NME’s latest stars of The Cover, Crushed, have compiled an exclusive playlist to accompany the story’s launch – check it out below.
The alt-pop duo are on this week’s (September 22) edition of The Cover, a weekly 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 the profile of Crushed here, written by Patrick Clarke and featuring photography by David Milan Kelly.
To accompany The Cover, Crushed have curated an exclusive playlist for NME, titled ‘Overnight Drive’. The collection includes ‘Dissolved Girl’ by Massive Attack and Sarah Jay Hawley, Radagast’s ‘Breathing Labyrinth’, the Evian Christ and Bladee collaboration ‘Yxguden’, and more. Listen to the full playlist on Spotify below and on Apple Music.
In this week’s The Cover, Crushed open up about how they had no wider expectation when working on their debut EP, 2023’s ‘Extra Life’. “We had joked about not even sharing the songs at all, but they turned out even better than we could have thought. Then people liked them even more than we expected,” says Bre Morell. Work on a follow-up began as soon as ‘Extra Life’ finished, but in the background, the EP was outstripping expectations, racking up hundreds of thousands of plays and international press acclaim. “We’d be sitting at our jobs texting, like, ‘What is going on right now?’”
Shaun Durkan, the other half of Crushed, both of whom share instrumental, production and vocal duties, adds that the reception that greeted ‘Extra Life’ “was a real perspective change”. “It really motivated me. Made me really laser-focused on what we were doing,” he says. You can hear that increased confidence on ‘No Scope’, where that welding of influences becomes tighter, the extremes between the ‘go for it’ and the ‘life’s uncertain’ interpretations of the title are pushed further.
Find out more about Crushed in the full Cover story here and see who else has been on The Cover here.