The New Cue #492 May 16: JID, PinkPantheress, Wolf Alice, The Lemonheads, Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band, Alan Sparhawk, Anna Doble, Chartreuse, Coach Party

"Music is a reminder of the past but, truly, music is for now."

Yeah, it’s Friday, baby! Let’s go!

Weekend starts here, right? Unless, like us, Thursday is your Friday because that’s actually the best night to go out, and Friday is hangover day, and, let’s face it, you don’t have a real job anyway, so you have to work all weekend on whatever you call this for a living…

Woah, bit too much perspective. Friday is Recommender day. Let’s leave it at that. Lots of that for our paying subscribers beneath the paywall. Join them and allow Niall and Ted perhaps the occasional day off/night out. A fiver a month. We appreciate all who do subscribe and support our (valuable) work.

We’ll see everyone on Monday with a very sweet Life & Times with Robert Forster. I just need to transcribe it - I’ll probably do that Saturday. Whilst I’m doing that, you’ll probably be listening to this excellent playlist of this week’s picks:

And here it is for the Apple Music crew.

Enjoy the edition,

Ted and Niall

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Recommender Pt. 1

Ted Kessler

When JID’s third album The Forever Story hit the Billboard top ten in 2022, propelled by two of the best hip hop singles of the decade in Surround Sound and Dance Now, it felt like the Atlantan was one record away from elevation to the kind of stardom that requires full-time security and the occasional use of formal wear. Since then, however, there’s been very little from him other than the odd guest spot, until his announcement last month of a new album called God Does Like Ugly, slated for August 8, and which he’s previewed with WRK, a track that very much suggests the promotion remains on. His intricate, scattershot wordplay is typically magnificent here, and there’s an even more otherly and sci-fi feel about the number. It sounds original, which is not easy in 2025. This week he delivered a suitably dystopian video for it and all eyes remain firmly on August 8.

At the end of my street in East London lies the second largest comprehensive school in our borough. Every morning, 1500 teenagers stream down our road, their school uniforms almost identically modified to not look like school uniforms, my own teenage daughter in the thick of them. The music I hear most being played on phones by the girls as they await each other by the tube at the other end of the street is always PinkPantheress, the infectious young magpie from Kent who nicks from hip hop, glittery emo and sped-up rave to deliver sweet-toothed but dead-eyed pop songs to die for. I’m trying here to suggest that the 24-year-old PinkPantheress is the voice of young British urban girls in school blazers in the way that Liam Gallagher is the leader of all British parka monkey males, but the truth is I only have a small sample size in E11 to go on. Nevertheless, PP’s new mixtape Fancy That is a brilliant fusion of can-you-really-sample-that-much-of-a-song, her deadpan saccharine vocals along with intergalactic beats that I have been playing all week, much to my daughter’s revulsion.