It seems impossible that it’s been more than a decade since Suede’s last album, 2002’s A New Morning, and maybe even harder to believe that was only the band’s fifth album: Considering the constant drama and upheaval, the numerous career highlights and “comebacks,” the compilations (including two greatest hits collections and a double-disc B-side set), and the manner in which they slowly receded from view (Stateside, anyway) after 1996’s terrific Coming Up, I would have guessed they were seven or eight albums in by now. But I would have been wrong. They did, however, just announce some details of album No. 6: Bloodsports will be released in March, preceded by first single “It Starts And Ends With You.” And that is preceded by non-single “Barriers, which you can download for free via the band’s site (in exchange for an email address) or listen to below. It’s a pretty terrific song — definitely an extension of their anthemic Oakes-era material rather than the weirder, glammier stuff they did on the first two albums with Bernard Butler — and without question worth checking out.

[Via CoS]

Frontman Brett Anderson gave the full scoop to NME. As he told them:

After a year of sweating and bleeding over the record it’s finally finished so we wanted to get some music out there as soon as we could. ‘Barriers’ isn’t the first single but we are proud enough of it to just chuck it out there and thought that its pulsing, romantic swell somehow summed up the feel of the album quite nicely. The album is called Bloodsports. It’s about lust, it’s about the chase, it’s about the endless carnal game of love. It was possibly the hardest we ever made but certainly is the most satisfying. It’s ten furious song for me have reclaimed for me what Suede was always about: drama, melody and noise.