(Credits: Far Out / Krists Luhaers)
Mon 1 September 2025 20:00, UK
Considering the strength of the albums that the Pixies tend to put out, especially in their initial run as a group, it’s hard to ever think of them as having ‘deep cuts’.
It’s hard to be presented with an album as strong as, say, Surfer Rosa or Doolittle, and to want to listen to it as anything other than the complete package. Yes, I understand the urge that someone might have to pick out a song like ‘Gigantic’ or ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’ and just listen to those on repeat, but are you really going to stop yourself from hearing ‘Broken Face’ or ‘Dead’, simply because you’d rather pick and choose your favourites from these masterpieces? I think not.
Perhaps something like ‘Nimrod’s Son’ from the Come on Pilgrim debut EP could count, considering that fans tend to overlook the record due to it not being a full-length title. Equally, you could select one of their many album tracks that whizz by in a flash like ‘Allison’, with its 77-second runtime delivering everything you could want from a Pixies track in a flurry of activity. Both of these could ostensibly be seen as ‘deep cuts’ from the band, but in reality, they’ve still got plenty of fans that make them too popular to be viewed in this light.
However, when the band returned in 2014 with Indie Cindy, the band’s first full-length album in 23 years, a lot of long-term fans of the band dismissed it due to the absence of original bassist Kim Deal, and said that it lacked the same vitality that the band once had. While it’s true that this record represented a major step back from their last offering, 1991’s Trompe Le Monde, it’s also hard to say that the album is a complete failure.
It would be remiss to tarnish the whole album, simply because had it been released by anyone other than a band like them, who have a legacy to keep intact, then it probably would’ve had a better reception. It may have been a disappointment, but also, if it meant that the Pixies were back for good, then there ought to be no good reason to complain.
This critical and public dismissal of Indie Cindy is perhaps why Black Francis deems one of the tracks from this record to be the band’s best deep cut, and in an interview with SongFacts, he revealed that ‘Snakes’ was one of his favourites to emerge from the recording sessions around the record.
“It wasn’t marked at the time as, ‘Oh, this is going to be a big track’, and it wasn’t planned,” the frontman explained. “It came off at the last minute in the recording session.” Speaking about how well it tends to go down, he says that it’s more a case of him feeling a sense of satisfaction from playing it rather than audience reception, but it does also go down well with fans.
“I can’t say that people have mentioned it in particular, but I like the song,” he continued. “I like to play it, and I do notice that when we play it, it gets a really good reaction. So, it has some quality to it that seems to maintain over time. I’m just aware that every time we play it, there is a response. That one we don’t play every show, but we play it every third show or something like that, and it never fails to get a big response.”
It might not be the first song that people would select to go into every live set, nor would it easily find its way onto a ‘greatest hits’ compilation, but it’s a solid song that gets overlooked regularly, which makes it a perfect candidate for being their finest deep cut.
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