American Football blend Never Meant into Boys Don't Cry for SiriusXM

American Football opened The Cure's "Boys Don't Cry" with their own "Never Meant" in a live session for SiriusXM.

The band played the combined arrangement in the SiriusXM studio, keeping both songs in one continuous performance, according to Pitchfork. A cover is a performance of a song first made known by another artist. A mash-up blends two songs into one piece, rather than playing them separately.

The structure puts "Never Meant" first. The band plays the opening of its own song before moving into the guitar line and faster pulse of "Boys Don't Cry," Yahoo Entertainment reported. The join is direct, with no break between the two parts. Listeners can recognise both songs in the single take.

Drummer Steve Lamos added a trumpet part to the performance. The solo arrives late in the song and plays over the full band. It changes the texture of a song most listeners will know from guitars and voice alone. The session credits Lamos with both roles in the room, on drums and on trumpet.

The visit included more than the cover. The band also performed "Wake Her Up" and "No Feeling" for the SiriusXMU session. Both are listed as coming from American Football (LP4). That made three filmed performances from the stop, with the Cure cover as the centre of attention.

Footage of the cover is listed on SiriusXM's official YouTube channel as "American Football — Boys Don't Cry (The Cure Cover) [Live @ SiriusXM]". The listing gives a runtime of 4:36, about the length of a single album track. The channel page shows 1.89M subscribers and 10K videos, which gives a sense of how widely the session is distributed.

What makes this stand out is the way it is put together. Many covers keep the original shape intact from start to finish. This one uses a familiar opening from the band's own catalogue to lead the audience into someone else's song.

The session was published on 7 October 2026. The video is available through SiriusXM's YouTube page.