Suede started Britpop before Oasis, but the band refuses to stay there. ‘We are anti-nostalgia.’

For most of its career, Suede assumed Britpop — the movement the band helped originate in the early ’90s — wouldn’t make a comeback. That assumption will be tested on Sept. 6, when Oasis plays the Rose Bowl, one of its first U.S. shows in more than two decades and part of what’s being billed as the biggest rock tour of 2025. Ninety thousand fans are expected to show up in Pasadena for the Gallagher brothers’ brash, sentimental version of Britishness — the stadium-sized equivalent of a pub on Santa Monica Boulevard. The day before, five thousand miles away, Suede will release “Antidepressants,” its 10th studio album.

In the U.S., the band goes by the London Suede, thanks to a decades-old legal dispute with an American folk singer. That name is more likely to elicit polite recognition than the ecstatic nostalgia Oasis still inspires. But in Britain, Suede was the spark. Its 1992 single, “The Drowners,” ignited what would become Britpop, the most significant resurgence of British rock since Beatlemania, paving the way for a new generation of bands and projecting British soft power abroad. The group’s self-titled debut album followed the next year, pairing stacked, anthemic guitar lines with intimate, distinctly British portraits of life.

Emerging from a cult of nonpersonality, where ordinary figures with unassuming names like Ian Brown ascended to British music royalty, Brett Anderson, Suede’s fey and foppish androgyne, reintroduced theatricality and glamour to the scene. For a brief spell, Ricky Gervais co-managed the band. The group landed the cover of Melody Maker, then one of Britain’s most popular music magazines, before it even released a song. Its debut album became one of the most anticipated releases of the early decade, with a volume of enthusiasm comparable to the Smiths’ arrival just over a decade before. When it was released, “Suede” became the fastest-selling debut album in British history.

“We released the first Britpop album,” Anderson says, matter-of-factly. “You have to accept that.” And yet the band’s legacy remains strangely unclaimed, overshadowed by bands who made their Britishness easier to export. As Britpop began to cohere into a recognizable genre and vision, Suede was canonized as its originators, only to be largely eclipsed as bands like Blur and Oasis came to define the movement.

Today, Anderson is joined by Suede’s bassist Mat Osman, who wears a distressed black tee and statement necklace. Anderson, who describes himself as “anti-fashion,” is wearing the same uniform he’s worn for the better part of two decades: an impeccably cut shirt and a pair of tight cocktail trousers. He reclines into his couch, one arm flung lazily behind his head, while the greens of his English garden sway in the waning summer light. His band has been around so long that the zeitgeist it emerged in has circled back around again.

Soon after Suede released its debut album, David Bowie told Anderson candidly: “Your playing and your songwriting’s so good that I know you’re going to be working in music for quite some time.” He was right. Ten albums in, Suede remains creatively restless, refusing the comforts of a heritage band afterlife. “We are anti-nostalgia,” says Anderson. The band’s latest album carries the hard-earned knowledge of age and the strange doubleness of feeling both young and old, like “18-year-old software on 50-year-old hardware,” as Anderson puts it. He and Osman are nearing 60.

“Antidepressants” is every bit an emblem of late-style. If Suede’s early work captured the ecstasy and collapse of first love, “Antidepressants” is about the more precarious work of maintenance. “People sing about falling in or out of love,” Anderson says, “but no one really writes about keeping a relationship alive.” Suede has become an experiment in longevity, driving teenage feelings through a wizened motor. Still, in the group’s songs today lies a complex kind of Britishness — at once maddening and beautiful, destitute and soaring — the very kind the musicians always sought to capture in their portraits of British working-class life.

Anderson grew up near Osman in the southern English town of Haywards Heath, part of a working-class family in a government-subsidized home. His father was a classical-music obsessive; his mother, an artist — tendencies that, at the time, were considered antithetical to working-class life. That assumed contradiction mirrored Suede’s own sensibility, which resisted tidy prescriptions of what working-class representation should look like. The music press, an industry overwhelmingly drawn from the upper middle class, struggled to reconcile it. “There’s a certain kind of working-class culture or person that the middle class is very comfortable with,” Osman observes. “It’s that Oasis, football-and-beer thing.” Britpop, in its mass-market incarnation, became precisely that: laddish, boozy and wilfully simple.

Suede quickly dissociated from Britpop when it curdled into something the band couldn’t recognize; something that, to the group, resembled a kind of jingoism. The band’s second album, 1994’s “Dog Man Star,” was Suede’s “anti-Britpop” statement, more art-rock fever dream than stadium singalong. It was around this time that the press came to define Britpop through caricatured rivalries: Oasis (working-class, football-and-pints Manchester) versus Blur (middle-class, art-school London). Suede, with its glam inflections and high-drama songs, didn’t slot neatly into either camp. The bandmates dressed in secondhand suits that made them look posh to some and, perhaps more damningly, refused to flatten their class identity into something easily legible.

Here lay much of the problem. As Noel Gallagher said himself in 1994, the year Oasis released its debut album: “You get a band like Suede and they write pretty decent music and all that, but Brett Anderson’s lyrics are basically a cross between Bowie and Morrissey, and I don’t think that some 16-year-old on the dole is going to understand what he means.” In Britain, Osman observes, “The cartoon is realer than the reality.”

In America, that cartoon is also beginning to gain traction, a surprising development given Britpop’s deep-seated anti-Americana stance. Unlike previous musical movements in Britain, Britpop required no reference to American culture and often positioned itself against it. As Britpop rose to prominence in England, grunge was taking hold in America. At times, Britpop acted as a cultural reflex against its Yankee counterpart. Blur even satirized grunge music with its megahit “Song 2,” a song of nonsense lyrics and unearned vim. Suede’s sense of Britishness, however, was less a matter of manifesto than of instinct, driven by the desire to render small lives and intimate details in sweeping, romantic, even histrionic gestures. Britpop conveyed Britishness through wryness; grunge articulated Americana through sublimated passion. “You know,” Anderson says, “if I could choose between grunge and Britpop today, I’d probably choose grunge.”

Osman says he’s making a conscious effort “not to be cynical” about Britpop’s return. “It’s basically a generation with spending power indulging nostalgia for their youth,” he says. “I’m trying to think of that as a positive thing.” He rationalizes it by seeing the Oasis gigs less as musical events than as exercises in monocultural communion, “as much about being in a huge crowd of people who feel the same as you as it is about anything else.” Suede, for its part, inspires a similar mass fervor in far-flung territories: in Chile, where the group recently played to a crowd in the tens of thousands, and in China, where it can comfortably fill sports stadiums. In America, a different story. Anderson says the band has no plans to tour the States, since it probably won’t make any money from it, “and we’re not doing charity work.”

While Oasis’ Rose Bowl show may be remembered as Britpop’s American victory lap, Suede remains focused on the future, still finding ways to push itself. “Britpop’s just automatically some kind of nostalgia thing, isn’t it?” Anderson says. “It’s a faded version of a past that never really existed.”