producer Alan Moulder to collaborate with, rather than their mainstay creative foil Ed Buller, they’ve managed to expand their canvas even further, mixing gothic grandeur and poetry with a brutal absence of sentimentality. The Blue Hour is an update of Dog Man Star for austerity ravaged, Brexit-threatened Britain, and its left-behind towns, hollowed-out cities and untamed countrysides. Turner, Luke (21 September 2018). "Suede: The Blue Hour review – a wild ride into a rural nightmare". The Guardian . Retrieved 22 September 2018. Suede vuelven a la escena musical por la puerta grande con “The Blue Hour”, su octavo disco de estudio, un disco que, pese a sonar más oscuro e inquietante que sus predecesores, mantiene ese pop cuidado y melódico que tantos éxitos les reportó antaño. Y es que la mayoría de los catorce temas que lo componen cuentan con unos estribillos repletos de magia y belleza.

SUEDE:: Banda anuncia novo álbum para setembro". Urge | Música, Filmes, Séries, Games (in Brazilian Portuguese). 30 April 2018 . Retrieved 5 May 2018. Trendell, Andrew (19 September 2018). "Suede – 'The Blue Hour' review". NME . Retrieved 18 December 2019. God Brett is better than ever. His voice is astoundingly expressive, at full strength, pitch-perfect. And on stage, wait and see him move, smile, take the wand and orchestrate the cult. Le sigue “Mistress”, un tema carente de batería, más lento, que se soporta, primero sobre la firmeza de los arpegios de Richard Oakes, y el bajo, teclado y cuerdas después. Nos presenta la historia de un affair contada desde el punto de vista de un niño, que ve como su padre engaña a su madre con otra mujer, con todas las dudas que ese hecho le suscita. “Beyond the Outskirts”Insomnia had me listening to it at 2am on 21 September (New Zealand time) when I guess the rest of the world may not have got their grotty little paws on it just yet. It didn’t grab me like that sacred moment when I first listened to Dog Man Star, and realised that I wasn’t the only one who both loved and hated the housing estate hopelessness of suburban England in the first half of the 90s. But it had me in a different way. Clayton-Lea, Tony (21 September 2018). "Suede: The Blue Hour review – Orchestral manoeuvres with a spark". The Irish Times . Retrieved 20 October 2018. The result is possibly the most satisfying entry in what those of us of a less fanciful persuasion might call a trilogy. There’s a concept, but it’s worn lightly – lightly enough, in fact, that ‘concept album’ would be a misleading appellation. The story isn’t fully explained or resolved, leaving room for the listener’s mind to become part of the action. There’s a missing child amid the menacing open spaces, fields, and woods of the countryside as night descends. Other characters emerge in the songs, though it’s hard to determine whether for good or ill.