The New Cue #496 May 30: Shura, Whitney, Cliffords, Thom Yorke, Demise Of Love, Modern Nature, Garbage

"Next time you crowdsurf, don’t take the mic"

Hello there,

Whoa edition four-hundred and ninety-six. Maybe we should start thinking about doing something special for edition number 500. Or maybe it’s too late. Or maybe there’s enough pat on the back-ery going on out there and we should just keep marching on. Yeah, I think we’ll do that, starting now: welcome to your weekly Recommender fix, full of the usual high-quality music picks from your hosts and a Q&A with Shura, who has put her synth away and returned with a very enjoyable indie-folk record.

Most of this edition is having the time of its life behind a paywall, so you’ll need to be a paying subscriber to get in there and join the party. It costs £5 a month, will help keep The New Cue rolling and will make you look really cool in front of your friends, ooh look this one comes with a little caption to try and convince you:

Are you going to support us, READER?! Here's this week’s playlist as a sweetener:

And here it is the Apple Music crew.

Enjoy the edition, see you on Monday for a Life & Times chat with U.S. Girls.

Ted and Niall

---

Recommender Pt. 1

Niall Doherty

One of my best mates recently moaned at me because he runs to our Recommender playlists and apparently my choices one week dramatically slowed him down. I fully expect a text this week because I’m beginning my picks with Dialing In, a haunting, slo-mo ballad from Thom Yorke. The Radiohead frontman is no slouch, though, he’s banging out the tunes at the moment. This is like nothing on his recent collaborative record with Mark Pritchard or last year’s two albums with The Smile, more a callback to his Suspiria and Confidenza scores, eerie soundscapes and lullaby-ish keyboards forming a mist around his forlorn, fragile vocal. A reworking of a track that’s been around for a few years titled Gawpers, it features as the theme to forthcoming Apple TV+ show Smoke.

The debut self-titled EP from Demise Of Love will get the BPMs up. The trio is a collaboration between electronic dons Daniel Avery, Ghost Culture and Working Men’s Club but the alchemy takes them to a place that doesn’t really touch on any of their solo work. It’s an EP that shapeshifts its way through four very good songs, from Nine Inch Nails-y industrial-punk to danceable, early 90s psychedelia to airy indie-pop. Each song almost sounds like a different band but it somehow works.