'Twin Peaks' Has An Amazing Musical Legacy

Experimental noise group Xiu Xiu recently announced that they'd be covering the music from Twin Peaks at their June 4 concert at the Alamo Drafthouse in San Francisco. So far, so exciting. Xiu Xiu's album Xiu Xiu Plays the Music of Twin Peaks dropped recently, so the timing's all sorts of appropriate. The album itself features covers from the 1990-1991 drama series and bandmate Jamie Stewart told Indiewire: "The music of music of Twin Peaks is everything that we aspire to as musicians and is everything that we want to listen to as music fans. It is romantic, it is terrifying, it is beautiful, it is unnervingly sexual."

Stewart truly is devoted to the cult of Lynch. He also released a special Lynch-themed playlist on Record Store Day, which contains wonderfully thoughtful commentary on tracks featured on Twin Peaks, and it's well worth a look. Xiu Xiu are the most recent musicians to announce Lynch as an influence, but they're not flying solo on this one. Obviously a TV series as wonderfully cuckoo and groundbreaking as Twin Peaks has influenced a whole gamut of musicians. The number of musicians who directly or abstractly reference Twin Peaks is a little too high in number to run through all of them here. So let's just do a brief summary of some of the more obvious candidates for the list.

The Music Of David Lynch

2015 was an orgy for the ears for Lynch addicts when the album The Music of David Lynch dropped. This was a recording of live performances by artists like Moby, Zola Jesus and, yes, Lykke Li, reinterpreting the songs of Twin Peaks, and it's all sort of magical. Angelo Badalamenti, the original composer of much of the music for the series, was also there to perform. YouTube away, you bright young things.

Dwellers On The Threshold

A hip hop duo inspired by Twin Peaks is every bit as brilliant as it sounds like it would be. They released their album Live From The Black Lodge on February 24 this year – i.e. exactly 27 years after Laura Palmer passed away on Twin Peaks. That attention to details is impressive and deeply creepy in equal measures.

You Say Party — "Laura Palmer's Prom"

Those mournful vocals and retro stylings are a perfect pairing for a Laura Palmer tribute. This is Twin Peaks inspired music to slowdance with Agent Cooper at your prom to.

The Joy Formidable

Welsh band The Joy Formidable decided to release a cover of Angelo Badalamenti's Twin Peaks theme. They told Welcome To Twin Peaks, “We had some time during the making of our new album to get excited that a new series of Twin Peaks is on the horizon. Here’s our tribute to that legendary series." It's all sorts of dreamy.

Obviously this is just the tip of the musical iceberg, but it's a good start to getting into the right headspace for Lynch's — and Twin Peaks' — return to the small screen. So slip off your saddle shoes, slip into a pair of ruby red heels and get ready to shake it like Audrey.

Image: CBS Television Distribution