Whenever a band rolls into town playing a classic album in full, there’s always the danger of getting lazy and presuming to know exactly how the set list is going to go. But usually the band in question plays more than the advertised album, either as a warm-up or encore, sprinkling in career-spanning classics or b-sides and lost gems from the era of the main attraction.
In the case of RIDE’s appearance last night at Big Night Live in Boston, the latest stop on a co-headlining tour with The Charlatans that saw the shoegaze pioneers playing celebrated 1990 record Nowhere in full, the encore featured six extra, non-Nowhere songs, including an unexpected treat: A new, unreleased song called “Monaco” that the band aired out for the very first time.
Brad Searles of Bradley’s Almanac was at Big Night Live to capture the “Monaco” debut, and you can watch video of the performance below.
“Ok, this song we’ve never played before,” quipped RIDE’s Mark Gardener. “We’ve just been doing a new record over the last year or so… and we’re gonna give one a debut. It could go horribly wrong… we thought Boston was the night to try this.”
It certainly did not go wrong, as “Monaco” is a propulsive tune that doesn’t sound out of place in either of RIDE’s two eras, from their classic ’90s material this recent rebirth, which has given us two very solid studio albums in 2017’s Weather Diaries and 2019’s This Is Not a Safe Place. “Monaco” feels and sounds like a natural progression of a band with lots of creative juice left in the tank.
Give a listen and watch below, and be sure to catch up with our extended 617 Q&A with Tim Burgess of The Charlatans, who have brought their own classic album, Between 10th and 11th, on this North American run.