The Dandy Warhols crack open the vault on covers LP ‘Pin Ups’
The group’s first full-length covers album sees galvanising new alt takes on familiar classics from the ‘60s and beyond.
Photo: Nicole Nodland
Everyone’s favourite alt-something group, The Dandy Warhols, have put out Pin Ups, a covers album made up of half-finished demos, outtakes, B-sides and foreign territory bonus tracks. It’s an ambitious collection of renditions, spanning The Beatles and Grateful Dead, through to Gang of Four and obscure-ish ‘80s rock group Love and Rockets.
In a way, you wonder why it’s taken this long for the Dandys to release a full covers LP. In 2004, they put out The Black Album/Come on Feel the Dandy Warhols, a double album that, among ‘lost’ debuts and other material, featured no less than eight covers. They’ve been around since before the turn of the millennium and have recorded countless hours of material in total, frequently unsealing the vault for fans. It’s long overdue.
But now, in 2026, Pin Ups is here to rectify that. A passion project of sorts, spearheaded by the band’s guitarist and founding member Peter Holmström, Pin Ups is a compilation of covers from across the band’s long history. The record boasts the full spectrum of covers, from scarcely-altered and less inspired to the radically overhauled and gorgeously reimagined.
The Cure’s Primary, for instance, is in the latter category, as dance-worthy as the original but undeniably ‘Dandy’. The Cult’s 1985 classic rock anthem Rain becomes three minutes of stripped-back, shoegazing bliss, in much the same vein as the seminal The Dandy Warhols Come Down.
She Sells Sanctuary, by the same band and from the same album, gets a similar treatment, with frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor’s wafting vocals fitting the laid-back take on a rock classic to a tee. The Beautiful People, originally by disgraced industrial singer Marilyn Manson, undergoes radical reassignment, morphing into a kind of deep southern, back-porch jam.
Like with any covers album, some songs should always be left alone — Bob Dylan’s Lay, Lady, Lay, America’s Sister Golden Hair (though the group gives it their best) — and some that just aren’t quite as inspired as the rest. What We All Want, while a worthy attempt, never comes close to Gang of Four’s seminal original. Goo Goo Muck uses a phasing guitar tone to swap the rampant psychobilly for psychedelia, but still doesn’t prove a standout.
Still, there’s lots to love here. Straight to Hell (The Clash) is one of the best covers on Pin Ups, applying the same minimalist sound of the original, but offering something fresh and hypnotic. It’s very Warhols. Blackbird, one of the most well-known songs on here by a mile, is radically different, while The Damned’s Love Song becomes a pulsing, club-ready beat that captures the cool sleaziness of the original.
As with any album of this nature, Pin Ups is a wholly mixed bag. Around half the cuts on here were absolutely worth polishing and putting out there. The other half, while an interesting look into the influences of the strange, ever-morphing beast that is The Dandy Warhols, does more for the band than the fans, perhaps.
That’s a shame, because when the Warhols get it right on a cover, they get it right. There are some omissions here that would have raised the bar, like the group’s take on The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, AC/DC’s Hells Bells or Call Me — all of which found a place on Come On Feel the Dandy Warhols. Maybe the group felt it would have been awarding too much time to a release that’s already fairly available out there. But, for an album with three sides to fill, I think there was enough space. Either way, Pin Ups does a decent job at collating some of the Warhols’ better lost material and establishes yet again that, most of the time, they are masters of their craft.
Pin Ups is out now via Beat The World Records.
