“I couldn’t be more bored by talking about the 90s,” says Suede bassist Mat Osman of the decade when Britpop ruled all and his band, led by Brett Anderson, were at their commercial peak with hits like “Trash” and “Beautiful Ones”. He adds: “There’s just very little interesting left to say. So this seemed like a chance to talk about a very different kind of thing.”

Osman is referring to a new biography by author Rodge Glass, As One: Remaking Suede. It leaves the band’s 90s pomp behind to tell the newer story of Suede’s remarkable and highly improbable second act. Few were grieving when the band split sorrily in 2003 – “it was a relief because we weren’t very good at what we were supposed to be doing,” Osman says – and there was little clamour for their return.

But since tentatively reforming in 2010 for a Teenage Cancer Trust concert at the Royal Albert Hall, Suede have forged an uncommon path forward, rebuilding themselves as a creative force across five albums that peaked with 2022’s and last year’s 10th album . Both reached number two in the charts and remoulded Suede into a vigorous post-punk-adjacent band accruing more power with age.

It has raised the band back to a profile and critical acclaim akin to the old days: last month gave Suede their first Mercury Prize nomination in 29 years: fifty-something men looking incongruous in a list alongside today’s pop stars Olivia Dean, Raye and Dave. “It’s really great to be recognised,” says keyboardistguitarist Neil Codling. “We are, to most people’s eyes, a legacy act that they don’t know or care are making new music. But we don’t rest on our laurels and think about ‘Animal Nitrate’ day in day out. We’re like a shark as a band. We need to keep moving forward.”

documents with great care and exacting detail how Suede restored themselves from the margins after, as Codling puts it, “the carnival had moved on”. The weight of their history was a well worn tale looming large: Anderson and Osman migrating to London from Haywards Heath in West Sussex; their quick-selling self-titled 1993 debut winning the Mercury Prize with its songs of squalid urban glamour; guitarist Bernard Butler leaving in 1994 while they were making darkly florid follow-up ; 1996’s poppy , the first album with Codling and guitarist Richard Oakes, becoming their best-seller; before Anderson’s crack and heroin addictions did for the quality control on 1999’s stranger, colder .

Codling had left due to illness by the time the dismal A New Morning, from 2002, sealed a miserable falling-off. Having something to prove has been continuous fuel. “Brett in particular really likes and needs to feel like he’s outside something and battling something,” Glass says.

But there is no real precedent for Suede’s creative revival. From The Stone Roses to Pixies, once-great reformed bands invariably struggle to recapture their past glories. It was this aspect that Glass, a Suede fan from the start, was drawn to. “There was such a fascinating story to tell that I couldn’t really believe nobody had got round to,” he says. He’d met Osman at a literary event at Edinburgh Festival (Osman is now an acclaimed author). Osman was a fan of Glass’s biography of Dutch novelist Michel Faber, and in Edinburgh, Glass took the chance to pitch his Suede book idea. It is by no means a hagiography – “I’m critical in places and loving in others,” Glass says – as he was given free rein to interpret as he wished.

“We didn’t want to course-correct,” Codling says. “It’s Rodge’s book. It was that thing, ‘Give me the unvarnished truth, and then I come to my own conclusions.’ That seems to me like a modern idea.”

Glass spent three intimate years with the band from 2022. “I expected more resistance, but I was given a staggering amount of access,” he says. He found a band that were “genuine, earnest, incredibly hard-working, self-critical, curious. And open, once trust was there. With Brett, maybe that trust was a little bit slower.” But Anderson felt comfortable enough to be unusually candid, and disclose that he had endured a brief lockdown-period Valium dependency, the panicked withdrawals from which were medicated with antidepressants.

In interviews promoting , Anderson was keen to stress that the music itself acted as a restorative, but chose not to disclose his own recent struggles. “Because that would be the story,” Osman says. “It’s impossible to talk about any kind of drugs and it not get turned into a one-line, clickbait thing. You can call that cynical, or you can call it idealistic. Because a good song or album contains multitudes. is about the power of music, the power of playing live.”

