The New Cue #531 September 26: Geese, Nine Inch Nails, Eera, Donna Thompson, Danny Brown, Cate Le Bon, UFOs, Art School Girlfriend

“Come on Kent!”

Good morning,

Welcome to this week’s Recommender edition. How about we mix things up this week and just get straight into the playlist?

Oof! Didn’t see that coming did you – watch your head, here it is for the Apple Music crew!

It’s all about the element of surprise and putting a little Subscribe Now button in front of you before you’re expecting it so that if you’re not a paying subscriber you will become one before you even think about it:

But if you do need to think about it then please be assured there’s nothing to think about, apart from the fact that you are reading this intro which tells us you may be interested in having access to the whole edition and you can do that for only £5 a month. You’re telling me you need a second Subscribe Now button to sway you? That’s nuts but here you go:

OK, enjoy the edition, thanks for subscribing and if you didn’t, we’ll try you again next week,

Ted and Niall

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Recommender Pt. 1

Ted Kessler

Stop me if I’ve told this one before (I have told this one before…).

Once, when the weekly music press dictated and reflected the culture of the nation’s youth, New York’s Geese would have already had a couple of Melody Maker covers for each of their critically well-received if poorly selling albums. Their pictures would be pasted on the walls of art student dorms, their oblique quotes pulled apart for hidden meaning, their trouser lengths copied in indie clubs. Last year, after frontman Cameron Winter’s magnificently original solo album Heavy Metal – Tom Waits plays Rufus Wainwright, or vice versa - appeared near the top of end of year lists, anticipation for the third Geese LP would have ratcheted up to sleepy-eyed hysteria in the NME office. Then, when the first promos of that album, Getting Killed, appeared in NME mailbags in the summer of 2025, writers and section editors would have been banging desks in the editorial meet, getting over-emotional and hyperbolic, calling the quartet the most important NYC band in decades, etc, (while some older, more cynical staffers would have scoffed, dubbing them the Yankee Gomez, or something)...Then, upon its release, Geese would be on the NME cover this week, maybe next week too, then, over the following months, they’d hit the monthly covers, TV would tumble to their intense live charms and the world would be their oyster. It may still be their oyster. But this homerun piece of ecstatic far-out rock pop genius, its Tom-Waits-Strokes-Talking-Heads-Pere-Ubu-Sly-Stone and something that is entirely their own mix will sell far fewer physical copies and be less widely celebrated than is its due because we opened the devil’s window too wide and killed print media, mortally wounding physical music sales. Which is a shame. But let’s enjoy its unquestionable magnificence all the same.

You know who’d also be getting an NME cover soon? Tyler Ballgame, whose debut album For The First Time, Again (that’s going to be an annoying comma, editorially) is out at the end of January. Here’s another good taste from it, I Believe In Love, kinda Roy Orbison meets T Rex. Not sure it’s quite as good as his previous Got A New Car, but am nonetheless looking forward to the LP.