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: Open Mike Eagle & Kenny Segal feat. Hemlock Ernst, “Unfinished Concrete Initials”

Open Mike Eagle is on a tear. This is the L.A. rapper’s fourth year in a row to release an LP, and they’re all good, too—I really enjoyed last year’s Neighborhood Gods Unlimited. DOOMED!, to be released on Backwoodz, will be OME’s first full-length with producer Kenny Segal, and we already have Hemlock Ernst (Future Islands’ Samuel T. Herring) guesting on the lead single. As a longtime Hellfyre Club devotee, I genuinely don’t know if I could be more excited. “Unfinished Concrete Initials” is relatively sparse but gorgeously rendered, from the hypnotic vocal sample to the steady drum fill to Ernst’s excellent verse (he never misses when it comes to features; just look at Milo’s “Souvenir”). The track opens with a softer, half-sung refrain from Mike, lyricism as stellar as ever with lines like “Hair down like the goose feathers stuck into a winter cold,” before he swaggers into the first verse and starts recounting the album’s central failed relationship: “In my day dreams your name’s a cursed word so I bleeped it.” Ernst hops on the same train of thought, regaling us with tales of post-breakup couch-hopping and misery: “She even took the space heaters, I’m a mouth breather, so my fear is that nothing remains.” Sure, everything from Mike and Ernst’s relationships to the world writ large might be doomed, but DOOMED! itself surely isn’t. —Casey Epstein-Gross

heavensouls: “shipping times and quiet streets”

I hope Paste hasn’t become a broken record about heavensouls: his recent album westside trapped just landed in the top five of our mid-year list after earning a Paste Pick. But in my time working for this company, I’ve yet to discover an artist like Chidi Obialo, the Nigerian-born, Houston-based rapper and producer who made a digicore Fela Kuti album and knocked it out of every ballpark in earshot. His new single, “shipping times and quiet streets,” is a ceremonial collage tinted by fairy therapy’s agile jazz saxophone and Auto-Tuned purrs from his Sidepeices counterpart, Stickerbush. The track is seven minutes of spiraling detail—piano chords like blinking lights, ambient synth exhales, vocal samples in motion, each passage awakening into the next. This is a sound you spend your life searching for. —Matt Mitchell

L’Rain: “soulless cycle”

L’Rain’s forthcoming LP, Fata Morgana, is born in large part from contending with the work of making music amidst the nation’s descent into “fascism and trad culture.” Introducing this album rollout is “soulless cycle,” a lead single that sneaks up and crashes in with no warning—but looking back from its cacophonous climax, you realize you should’ve seen the signs of catastrophe coming all along. Her dissociative, looped vocals trudge through a left-right panned synth and a psych-hardcore breakdown all the same, heavy with the weight of countless to break free from “psycho cycles” only to end up more trapped than before. It’s an audio-sensory manifestation of what happens when crisis becomes routine—its quiet closing notes might be mistaken for reprieve, but more likely, they’re the prelude to even worse horrors to learn how to live with and hopefully, outlive. —Grace Robins-Somerville

Slow Pulp: “Better Man”

Slow Pulp returned this week with “Better Man,” the lead single off the forthcoming Melodie. Over trebly, jangling guitars and rattling drums, Emily Massey delivers a vulnerable, crackling performance suggestive of a turn toward a bigger sound in the Chicago group’s new chapter. “Did I fuck it up again? Maybe leave it to a better man,” she croons as a wall of sound wobbles and pulses behind her. Equally anthemic and angsty, “Better Man” feels like a cool-down walk after an earth-shattering argument, molten emotions roiling around like clothes in the dryer before they cool into discontent. The troubled self-doubt climbs and recedes over three propulsive minutes before it bursts into fireworks and fades. —Miranda Wollen

Sylvan Esso: “Hot Slob”

Durham duo Sylvan Esso have taken a psychedelic turn on their latest single, “Hot Slob,” an off-kilter ode to indulgence and self-destruction. Amelia Meath’s loose, slackerish warble surfs atop waves of acidic, feedback-drenched electric guitar. Recorded at Betty’s, the Chapel Hill recording studio that Meath and bandmate/husband Nick Sanborn co-own, “Hot Slob” is their first release on Psychic Hotline Records, of which they’re also partial owners. It’s a fittingly bratty, irreverent release to herald in the band’s new independent era, their occasional glitchiness cranked up and gone analog. “Fuck it, yeah I’m phony, but I sell it like it’s something new,” Meath sings, an admittance that she’s not reinventing any wheels, but having a good time spinning them. —Grace Robins-Somerville

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