One night at karaoke, I gave a soulful, hammy rendition of Talking Heads’ Burning Down the House to a standing ovation. Someone lauded “I love what you added to that song”. I really wish I could take credit for reinterpreting this song, but the version I asked the KJ to play was actually by Tom Jones with an assist from the Cardigans! Indeed, many bands that seem to not have a new wave pedigree are actually fans of the style, or at least some of their songs. This article focuses on inventive covers of new wave classics.
Believe it or not, it wasn’t unusual for the Welsh Wailer himself to cover new wave songs. Enjoying a revival in the ‘90s thanks to the Carlton Dance, he literally put on the blue spandex and covered the synth-heavy Situation in the synth-hostile 1994 (when introspective grunge and brit-pop ruled the roost). He just doesn’t care - I love it!
Emboldened by this, Jones made a covers album (Reloaded) five years later, with assists from popular ‘90s bands. He picked Burning Down the House (gutsy), and got the mellow Cardigans (a Swedish band not influenced by ABBA) for the sonic arrangement.
What makes the cover sizzle is the collision of energies:
It shouldn’t work, but It absolutely does!
“I’ve never been narrow-minded about music. I like some classical, some country and a lot of 50s rock ’n’ roll and 60s rhythm & blues. I like some ballad singers like Tony Bennett and Sinatra. I like any music that is genuine. If it’s put across honestly and well, I like it.” - Tom Jones
Save it For Later is a new wave staple. And while it didn’t chart high, it has aged remarkably well over the decades, being in Spiderman Homecoming in 2017. And while watching The Bear with my wife, a raw, vulnerable, acoustic song played. “That’s a great song by Vedder", she said. A few seconds later, I realized it as a cover of Save it For Later. And, as a surprise to me (as Pearl Jam avoided synths and pep like the plague), Vedder has affection for post-punk and new wave. In fact, Pearl Jam has publicly saluted Devo.
I’ll say that Vedder’s rendition of Save It For Later feels like a Pearl Jam track slowed to a late-night reflection. Vedder lengthens the song by almost a minute - but that’s totally fine as he’s opting for longing and reflection (like the scene in the Bear it supported). And bonus points to Vedder for incorporating a saxophone - an English Beat staple. It integrates well with the song- definitely not a tack-on!
“I think that Ed decided we were going to do that. We talked about it a month ago and it didn’t really sink in. When I knew we were going to do it and I listened to that song I really started thinking about the impact of Devo. They mean so much to us and it really was a salute to them.” - Stone Gossard (Pearl Jam), on dressing as Devo for a performance of “Whip It”
In the late ‘90s a group of contemporary artists teamed to make a Duran Duran tribute album. There are some ska-revival artists in there like Reel Big Fish and Less Than Jake. These are mostly fun covers but things are played fairly safe. Until the standout track - in a style I rarely enjoy: a cover of The Chauffeur in a alternative metal sauce courtesy of Deftones. Now two highlights of the original were Nick Rhode’s delicate-yet-creepy synth and Simon LeBon’s aloof vocals (he’s usually known for vocal bravado, but he can also deftly use the freeze ray). One of the moodiest tracks in Duran’s catalog, its tension and voyeristic atmosphere make it a great fit for the Deftones’ style. They wisely play to their strengths and shift the sound to unfiltered, nihilistic guitars and the slightly menacing vocals of Chino Moreno. I almost overlooked that the Deftones played LeBon’s flute outro note-for-note, but with a high-pitched guitar. Perfect homage while not straying from their sound! It’s one of the rare tribute-album cuts that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the original in its own way.
"Duran Duran was the same thing to me, you know growing up musically they were just great… It was so refreshing to hear and it still felt so musically... I still really connect with it that. I don’t know why, it’s just you know the album spoke to me and as a band and Simon [Le Bon] as well as a lyricist, and you know as musicians. - Chino Moreno
The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me is a quintessential ‘80s song, with its tight, icy synths, and Oakey’s deadpan vocal standoff with Susan Ann Sulley. So when Neon Trees tackled it 30 years later, they didn’t strip it down like Vedder later did with his cover. But rather, they give Don’t You Want Me a supersizing. The synths are now thicker and more ornamental, to reflect the 2010s shift to maximalist pop. They add splashes of crunchy guitar - the kind Andy Taylor of Duran Duran would slip into their songs. The guitars are turbo-charging the synths, rather than fighting them. Vocally Tyler Glenn is quite different than Phil Oakey, with Tyler more expressive and melodramatic. Instead of mimicking Oakey’s signature deadpan, Tyler uses his expressive vocal style to his advantage on Don’t You Want Me. He belts, pleads, and emotes, turning the ice of the original to the fire. It’s one of those rare covers where heightened drama actually deepens the song’s emotional core rather than drowning it.
“I think for groups like Duran Duran there is a sense of nostalgia to them. People that grew up in the eighties don’t want to forget about them. I don’t know if that is a direct reason why we have found success is because a lot of people of that age have found that quality in our live performances.” - Tyler Glenn
The band Orgy was a melding of industrial and nu-metal coming out in the late ‘90s. Their timing was great as MTV and radio were leaning on these styles hard. And while their cover of New Order’s Blue Monday seems like an odd choice, it’s actually not considering that industrial music owes a lot to synthpop (Trent Reznor himself played in Cleveland-area synthpop bands before Nine inch Nails). I was in college when Orgy’s Blue Monday blasted through MTV harder than that guy in their first ad, and my campus took notice.
Orgy’s recipe: invert, invert, invert. New Order’s clinical pulse turns into industrial overdrive. Sumner’s cool-as-ice vocals turn into Jay Gordon’s berserker snarl. The original’s well-known kick-drum synth is replaced with a wall of crashing guitars. Gen X hated it, Millenials loved it: so I guess it’s not a shock that, being cusp, I liked both. And that it survived (even thrived) after this mutation, really speaks to the structurally-mighty original that New Order created. And while I couldn’t sit through an album of Orgy, I bopped to their follow-up single Opticon. Which leads me to…
At the turn of the 2000s the tide slowly turned back toward synth goodness. For example, the Human League had a solid return-to-form with Secrets in 2002 after stumbling in the ‘90s. And what better homage to that than a cover of the eerie-yet-catchy Empire State Human (off their debut) by a band uses mostly an electronic organ from even earlier? The original is one of the earliest glimpses of the Human League’s eerie futurism. It has the cadence of a nursery rhyme while being a dystopian monster tale (so I don’t play it for my daughter).
Back to the Optigan, it’s pretty innovative: an early ‘70s keyboard that plays sounds from optical discs. It has a warped, haunted carousel vibe - a refreshing change from the ‘60s Musitron (of Del Shannon fame). With this secret weapon, Optiganally Yours’ Empire State Human is unabashedly retro but also offers a different timbre than the League original. The female vocal in the chorus provides variety while not pulling away from the creep zone. The result? A cover that feels even more retro-futurist than the League original.
Interestingly enough, Heaven 17 (who had members in the original version of Human League) had a cover years later that sounds like the Optiganally cover.
In the end, that karaoke mix-up wasn’t a fluke - it was a reminder that new wave has seeped into far more corners of music than we notice. These covers come from artists who’d never be filed under “new wave,” yet something in these songs pulled them in anyway. Reinvented, rearranged, or blasted into new genres, the spirit still shines through. And if a cover can trick a room into cheering? That’s new wave doing its job.
