Skip to content
Premieres

FREE MP3: Mates of State Cover Girls!

100407-mates-of-state.jpg

Indie-pop husband-wife team Mates of State will join a growing legion of bands releasing cover albums — see Nada Surf, the Bird & the Bee — with this summer’s Crushes (The Covers Mixtape), a 10-song set of other people’s music. The album’s infectiously adorable take on “Laura,” a track from Girls’ excellent debut Album, is available for free download below.

The bands covered on Crushes, the first output from Jason Hammel and Kori Gardner since 2008’s SPIN-approved Re-Arrange Us, represent a very wide range of styles, from noise rockers the Mars Volta to twee sentimentalists Belle & Sebastian to ’70s radio faves Fleetwood Mac.

“We’ve been talking about doing a covers record for a long time,” the Connecticut-based duo said. “We’d hear a great song at 2 A.M. while driving the straight line from one part of Texas to the next, and all we’d want to do is play that song as if we had written it.”

Re-working the music of others actually appears to have inspired Mates of State to get back to recording originals again. “When we were finished, we couldn’t wait to write our own songs again,” they said. “In a sense, these other great bands made us a better band.”

Download “Laura” and tell us what you think — and check out the full tracklisting for Crushes here:

1. Laura (Girls)
2. Son et Lumiere (The Mars Volta)
3. Sleep the Clock Around (Belle & Sebastian)
4. Technicolor Girls (Death Cab for Cutie)
5. Long Way Home (Tom Waits)
6. Love Letter (Nick Cave)
7. Second Hand News (Fleetwood Mac)
8. 17 Pink Sugar Elephants (Vashti Bunyan)
9. Roller Coaster Ride (Dear Nora)
10. True Love Will Find You in the End (Daniel Johnston)