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: Los Thuthanaka, “Quta (capo-kullawada)”

Los Thuthanaka, despite making one of the best albums of the decade in 2025, remain polarizing. Some listeners find the sibling duo’s electronic collages to be illegible noise; others, however, are often stunned by the pair’s ability to interpret Andean folktales into challenging maximalist cut-ups. I am often, if not always, a part of the latter camp. The first lick on their new Wak’a EP, an Aymaran story about the first sunrise, is their best creation yet. As crying doors open all around Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, crickets harmonize into a low, droning synth. The teclas lope and twirl, holding a textural line that briefly speeds up while a saxophone sample dances faintly. “Aye” chants jolt like percussion, and Crampton’s guitar punches in phrases that sound like early Eno. The melody is not harsh, but gradually handsome. Los Thuthanaka’s pacing washes over you. “Quta” is the crack of orange that stirs the valley awake. —Matt Mitchell

Cactus Lee: “Lone Star”

I quote John Updike’s paean to the beer can: “It was beautiful—as beautiful as the clothespin, as inevitable as the wine bottle, as dignified and reassuring as the fire hydrant.” Kevin Dehan, who runs around as Cactus Lee, makes music like that. He’s taller than he sings, and his leads don’t twang like a Texan’s should. No, his voice is purer, with a tone closer to Gordon Lightfoot’s. You see, Dehan can swing between baritone and tenor, but there’s no unsettling jolt to his versatility. It’s the type of singing you can poke a hole through. His new single, “Lone Star,” pays tribute to a beer whose logo has never changed, even when cans switched from the church key to the zip-top. “Lone Star” chases a nighttime buzz. Brushed snares, sock-hop guitar curls, and ooh-oohs plug in and plug along. It’s a sticky Country & Western chugger that can mend any old hippie heart with a grainy, hoppy exit strategy. “What we need is progress with an escape hatch,” Updike wrote, and Dehan sees the author’s plan through: “Once the night begins, I’ll have Lone Star. I might have one, I might have ten.” —Matt Mitchell

Kelela: “idea 1”

Three years ago, Kelela masterfully paired East Coast club, techno, R&B, and ambient music together on Raven. It sounded, to my ears, like a payoff to the dance-music castles she’d been building on her records for ten years, since the Cut 4 Me mixtape. Kelela goes wherever she’s summoned to. On “idea 1,” it’s a finger-plucked melody that props up her space-filling falsetto. Kelela says that the single is “about what it feels like to exist in this climate—the weight of being expected to witness, absorb, and speak truth at a time when the world feels like it’s unraveling. That’s a particular kind of burden Black women know intimately.” The song compliments the disentanglement around us. It’s rock and roll bordering on shoegaze, as a chorus of soft drones collapses into noisy guitar stridence supplied by Scarlet House. The tension comes to life even as a deep, heady groove sits beneath the robust distortion. “idea 1,” Kelela says, “feels like the beginning of a much larger conversation I’m ready to have.” The song, even as its seismic ambitions begin to overwhelm and her gentle voice begins to holler, strikingly beckon. —Matt Mitchell

Lip Critic: “Talon”

I was one of the lucky few who caught Lip Critic at their ridiculous laundromat show last month, and one of the luckier still who’ll also get to see them rock out tonight in a boxing ring. To the surprise of absolutely no one, the New York hardcore act absolutely rules live—and their recorded tracks aren’t anything to scoff at either. Just look at new single “Talon,” a sick and sickening unhinged scroll through our perpetually violent digital landscape. In a world where bodies are torn asunder on the daily, the physical realm remains out of reach even as its inhabitants are torn to shreds: “Can’t touch you,” frontman Bret Kaser drawls, harsh with it, “I can’t even make out a shape.” The production is brutal and unforgiving, each pulse of the beat resonating somewhere deep in our brainrotten skulls. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Slippers: “Fool In Your Room”

Who among us hasn’t woken up groggy and hungover in someone else’s bed after a perhaps ill-advised hookup that you feel like you should probably regret more than you do? It’s a hyper-specific feeling, but an all too universal one—and now it has a soundtrack! “Fool in Your Room” is less than two minutes of pure indie-pop goodness, a fast-paced track with a host of cheery fuzzed-up guitars churning underneath. The plaintive honesty in Madeline BB’s voice ties the whole thing together, from the light-hearted wordplay of the chorus (“A fool in your room / I fool in your room / A fool in your room for you”) to the self-deprecation of the verses (“In the bed I’m under the sheets / And I’m already gone / Think of reasons how I could try / To get out of my mind or out of here”). Never has a disorienting morning after sounded so delightful. —Casey Epstein-Gross

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