Long ago, a Dischord band tackling Depeche Mode would have been a bigger deal, but the landscape has shifted. Nowadays, the borders between different musical worlds feel more porous, and it seems entirely natural—especially when the Dischord artist in question is Shudder To Think, a glam-tinged art-punk outfit that always sat a notch above their peers.
Last year, the reunited Shudder To Think issued a two-track single, their first new material in 27 years. This Friday, they’ll follow it with Who Sent You?, a three-song EP. We’ve already premiered the title track, and now Shudder To Think have delivered a sharply fractured rendition of “Something To Do,” a cut from Depeche Mode’s 1984 album Some Great Reward. They bend it so it sounds almost like a Shudder To Think tune. Here’s how the band describes it:
For some of us, the album Some Great Reward stands as the peak of Depeche Mode’s brilliance and imagination.
Not that they stopped making astonishing music—both singles and albums—after that, but SGR represents the apex of their first phase, where catchy pop hooks collided with candy-store synth experiments and a restless longing tangled with the darkest bedroom malaise. After that, their records grew more mature and refined, less chaotic.
There’s a gaudy audacity to Some Great Reward that perfectly soundtracked a suburban teenager, wild on the inside, about to erupt, misunderstood, romantic as all hell.
The track “Something To Do” opens the record, and it’s a semi-forgotten (compared to other DM singles), underappreciated banger about being young, angsty, bored, and horny (“put your leather boots on”) in a shabby old industrial town. It’s about misery turned into your own fun—dangerous and thrilling, but in that youthful way where consequences haven’t yet surfaced (those would come on later DM records).
When we were making the new Shudder album, “Something To Do” came on the satellite radio and pulled Craig’s memory back to sixteen, during a family trip to Israel, in love and hating everyone and everything, flipping the cassette in his Walkman from Some Great Reward to XTC’s English Settlement and the Dukes Of Stratosphear. A girl named Robin and a girl named Julie…
Anyway, we HAD to cover it.
So, minutes after laying down the basics for the final track on the record, we quickly learned its structure and let it fly, perhaps three takes, no corrections.
Our friend (and Craig’s brother-in-law), the great Thomas Lennon, happened to be visiting and stood in with us as we threw it down. Tom’s a big Depeche Mode fan and a big Shudder To Think fan, so his energy and enthusiasm closed the circuit and gave us exactly the impetus we needed.
Often at the end of a project, there’s magic gunk left at the bottom of the fuel tank, like potent resin at the bottom of a bowl. This was that.
Watch Shudder To Think’s cover of “Something To Do” alongside Depeche Mode’s original below.
The Who Sent You? EP arrives 9/11 on Dischord.
