[2] After the departure of guitarist Bernard Butler and the lack of commercial success with Dog Man Star and its singles, Suede were being somewhat dismissed by the British music press with Oasis, Blur and Pulp taking the limelight.

[3] Determined to bring Suede back into the mainstream, frontman Brett Anderson decided that the sound of the new album would be the complete opposite of Dog Man Star.

[5] Despite Oakes' smooth integration into his new role and the band's rejuvenated spirit, Anderson was tired of touring and was keen to get back in the studio with his new songwriting partner.

[7] Buller had in fact welcomed a parting of the ways due to the fractious relationship between the band members during the recording of the last album.

[4] Unlike the tense and chaotic recording of Dog Man Star, which according to Anderson was mostly written "by post", in a shift-like format, the new material was far more celebratory in both its development and execution.

[9] As opposed to the previous album which followed a stringent pattern of Butler composing music for Anderson's lyrics, Coming Up was a more collaborative project.

Faced with the problem as to how to play them live, Suede recruited Simon Gilbert's cousin Neil Codling, who made his debut at a fan-club gig in January 1996.

[8] One of Suede's popular B-sides "Young Men" was left off the album, as Buller felt it was "too dark" and not as "poppy [and] in your face" as other songs on the record.

Its singles were much more successful than those of their second LP, while the lyrical content concerns the band's disaffection at the mid-90s hedonistic, celebrity-obsessed culture; "Beautiful Ones" and "She" are caricatures of British yuppies, celebrities and heroin-chic models.

"[24] Roy Wilkinson of Select called it: "a wondrous pop album, simultaneously immediate and full of scope, a lovely, charming mix of absolute beauty and the thrillingly awkward.

"[22] Caroline Sullivan of The Guardian felt that even despite the album's simplistic composition of "vibrant three-minute howla-longs", it still manages to avoid being too mainstream and incomparable to rivals Oasis and Blur.

Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle wrote: "Oakes more than fills the boots of his predecessor, and the new CD is a pure pop pleasure, thick and sinewy and terribly, cooly [sic] British.

"[27] James Hunter of Spin said that "the band pushes its case by ascending to heights of absolutely lucid songcraft that, in this often fuzzy era, feels exhilarating.

"[23] Rolling Stone critic Elysa Gardner noted their "concise melodies and taut, brashly energetic arrangements".

"[14] With similar views, Kevin Courtney of The Irish Times wrote: "Sometimes the songs seem a little too simple and throwaway, but Anderson tosses them aside with such aplomb, you can't wait to pick up after him.

"[28] Suede embarked on a short tour of the US and Canada in May 1997 to support the album,[29] but fell upon bad fortune when their equipment got stolen after playing a sold-out show in Boston, Massachusetts on 17 May.

[33] Excluding the US, where Coming Up had a later release date, year-end worldwide sales were roughly 600,000, with the top markets being the UK, Scandinavia and Japan.

"[40] In December 1996, The Face,[41] Melody Maker,[42] Q,[43] Hot Press[44] and Select[45] listed Coming Up as one of the ten best albums of the year, while Mojo[46] and NME ranked it 12th.

[50] In 1999, American music critic Ned Raggett, writing in Freaky Trigger, ranked Coming Up as the 42nd greatest album of the 1990s.