5 songs you need to hear this week

Every Thursday, the Paste staff and contributors will choose their five favorite songs of the week, awarding one entry a “Song of the Week” designation. Check out last week’s roundup here.

Song of the Week: Fire-Toolz feat. Jennifer Holm, “And Where Is The Heart? I’ve Searched My Entire Home”

Warp Records has been on some bullshit this week, between the new (and also very good) Oneohtrix Point Never single and this excellent Fire-Toolz track. While watching an Eddy Burback clip on YouTube, Fire-Toolz fixated on a royalty-free stock song playing in the background and traced it back to Jennifer Holm, a “session singer, church mommy and Nashville lady.” Holm’s anonymity lends her singing a certain impossibility on “And Where Is The Heart? I’ve Searched My Entire Home.” Her voice reaches me like Beth Gibbons’ does on Dummy, and Fire-Toolz surrounds her with a synth that clangs like a Beverly Glenn-Copeland idea circa-Keyboard Fantasies. But what’s gentle then powers a swirl of ‘80s-blockbuster-score electronica later, until Holm’s harmony dissipates and Fire-Toolz’s screamo growls start to brighten. “And Where Is The Heart? I’ve Searched My Entire Home” is, as she calls it, about grief: “everything about the song makes me feel like I’m walking through the neighborhood on a warm day, with no one to answer to, just being. Being afraid, being cozy.” But the vibrations are never dispirited, especially when they accumulate into a pixelated euphoria. “And Where Is The Heart? I’ve Searched My Entire Home” is post-hardcore, post-Hiroshi Yoshimura, post-PC, post-New Age music. Overstimulation rarely sounds this genius. —Matt Mitchell

Emily Nenni: “What Have I Done Wrong”

When Emily Nenni sings, you dance, so it’s no wonder she’s calling her new record Movin’ Shoes. But Nenni is a charmer with a pedal-steel grin, Memphis soul, and Muscle Shoals groove. Not too many players are inspired by Linda Ronstadt’s Motown covers nowadays, but “What Have I Done Wrong,” in its William Bell-meets-Aretha Franklin aroma, is drop-dead winsome, affably retro, and slides in sideways. It’s a bar song, no doubt about that, but it curves and glares like the climbing daytime sun. Nenni’s style reminds me that not every wheel needs to be reinvented, just lubed up enough to turn. “What Have I Dont Wrong” is a tailored nine-piece suit with all of her bandmates’ contributions sewn into it, be it the Deslondes’ John James Tourville on synth, Booker T. and the M.G.’s drummer Steve Potts behind the kit, James Woodall on a dobro, or Marc Franklin, Art Edmaiston, and Kirk Smothers’ brass accoutrements. But I find Nenni to be the most compelling thread here, when she’s calling herself “faulty by design” and begging to be understood. Her weary, wandering heart sounds like a safe place to be imperfect. “What Have I Done Wrong” is a firecracker with a mile-long fuse. —Matt Mitchell

Massive Attack / Tom Waits: “Boots on the Ground”

Tom Waits hasn’t put out an original song since Bad as Me in 2011. Massive Attack haven’t released anything since the Eutopia EP in 2020. Two of music’s most missed hermits decided to emerge from their respective bunkers simultaneously—five days after the latter’s Robert Del Naja was arrested at a Palestine Action demonstration in Trafalgar Square, no less—and the result is seven minutes of bleary, furious, exquisitely paced doom. “Boots on the Ground” reportedly sat in Massive Attack’s hands for years after Waits sent it over, and that patience shows in the production, which breathes and tightens with a surgeon’s sense of timing. The Bristol pair lays a bed of plucked piano and bruised synths that recall their Mezzanine-era claustrophobia, while percussion and brass clatter from Waits’s corner of the room like a junkyard New Orleans funeral march. He sounds magnificent: looser, somehow even more gravelly than you remember, veering from barked absurdity (I never knew I needed to hear Tom Waits wail “big titties, big titties” or “young, dumb, and full of cum” but, well, here we are) to plain-spoken political rage that could strip paint off a warship (“Now who the hell are these federal pricks? / Hiding in the Senate like a bloated-ass tick / Air-conditioned fuckstick loafers / Sittin’ in a room full of army posters”). The accompanying film splices thefinaleye’s protest photography into something that sits uncomfortably between documentary and eulogy. And, FYI, you can’t stream the track on Spotify—Massive Attack pulled their catalogue last year over CEO Daniel Ek’s military-tech investments, so you’ll have to get your boots on the ground and find it yourself. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Qontinue: “Pressured Up”

The only thing I know about Qontinue is that he’s from Toronto and put out a great record called FIGURING(!) last month, but maybe that’s all I need to know. The tape appeared on my Bandcamp feed this week and I’ve been revisiting it daily. Track two, “Pressured Up,” is a small masterpiece, as a glut of heady gospel and soul samples drape over Qontinue like a jazz arrangement. There’s no blaps or pretension, just Navy Blue’s melodicism, MIKE’s tempo, and vintage textures that spiral and sprawl like a sped-up NTS radio show. The flow, the piano clips, the found-sound debris, the pattering beat hidden beneath a hundred singing voices… even the flip at the 3:15 mark is staggering. The retro-futuristic loops in “Pressured Up” are suspended in air while Qontinue worships beneath them. And there we are, gladly wedged somewhere between the two. —Matt Mitchell

Tori Amos: “Gasoline Girls”

18 albums in and Tori Amos is writing songs about lesbian biker gangs rescuing women from evil billionaires, which is to say she has never once wavered. “Gasoline Girls” is the third preview of In Times of Dragons, her upcoming record-as-allegory about fleeing a cartoonishly sinister tycoon husband across a mythologized America, and it hits the same strange, playful sweet spot as some of the sprawling ’90s B-sides her fans treat like apocrypha. The verses are just Amos and her piano in close quarters, percussive and darting, with a melodic logic that feels half-composed and half-discovered at the bench. But the chorus brings out the full band: guitars arrive (to quote a text I received from Paste editor Matt Mitchell: “that guitar part, jesus”), the instrumentation swells, and Amos sings the title like she’s trying to summon these women into existence through sheer vocal force. The whole thing has the cadence of a nursery rhyme sung by Kate Bush, perhaps with early Regina Spektor plinking along on piano. Within the album’s fiction, the Gasoline Girls are a pack of lesbian motorcyclists who shield the protagonist and spark her transformation from hunted wife to something with teeth, but Amos has said the song is really about every version of becoming. “Stalked by henchmen / Of that lizard scum,” she sings in the second verse. “Free speech? / What was that? Here there is none / Now there is none.” It’s a deceptively small song—barely three minutes of what she calls “a little ditty”—but boy, will that jaunty piano line play in your head indefinitely. —Casey Epstein-Gross

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