Osman says that he wasn’t aware of the extent to which Anderson was struggling (“you don’t bring that to work”). The band not conversing particularly well is a theme of the book, with the frustrations and tensions that inevitably follow. “We are five people who fail to communicate again and again and again,” adds Codling, who says the band learned things about each other by reading the book. “‘Oh, that’s what you thought?’”

“We all agree on what Suede should be, but there’s always going to be conflicts,” Osman says. A case in point being the fraught making of 2016’s , revealed for the first time to have stretched the band to their limits. On release, it was decided that it was best to present a united front. “I think we still have that 90s mindset that it’s very difficult to admit to f**king up and your vulnerabilities,” Osman adds.

For Glass, is a human story about creativity, and how five disparate characters unite with a common purpose to make something meaningful: “How do you face your own past and also the future without turning into some kind of cartoon, or living in a kind of denial?” The book therefore forensically recounts discussions around process, songwriting and messaging, from the reunion show through each album. “When we were young, we cultivated this mystique that everything we touched turned to magic,” Osman says. “But this is showing that 90 per cent of it is just hard work.”

There have been key decisions that helped Suede renew. After initially struggling to get 2013’s comeback album off the ground – “The first year of stuff that we wrote was not up to scratch,” Codling says – the band’s long-time producer, the battle-hardened Ed Buller, insisted on clearly defined creative roles: Codling and Oakes writing the music, and Anderson the melodies and lyrics. “Ed thought that having Brett write the music, which happened more for and A New Morning, made Suede sound less like Suede,” Codling says.

A dynamic plays out with Codling and Oakes needing to have Anderson on board before songs get worked on, at times a trying process. “We are all peers – Richard and I aren’t some kind of a clearing house for music that will get Brett to start writing,” Codling says. “It’s more that we just need to be in sync.” It leaves an unusual situation where Oakes and Codling write the music but stay in the background – Codling and Oakes historically do little press – with Anderson and Osman the public face of Suede. Codling smiles. “That’s just the division of labour.”

Oakes’s untold story is the book’s most moving element. reveals his struggles with depression after Suede’s split as he came to terms with what he calls “the best and worst thing that ever happened to me”. At just 17, he was thrown in at the deep end, joining the band as a replacement for Butler, and sent straight on an 18-month tour. Being perceived by some, as Glass puts it, as “an imitation of someone else” left scars and an imposter syndrome Oakes carried for decades.

“Looking back on it, [going straight on tour] was possibly a mistake,” Osman says. “Because he had no chance to actually prove himself as a songwriter. He was just playing someone’s parts.” Codling pushes back slightly. “It’s unfair to say that he was just writing someone else’s style until 2022.” But from onwards, Oakes asserted himself, with success a clear vindication of his singular talents. “That was really galling,” Osman says. “Both me and Brett thought, ‘F**k, we should have given him free rein much earlier on.’”

Another change has been in Anderson. While he remains starry and fixated over all aspects of “Suedeworld” – the lyrical content, aesthetics and presentation – he has dropped his armour somewhat, and increasingly seeks genuine connection with the audience. “I think he has learned to be more vulnerable, to show self-doubt,” Osman says. “And the live thing has become much more important to him. We used to be, ‘We are rock Gods, and you’re down there looking at us.’ Now he’s always trying to break down the barriers between band and crowd.”

That live feeling played into the directness of and , and steered Anderson’s lyrics about middle-aged anxieties over fatherhood, the knottiness of long-term relationships and the disconnect of modern life. “Brett has found a way to write for Suede’s audience in a way that is honest and convincing and new,” Codling says. The key reunion track, 2022’s “She Still Leads Me On”, is proof: a moving, uplifting anthem about Anderson seeking ongoing meaning from the relationship with his mother, who died when he was 21. “Seeing the way people reacted to that song was like, ‘OK, this is actually landing,’” Osman says.

For once, the band doubled down on something that worked rather than taking a left-field turn: a ballet score was scrapped to make . They could be rewarded by winning the Mercury Prize for the second time. Either way, Osman says Suede’s second act recovery isn’t finished. “We’re trying to build. The moment we think, ‘Everyone loves us. We’re great!’ it will all fall apart again.”

‘As One: Remaking Suede‘ is published on Thursday by New Modern