Mudlow - Run Thru The Cover Crop

A swamp-noir reworking of roots, blues, and outsider gems. Brighton’s swamp-noir stalwarts, Mudlow, return with Run Thru the Cover Crop, a full-length LP of cover versions released via acclaimed German label, JukeJoint500. 

Long known for their slow-burning, smoke-hung blend of blues, jazz, and Southern Gothic storytelling, Mudlow take a sharp left turn here - offering up ten carefully chosen reinterpretations that reflect the dark undercurrents and idiosyncratic soul of their influences. But this is no paint-by-numbers tribute. With Run Thru the Cover Crop, the band doesn’t so much cover songs as inhabit them - dragging each track down into the lowlands and dressing it in Mudlow’s signature grit and shadow.

‘Some songs came to us like ghosts with their boots still on. Others, we had to drag out of the mud and give them new clothes. Every one of them earned its place.’ The album’s selections span decades and genres, but they’re unified by tone and texture: lonesome, bruised, and cinematic.’ We didn’t want to just play them straight,’ adds drummer-man, Matt. ‘We wanted to see what they sounded like after being left out in the weather a while - rusted, bent, still humming.’ 

The album cover - a stark, twilight-drenched image of silhouetted poles and crows perched on power lines - captures the desolate, timeless feel of the music inside. Run Thru the Cover Crop plays like a haunted mixtape discovered in the glovebox of a car that’s been abandoned since the ‘70s. The album follows 2022’s Bad Turn and marks a bold addition to their growing discography - leaning into tradition while twisting it into new, stranger shapes. 

For fans of Tom Waits, Morphine, Solomon Burke, Kelly Joe Phelps, and anyone drawn to the murky end of the river