NME’s latest stars of The Cover, Mandy, Indiana, have created an exclusive playlist to accompany the story’s launch – check it out below.
The French/Mancunian band are on this week’s (March 9) edition of The Cover, a manifestation of NME’s commitment to supporting emerging talent across the globe on a weekly basis. Every week, a rising artist will feature on The Cover – you can read Mandy, Indiana’s profile here, written by Spencer Hughes and featuring photography by Tom Oxley.
Alongside their The Cover story, Mandy, Indiana have curated an exclusive playlist, titled ‘The real second album was the friends we made along the way’. The selection includes cuts from former The Cover starrs including Model/Actriz and Lambrini Girls, as well as artists such as PVA and Water From Your Eyes. Listen to the full playlist on Spotify below and on Apple Music.
Mandy, Indiana have been making disorienting, incendiary music since just before lockdown, after frontwoman Valentine Caulfield and guitarist Scott Fair met while sharing a bill with their previous bands. Fair, from North Wales, had been playing in DIY bands since he was a youngster; Caulfield, meanwhile, is from Paris, and grew up singing choral and opera music until she discovered “a lot of really horrible metal bands”.
Their combination of harsh industrial dance sounds and intriguing French vocals quickly spread across music blogs and publications, eventually leading to a spot on the NME 100 of 2022 and a deal with tastemaking indie label Fire Talk. Their first album, 2023’s ‘I’ve Seen A Way’, was one of the year’s best indie albums and took them on their first big tours across Europe and the US.
Making their latest project ‘Urgh’, then, came with the typical curse of a second album: what do we do now? They spent a weekend trying to figure it out at an isolated studio outside of Leeds that Caulfield insists “was a murder house”. They cracked it when they wrote the muscular, snarling ‘Magazine’, which intermittently swaps out dread-infused, intensifying racket for a pulsating dance beat.
“I think what we were noticing when we were touring and playing festivals was that we were attracted to unexpected rhythms. It’s something that you can dance to, but that you don’t normally dance to,” Fair recalls. “You can dance to some experimental noise artist hitting a snare drum at really weird intervals and throwing things around a room – that’s really exciting to dance to.”
Read Mandy, Indiana’s full Cover story here and find out who else has been on The Cover here.
Every year, NME produces 50 Cover stories, showcasing the future of music via in-depth profiles and exclusive photoshoots. Check out our coffee table book NME The Cover 2024-2025, which features the likes of Kneecap, Lola Young, Amaarae, LE SSERAFIM, Oklou and many more.