This is what happens when you’re alone on a cold, rainy afternoon with too much memory and just enough gear: a collection of instrumental covers of ’80s bands I grew up worshipping—mercifully stripped of their moody vocals and Anglo accents. Guitars, bass, drum pads, synth—all played by me, in a quiet loop of trying to preserve something without the pressure to sound like I grew up in suburban Manchester. It’s nostalgia without the adolescent identity crisis: reverb-heavy, hook-laced background music for remembering a time when feelings were oversized, lyrics were unintelligible, and eyeliner was for everyone.

New Wave Minus One

I Melt With You (Instrumental) sounds like something you’d find on a dusty cassette in the glove box of a car that doesn’t exist anymore. It was stitched together out of weekend boredom and the kind of longing that only comes when you realize the past wasn’t perfect—just simpler. No vocals, no pretense—just guitars doing their best to say everything that words can’t. All instruments performed, recorded, and mixed by Chuck Baclagon.

I Melt With You – Instrumental Cover of Modern English

This is an instrumental cover of Pretty in Pink I recorded years ago, back when my old band thought we could sneak a New Wave anthem into our mostly garage-punk-shoegaze setlist and make it work. We never actually played it live—something about the tempo always felt like it belonged to a different kind of heartbreak than we were used to performing. Still, I held onto this version. It sounds like 2 a.m. in someone else’s kitchen, the party long since over, with cheap strings of fairy lights still on and no one bothering to turn off the amp. It’s less about nostalgia and more about that fleeting moment where you thought reinvention was still possible—before the morning came and reminded you otherwise.

Pretty in Pink – Instrumental Cover of The Psychedelic Furs

An instrumental cover of Seona Dancing’s More to Lose, lovingly stripped of its synths and rebuilt with jangly, melancholic layers of guitar—because sometimes heartbreak sounds better on six strings. A sonic time capsule from the ’80s, reimagined in a bedroom studio three decades too late, hoping somewhere out there, Ricky Gervais pauses, smirks, and almost remembers being in a band.

More to Lose – Instrumental Cover of Seona Dancing

An instrumental cover of Boys Don’t Cry—the song that first tricked me into thinking new wave was a lifestyle choice and that playing guitar could solve emotional repression. I found it a decade late in the mid-‘90s, when it already sounded like a postcard from someone else’s youth. Still fun to play, even if I’ve long outgrown the whole “emotions are embarrassing” thing. It’s like visiting your teenage bedroom and realizing you turned out okay anyway.

Boys Don’t Cry – Instrumental Cover of The Cure

Nearly a decade ago, I recorded an instrumental cover using a guitar, bass, drum pad, and a synth module on GarageBand for iPad—meant for a girlfriend to sing over, though that never happened, the way the relationship didn’t quite either. It sat unfinished, waiting for a voice that kept postponing itself, much like we did. Now it’s just a loop of almosts: a space left open for something that never came, a quiet timestamp of a feeling that tried to become a song but settled, instead, into memory.

Bizarre Love Triangle – Instrumental Cover of New Order

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New Wave Minus One

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