Lime Garden have shared an exhilarating cover of the classic New Order track ‘Age Of Consent’, which they recorded at Abbey Road.
READ MORE: “It felt like we were changing the world”: inside New Order’s seminal ‘Power, Corruption & Lies’
The Brighton four-piece put their spin on the iconic 1983 song during a recent visit to the historic London studio, where they also reworked a handful of songs from their upcoming ‘Maybe Not Tonight’.
Their choice to take on the track – released as the opening track of New Order’s second studio album ‘Power, Corruption & Lies’ –comes after they first performed a stirring cover of it during a headline show at YES in Manchester earlier this month. For their version, Lime Garden stripped back the driving energy of the original ‘80s classic, and elegantly reshaped it so it aligned with the nuanced, off-kilter feeling of their signature sound.
“Recording at Abbey Road was definitely a bucket list moment, the stuff we joked about since starting the band,” frontwoman Chloe Howard shared. “We chose to cover ‘Age of Consent’ as New Order were a major influence on the feel of our new album. We love how they meld guitars and synths to create an ‘alternative dance music’ sound.”
“Gillian Gilbert in particular is a huge inspiration in terms of her songwriting and those electronic melodies,” the singer added.
The new album from Lime Garden follows on from their critically acclaimed 2024 debut ‘One More Thing’, which captured the raw live energy they broke out during sets at festivals including Glastonbury and Green Man.
Already, the new album has been previewed by the title track, ‘23’, and ‘All Bad Parts’, as well as latest single ‘Downtown Lover’. The record is set to be their most intoxicating and luminous material to date, and will chart the highs and lows of youth, taking on the structure of “a night out, from start to finish”.
Alongside the new music, Lime Garden have also shared a new list of 2026 UK tour dates. The shows kick off in Bristol on October 2, and continue throughout the month with further stops in Oxford, Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Manchester and more. Visit here for tickets.
Lime Garden aren’t the only ones to share their praise for New Order, and in particular, Gillian Gilbert. Back in 2020, Welsh electronic musician Kelly Lee Owens called for more recognition for the artist – hailing her as a role model and “synth queen”, particularly for her work on ‘Power, Corruption & Lies’.
That record is widely considered to have helped define the sound of the ‘80s, and marked the shift from a post-punk sound into their unique style of synth-pop. At the time of its release, the record reached Number Four on the UK albums charts, and NME later listed it as Number 216 on the 2013 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Speaking to us in 2020 about how that album, and Gilbert in particular, served as a massive source of inspiration, Kelly Lee Owens said: “Having Gillian as the synth queen was fucking amazing, speaking as a woman in music. You can’t be what you can’t see, so to have a woman be a part of something like this and own her part was really inspiring.”
Gilbert then responded to the comments from Owens, and told NME: “It’s weird – you never think of your work as part of history or influencing people. It was weird when I joined because nobody expected a girl to be brought into the band. They expected another singer.”
“It got better in the ‘90s, but going to Japan in the ‘80s for a photo shoot was a real shock because they didn’t want to talk to me. They’d say to the male members, ’Can you tell her to move?’ That was how they treated women in them days. I was just there in the background a lot of the time,” she added. “It always felt like you were doing [something] special because not many women were playing keyboards or any instruments. If anyone saw a band like us, it might make them do something.”
New Order formed after Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis took his own life in 1980, and surviving members Peter Hook, Steve Morris and guitarist and now-singer Bernard Sumner brought in Gillian Gilbert on synth and guitar, rechristened themselves under a new name.
In 2020, the band spoke about the origins of the group with NME, and shared what it was like to embrace a new sound after the post-punk days of Joy Division.
“You never think of Joy Division as a band who had any fun – even though we did have a lot of fun,” Morris said. “The 21st Century perspective of us is that we were four dour young men living in basements. New Order was the complete opposite of that.” Check out the full interview here.
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