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: Jeff Parker / ETA IVtet, “Like Swimwear (part one)”

Turn your ears on and you’ll hear Jeff Parker’s guitar cooing and coiling all around Highland Park. It slithers down bowling alley lanes and soda pop shop aisles. It crawls up the back of Chicken Boy. The notes are sopping with northeastside nightshade. And trailing them are Josh Johnson’s saxophone, Anna Butterss’ bass, and Jay Bellerose’s drum kit. Recorded at the Lodge Room just off Figueroa, “Like Swimwear (part one)” is a nine-minute section of a 20-minute arrangement. Parker and his ETA IVtet, in the aftermath of Trump’s despotism and the Eaton fire’s citywide displacement, gathered for a concert last August and performed together in a “statement of joy,” according to Parker, who’s titled their new album Happy Today in protest of this country’s ongoing dismantlement. Pings of cymbal brush against syncopated brass puffs. The bass vibrates but never overwhelms. Parker’s hand sprints up and down the fretboard, his other plucking curiously. What “Like Swimwear (part one)” reveals is true harmony—four experts in sync with themselves and each other. —Matt Mitchell

Beth Orton: “The Ground Above”

I am, notoriously, a sucker for an epic. Give me an 8+-minute song and I will eat it up every time—and “The Ground Above,” Beth Orton’s first single since her excellent 2022 record Weather Alive, is certainly no exception. The song bleeds a low, eerie synth hum, Orton’s idiosyncratic voice groaning “I’m invincible as grief / Violent as a blade of spring released,” before building, eventually, into a full-throttle electro-folk soundscape, with peals of electronic fibers braiding through each guitar line. Drumwork from Vishal Nayak keeps the song on its toes, driving every charge, while Christos Stylianides’ trumpet blares pure feeling and Orton’s own Rhodes piano riffs twinkle through the mix. There’s something wholly cathartic about the journey of the track, churning ever closer to release, like Icarus flying ever closer to the sun—while, fittingly, Orton bites out “Come on lift me higher / I want to touch the sky / Come on wipe me out.” The last two minutes are dedicated to pure instrumental work, and it’s well-deserved; the climax and the come-down all at once. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Friko: “Still Around”

There’s been no better post-Yankee Hotel Foxtrot band than Friko. Now, I’m not saying that Niko Kapetan and Bailey Minzenberger are immediately influenced by Wilco or anything of the sort—Friko save any and all alt-country impulses for their listening habits, not their instruments—but I think they’re going to do for Chicago in the 2020s what Tweedy and his bandmates did 25 years ago. Where we’ve been, Where we go from here is still the best rock debut of this decade. Its well-titled follow-up, Something Worth Waiting For, sprung to life via “Seven Degrees” and “Choo Choo” (both very good songs) earlier this winter, but single #3, “Still Around,” is tightly-wound perfection fine-tuned by John Congleton. Big guitar hooks from Kapetan, head-splitting snare-drum cracks from Minzenberger, and rhythmic intervals supplied by Korgan Rob and David Fuller pile onto each other. “Still Around” bends, curls, and shouts but never snaps. The band holler “it only starts to come when you need it most” 16 times, answering their own tattered, jumpy siren. It’s impossible not to love these four people, man. You better get in while you fit in. Bury me beneath the Schubas floor so I can listen to Friko forever. —Matt Mitchell

Teller Bank$: “N****as Thought It Was Autotune LOL ($$$)”

If you caught Teller Bank$’ pitch-shifted, lethal-projectile verse on McKinley Dixon’s “Recitatif” last year, then his new album, Hate Island, may have already summoned you. I’m of the opinion that Bank$ should be a rap superstar, and not just because his Bandcamp catalogue runs deep enough to make him the genre’s Bob Pollard. Whether it’s spilling out of Colorado or Des Moines, Bank$’ music is conversational, confounding, and choppy. He ping-pongs off lo-fi samples and split-bullet beats with verses about gang violence, drugs, family matters, and Black and brown death that slur, staccato, and stretch out like a jetstream. There are 17 songs on Hate Island and any of them could be here. Today I’m picking “N****as Thought It Was Autotune lol ($$$),” the record’s halfway point. It’s a turnstile of gospel cut-ups, boom-bap dressings, and soaring piano licks. But the style is subtle, buggy, and cohesive. Around the 52-second mark, Bank$ and his Beats by $$$ collective (Q No Rap Name, Killer Kane, Philth Spector, Ayashi[!]) gladden the production fast and delicately. It’s one of the prettiest, smartest payoffs of the year. —Matt Mitchell

Widemouth: “No Gasoline”

So far, the 2020s have been a great decade for up-and-coming alt-country acts, and thankfully, that trend shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon. Just lend your ear to Widemouth’s “No Gasoline,” the title track to their upcoming debut record, slated to release in May. It’s a slow-burning ballad with traces of Waxahatchee and Gillian Welch woven into its DNA. Mak Carnahan’s truly-made-for-alt-country voice oozes emotion from every syllable, and harmonies from Jamie Eder and Levi Saltzman make the world of the song feel expansive and lived-in. Drummer Lily Mitchell keeps everything on track as Sam Genualdi’s steel guitar winds through the atmosphere. There’s a haziness to the track, a swaying-in-a-wheat-field feel that belies its lyrical specificity: “Sarah, don’t say you wrote a love song,” Carnahan sings. “You got holes in your heart, your Sonata won’t start in the winter / I’m not sure I ever let you see me.” At the end of the accompanying music video, a car turn signal clicks repeatedly while one of the band members gushes, “That’s fucking sick.” I concur. —Casey Epstein-Gross

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