Best Loop Covers Laura Jane Grace to Mark International Trans Day of Visibility

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Apr 082025
 
best loop

Chicago-based punk rock band Best Loop released a new EP last week, on the occasion of International Trans Day of Visibility. And the EP is made up entirely of songs written and performed by Laura Jane Grace.

The EP, titled, Reinventing Laura Jane Grace, features three covers chosen from across Grace’s career. The album opens with “Cuffing Season,” which originally appeared on Grace’s 2024 album, Hole in My Head. While the original was acoustic, the Best Loop version is electric and has a punk edge to it.

Also featured on the EP is Against Me!‘s “Borne on the FM Waves of the Heart,” and “Shame.” (Grace fronted Against Me! from 1997 until the band’s indefinite hiatus in 2020.)

Best Loop member said in a press release announcing the EP, “Seeing Laura’s past support of the Girls Rock Camp Movement, combined with a friendly dialogue when we reached out snapped everything into place immediately. Though we have always been a punk band in style, we wanted this release to match that ethos in substance.”

The EP is available digitally via BandCamp and all the funds raised will be donated to Girls Rock! Chicago, which is dedicated to offering programs and camps for girls, transgender and gender-nonconforming youth.

The Mountain Goats Cover Sisters of Mercy to Intro Their Own Song About the Band’s Singer

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Nov 152017
 
mountain goats sisters of mercy

The Mountain Goats’ latest album Goths contains a song titled “Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back to Leeds,” which requres a bit of explaining. Andrew Eldritch is the lead singer of pioneering gothic rock band Sisters of Mercy. As Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle explained to Noisey about the song, “The Sisters of Mercy haven’t made any music in over 20 years, and I just thought at some point you have to go home and I liked the idea of Andrew Eldritch being a person. Like, ‘I take off my hat and my sunglasses and go hang out with my friends who knew me when I was just a person who enjoyed a nice, sunny day in Leeds.'”

Growing up as a teen goth (though he knew the genre as “death rock”), Darnielle’s favorite band was the Sisters of Mercy. “My girlfriend and I loved the fact that everyone else was making albums and touring, but in the beginning, the Sisters of Mercy only made 12-inch EPs that were fucking unbelievable,” he told Noisey. “We loved the first album [1985’s First and Last and Always], I saw them twice on that tour, but it lacked the magic, the total mystery of these 12-inches that had almost no details of any kind, just the names of the musicians and the songs. Each EP felt like something to parse, like a text to say how they’d grown.” Continue reading »