The Portland band’s long-gestating covers collection is finally out

The Dandy Warhols have released Pin Ups on 20 March 2026 via Beat The World Records and Little Cloud Records. The record is the result of roughly twenty years of intermittent recording: B-sides, tribute compilation contributions, and shelved sessions that never quite found a home, now gathered into a single release. The source material is broad without being random; The Cure, Gang of Four, The Clash, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Runaways, The Byrds, The Damned, and others, bound less by genre than by the kind of stubborn personal attachment that accumulates over decades rather than being programmed in advance.

Title: Pin Ups
Release Date: 2026-03-20
Genres: Alternative Rock, Indie Rock, Post-punk
Label: Beat The World Records, Little Cloud Records

Featured image: © Nicole Nodland

The title comes from David Bowie‘s 1973 covers album, though Courtney Taylor-Taylor is candid about how much weight to give that precedent: “We called it Pin Ups because we couldn’t think of any other name. We named it at the end, not at the beginning.” The fact that he went back and listened to Bowie’s record and barely recognised most of the songs on it adds a useful dimension to what might otherwise read as an act of reverent homage.

The album exists at all largely because of guitarist Peter Holmström. In our interview with Courtney Taylor-Taylor, he put it simply:”A lot of times it just takes one member of the band to get a head of steam up and push something through to make it happen.” Twenty years of intermittent conversation apparently needed exactly that.

Accompanying the release is a video for “Goo Goo Muck,” a song first recorded by Ronnie Cook and the Gaylads in 1962 and later recast by The Cramps on their 1979 debut Gravest Hits. The Dandy Warhols’ version dates from the mid-2010s and began life pointed at the original Cook recording before Holmström’s reverb-drenched, Duane Eddy-inflected guitar redirected the session entirely. The result sits closer to The Cramps’ swampy undertow than to the song’s origins.

Pin Ups follows Rockmaker (2024), which drew in Slash, Frank Black, and Debbie Harry as collaborators, and Rock ReMaker (2025), a companion reworking of that material. Between those records and this one, the band also performed alongside The Oregon Symphony, an experience Taylor-Taylor placed in unusual terms: “When the mix is correct on stage and everything is balanced well, it’s pretty much the most powerful music experience I’ve ever had. It’s significantly more powerful. You have to do drugs and listen to our records to have it be as powerful as that is.”

The Dandy Warhols came together in Portland, Oregon in 1994. Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Peter Holmström had been close since high school; Holmström’s years living in New York’s East Village gave Taylor-Taylor an early entry point into the city, and the band formed largely out of proximity and a lack of more pressing obligations. The lineup settled into its current form, with Zia McCabe on keyboards, bass, and percussion and Brent DeBoer on drums and backing vocals, after original drummer Eric Hedford departed. Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia (2000) broke through commercially, placing “Bohemian Like You” in the UK top 5. Ondi Timoner’s documentary Dig! (2004), which tracked the band’s trajectory in parallel with The Brian Jonestown Massacre, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. By 2005 they had built The Odditorium, a 10,000-square-foot Portland facility that put their independence on a concrete footing. Taylor-Taylor published the graphic novel One Model Nation in 2009, a fictional portrait of a West German krautrock group navigating the political atmosphere of the 1970s; he is currently adapting it into a film.

What comes after Pin Ups is apparently something quite different. Taylor-Taylor described work in progress: “We’re working on a dreamy record that is hypnotic and beautiful. It’s fairly soft. No hard rock and drum beats. No palm muted guitar chunkies.”

Pin Ups is available on vinyl, CD, and digital formats.

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