New Music: The Motels – Strange Days

As they prepare to play Darker Waves Festival in California, New Wave trailblazers The Motels announce their signing to Icons Creating Evil Art.

They mark that with Strange Days, a track that shows the band remain as relevant as ever. Their continuing influence was bolstered back in 2023 as their 80s classic Total Control appeared in season two of The Bear in 2023 and again this year as it appeared in Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette.

Strange Days does find Martha Davis and bandmates riffing on their New Wave roots, with the synths and sax embodying the streetwise swagger and gritty glamour of that era. The romanticism of Duran Duran has a presence, as does the smoky sophistication of 80s Roxy Music, but then that is also an approach to music that The Motels refined and defined both then, and down the years.  

The track looks at how fear is marketed to us; the group says Strange Days traces its origins to the millennium and 9/11. But as I listen to it against a background dialogue of planes being grounded, others at risk of falling from the sky, and the technology we rely on shown to be unreliable, it certainly captures the zeitgeist. Davis delivers the vocals in imperious fashion, drawing the full attention of the listener, an oracle with a prophecy that is already coming true. 

It serves as an introduction to the band’s ninth studio album, Escape Planet Earth, which they have disclosed will be “a concept album, dealing with the death of a once rational civilization, that let fear and commerce tell them what to do.”

Get the latest news on Escape Planet Earth and The Motels on Facebook and Instagram. Strange Days can be heard on Apple Music and Spotify.