The New Cue #472 March 7: Hamilton Leithauser, Billy Nomates, The Nightingales, University, Dirty Faces, Black Country, New Road, Quade, Yoshika Colwell

"Music is basically treated like cheap internet trash."

Good morning,

Welcome to your weekly Recommender fix. Everyone is welcome here but only those who pay £5 a month to be fully-fledged TNC subscribers can come inside. Come on, don’t be left out there looking like a loser when all your mates have gone on in. They’re laughing at you. Besides, it’s good for us to make some money from this, it means we can keep doing it. Go on, be brave, salvation is but a click away:

In today’s edition, we’ve got a brilliant Release Valve Q&A with Hamilton Leithauser and a fully-stocked selection of Recommender picks for you to enjoy. Here’s this week’s playlist:

And here it is for the Apple Music heads. We’ll see you on Monday for a bumper Life & Times interview with Edwyn Collins.

Ted and Niall

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Release Valve: Hamilton Leithauser

Let’s celebrate the release of This Side Of The Island, another magnificent and beautiful album by Hamilton Leithauser, the sometime singer with The Walkmen. We love The Walkmen, of course: their recent reunion delivered perhaps the most majestic live performances of their career. However, did they ever make an album quite as good from start to finish as This Side Of The Island? Up for debate. Here’s Hamilton…

The first record I loved was… Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I was four years old and I had it on cassette tape. But my copy was a little funny because we had these cassette recorders that were not like a boom box—they lay flat and had one tape deck, one speaker, and a built in mic somewhere near the speaker. My older cousin had the real copy of Thriller, so I found a blank tape, and we lay my recorder face down on his recorder, and hit play on his and hit record on mine. So I recorded the entire record from his speaker to my mic…just kinda mashed together. It didn’t sound great. There was also like dogs barking and little kids telling each other to shut up all over it. But I loved the record so much I listened to it over and over. I told my mom I wanted to be in a band and play “Beat It”, and I remember her telling me “well you’ll need to write your own songs”, and I was just heartbroken.

The last record I loved was… SOS by SZA. My daughters listen to pop music so I am totally up to date. A lot of what they love is a little boring, but SZA really stood out for me. I love her grooves and weird entrances. I like a lot of the pop star girls—but with weird consistency it’s the guys I find so boring. Most of the new rappers are just devoid of personality.

The musician I grew up most wanting to be is… Mick Jagger. My first love.