LIVE REVIEW: Suede @ Mountford Hall, Liverpool

Suede are having fun on this tour. That’s all. They’re in sweaty, beer coated venues playing songs they’ve only just written and bouncing about like lunatics. They have a weird goth-punk band opening for them and a mass of dizzy teenagers lining the barrier; they’re a definitively modern band. 

Suede at RFH 14 Sept 2025 credit Paul Khera

The strange gothic kids that christen the night are called Bloodworm, a three piece band from Nottingham whose instruments hang lazily from their hips like cobwebs. Siouxsie, Sisters of Mercy and The Cure creep their way into the set and yet they’re doing something entirely different, chucking bits of the post-punk revival, elements of pop and a handful of fluorescent white shirts into a cauldron. What bubbles out is a hazy spiral of…. Punk-gaze? Shoe-goth? Art-wave? We don’t know, it’s all very hazy, but it’s brilliant, and gets the audience just wired enough for the arrival of Suede. 

Swaggering on with even whiter shirts, even heavier drums and even more bravado, they allow the opening notes of ‘Disintegrate’ to ring out well before the dry ice has settled. Suede’s performance borders on camp; glam-rock stripped back to its gritty poetry, recited from the edge of a barrier. From his perch, Brett Anderson welcomes in the cloudy night, we leap into its arms and he is off. 

Suede @ Mountford Hall, Liverpool

From here, they play a slew of songs off of the new album. ‘Dancing With The Europeans’ is euphoric, drenched in a giggly artificial yellow light, the one that you eat your chips under after a night out, the side light you turn on when a girl comes round. It is that moment of absolute joy, when you’re exactly where you’re meant to be. 

‘June Rain’ appears a little later, one gloriously frantic crescendo, words falling over themselves to come out first, tumbling over a melodrama of drums. You can see Anderson picking up the strands of a broken self and weaving them together into a darkly romantic tangle of a song, building it note by note on stage. It is undeniably beautiful. 

He does the same for the audience in Tribe, which is introduced as a song for “the insatiable ones, the wild ones, the beautiful ones”. It is a recognition of a shattering world, it is an attempt to fix it. 

The gig, of course, flits between the newer material and the old classics with ‘Trash’ and ‘Animal Nitrate’ coming back to back. They’re dense musings on love and drugs played by a man spinning wildly in tight jeans and floppy hair; they’re the swirly pre-night-out conversations when everything goes serious before the glitter and bottles reappear.

Before this glitter is brought back there is a brief pause, an acapella version of ‘The Asphalt World’ that gives Anderson a chance to breathe before leaping into the final bars of the night. It is a breath that brushes gently against your ear, the breath taken before the spilling of a secret or a long overdue confession. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCNdb5zlQLE

For the last fifteen minutes of the night, Suede spend their time cramming as many 90s Britpop ballads into the space as humanly possible. It veers from the sparkling glamour of So Young, to the iconic chaos of Beautiful Ones, helter-skeltering its way down to The Only Way I Can Love You. 

This is a song that the audience collectively swoon over, drooping their arms over their partners, their kids, the strangers beside them. Through the dazzling choruses and seas of raised arms, the band slowly fades out, disappearing through a maze of spotlights and smoke machines. 

It seems weird to say that they’re a band to keep an eye on, a band that have headlined Glastonbury stages and are creeping towards a 40 year anniversary, but they are. Barring the skinny jeans and floppy fringes, there is nothing nostalgic about them. They’re a band with new songs, and new sounds, and certainly one to keep an eye on.