Song of the Day: Suede, "Animal Nitrate"

Despite my longtime devotion to ‘90s Britpop, I was late to Suede. I took sides in the Oasis versus Blur battle and obsessed over Pulp’s Different Class and flew all the way to France just to buy a copy of Manic Street Preachers’ This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours (not really, though that album, which the British press declared one of the best of 1998, was not yet available for sale in the United States when I went to Paris with my high school French teacher in April 1999; I bought it at the Virgin Megastore on the Champs Élysées, along with a French-dubbed VHS copy of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective).

But Suede somehow breezed right past me. I knew that they were one of those bands who had to have an altered name in North America (they were known as the London Suede on these shores, just as Charlatans were known here as Charlatans UK; in Canada, Gavin Rossdale’s band Bush was known as Bush X), and I knew that Elastica frontwoman Justine Frischmann was the group’s original lead guitarist, and I knew her replacement Bernard Butler also left the band and produced a bunch of cool 2000s indie and made a solo album I got for a quarter at a thrift store (and who I often confused with the Verve’s Richard Ashcroft). They never had much of a moment in the United States (their only appearance on an American chart was “Metal Mickey,” a single from their self-titled debut that got to number seven on the Billboard Modern Rock list in the summer of 1993 during Porno For Pyros’ “Pets” reign on top), but those first few albums were a proper phenomena in the UK. “Animal Nitrate” was the biggest smash from their self-titled debut, a glammy grind of a singalong with a ton of posturing and a video that found androgynous frontman Brett Anderson (no relation) preening around his be-curtained flat and slapping around a dude in a pig mask. It’s wild stuff.

The song is infectious as hell, and I managed to really sink my teeth into Suede right around the time I visited London in 2017. It was 25 years after the arrival of Suede, but I still totally understood the energy of London filtered through those songs. And even a quarter century later, I still love the bratty simplicity of the chorus: “What does it take to turn you on?” It’s a question we should ask ourselves every day.