American Football Release SiriusXMU Double Single, Including a Cover of The Cure’s ‘Boys Don’t Cry’

American Football have released a double single drawn from a session recorded for SiriusXMU: an acoustic reworking of “Wake Her Up,” from last May’s LP4, and a cover of The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry.” Both tracks were taped in Nashville last August, between stops on the band’s No Feeling Tour, and aired last week as part of a four-song session and interview with host Josiah Lambert. They are now available on streaming platforms.

The cover does not reproduce the original’s jangle. American Football slow it down, trading the familiar guitar figure for spindly lines and mournful trumpets, while leaving the adolescent longing of the lyric where it was. “The Cure, and specifically ‘Boys Don’t Cry,’ has not only been fundamental to my growth as a songwriter but as much or more so on my development as a man,” Mike Kinsella said of the choice. Robert Smith called the result “one of the most heartfelt and beautiful Cure covers I have ever heard.”

The release arrives on the back of LP4, an album preoccupied with the disorientation, grief and compromises of middle age. That is the pairing worth noticing: a band whose recent work measures the distance from its younger self, returning to a song it first heard as that younger self. The tempo is the point.