The Week In Music: Paste’s Favorite Songs, Albums, Performances and More

It’s (unofficially) summer and Paste is helping you kick off the long weekend with a look back at our best content from this week. In the studio, we hosted a group of amazing musicians, from England to Philly and plenty in between. On the features side, psych-rocker Rich Aucoin continued his bike tour across America. Plus, new tunes from Oh Sees, Cut Worms, Barrie and more. Check it all out below, and enjoy the beach and BBQ this weekend.

BEST ALBUMS
Cut Worms: Hollow Ground
Hollow Ground is the kind of project that could get watered down with too many cooks in the kitchen, so Max Clarke kept it tight: The album was produced by Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado in Los Angeles and Jason Finkel at Gary’s Electric in New York, and Clarke played most of the sounds himself, including guitars, bass, lap steel and keyboards. No surprise, then, that Hollow Ground boasts an impressive sonic consistency across all 10 tracks. —Ben Salmon

Jeremy Enigk: Return of the Frog Queen (Expanded Edition)
Return of the Frog Queen, reissued this week on Sub Pop, conjures a pastoral fantasy world that falls somewhere between childlike whimsy and existential despair—“Lizard,” on the face of it, is a dreamlike account of a lizard that lives in a castle, waiting for some unspecified moment to arrive. It’s as if Jeremy Enigk was trying his best to hold tight to youthful innocence even as it trickled away, like hugging a pile of warm sand. You couldn’t blame him: Enigk was just 22 when Return of the Frog Queen came out, following the unexpected success of Sunny Day Real Estate’s first two albums. The sudden attendant pressure helped break up the band as Enigk converted to Christianity and, apparently, tried to make sense of it all on his first solo album, with the help of a 21-piece orchestra.—Eric R. Danton

BEST SONGS
Barrie: ‘Tal Uno’
“Tal Uno” has a slow, hazy atmosphere that evokes images of bright lights dimmed by a running fog machine; it is a bleary-eyed look backwards. The lyrics are difficult to distinguish, swirling into the instruments, but the lyrics that stand out most are “I got your message, I left my necklace, I got your picture on my phone.” Framed within the track, these lines conjure thoughts of high school youthfulness while the phrase, “Don’t you think that you can do better?” sticks out like a dagger in the mist of the otherwise gently careening track.—Anna Haas

Oh Sees: ‘Overthrown’
The Oh Sees are responsible for 19 releases in their 20-year existence, and almost as many band names. Among the titles in their word bank are OCS, Thee Oh Sees, The Ohsees and various other descendants of these phonemes. But it’s just as “Oh Sees” that they’ll release a new album, Smote Reverser, on Aug. 17, their second recording under that moniker. The noise rockers shared the news Monday on Bandcamp, also clipping their new track, “Overthrown,” to the page. —Ellen Johnson

Maggie Rogers: ‘Fallingwater’
On her new track “Fallingwater,” produced by both Maggie Rogers and former Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij, she sings in streams of pure pop perfection, “I fought the current running just the way you would / And now I’m in the creek / And it’s getting harder / I’m like Fallingwater.” If “Alaska” was, for Rogers, a declaration of harmony with the natural world and that which she cannot control, “Fallingwater” feels like its opposite. Rogers admits to feeling stuck in, rather than symbiotic with, her environment, but she nonetheless stands her ground. —Ellen Johnson