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: Mykki Blanco, “Little Feet”

This month we’re hanging out, banging out, and “getting right underneath the street light.” With “Little Feet,” Mykki Blanco is leading me down the longest, hottest hallway on the block. His first preview from CAFE PARADISO is a full-on queer flâneur tease—knotted bodies rubbing together in the bleary oil slick of a room powered by dance and devotion. Three years after “Holidays in the Sun,” Blanco still believes in love and in going hard. This time, his desire makes the wood-paneled walls expand like body heat. Cloaked in their shared magpie funkedelia, he, Ian Isiah, and Breakaway slip out of falsettos and into baritones, vibrating between flirty and locked-in. “Little Feet” is so seductive it turns symphonic, covered in cum splatter and dotted with locks of hair coiled around wet fingers. There’s so much intimacy packed into these two minutes that Blanco’s hookup anthem for “the wayward metropolitan” lands like a psychic rush. —Matt Mitchell

Dogwood Tales: “McMemories”

In this godforsaken world the only thing of mine that’s held is a daily ritual of getting a Coke from McDonald’s. The transaction is like an heirloom, passed down from a mother whose kitchen is crowded with soda artifacts and antique-mall Americana. Music, like those syrupy swigs, is precious to me. As I lay dying from all these old, tattered diseases my family tree put in me, I can’t do much but listen and remember. I almost skipped Dogwood Tales’ new single “McMemories,” but I’m glad I didn’t. The guitar licks are gnarly and the pedal steel sounds like it’s been wired right into a pickup truck dashboard stereo, but the band’s vocabulary follows me like a phantom: couplets about stadium lights, names on street signs, kissing “until our lips hurt,” moving from Appalachia to LA, and “getting sick for a while.” It all feels awfully familiar. I should probably be angry about that—that my own coming of age isn’t as unique today as it was yesterday, when “McMemories” was but an unread PR email in my inbox. But I just remembered this one night twenty years ago when my papaw was mowing the yard outside my window and the ambient thrum of his tractor came to a sudden stop. I looked out and saw him standing in the open lot, looking up at the stars above him, then over to me. He waved. I waved. The stars stayed while his engine growled again. I guess I know now what Dogwood Tales mean when they say “your life is still more than giving all your time away.” —Matt Mitchell

Kelela: “point blank”

The soul of Cut 4 Me lingers in the snipped West London broken beat of “point blank.” Kelela’s spaciousness returns in delays and breakbeats. She’s processing the fantasy of helping men grow up emotionally by delivering lines like “the more I pour, the more you reap, and I’m too spent to weep” and “n****s refuse to read, somehow y’all got a lot to say” in a quiet storm while a chop of garage rattles beneath her. The vocal layering here feels intimate and immediate, and her syncopated, breathy expressions carry with them an urgency that previous singles “idea1” and “linknb” only hinted at. Can you hear that noise in the street? They’re building altars to “can you slut me out” out there. Kelela’s ties to Fade to Mind and Night Slugs vibrate throughout “point blank.” She and drum ‘n’ bass move like covalent bonds—like tangled infinities. —Matt Mitchell

Patois Counselors: “Cop City”

Have you ever heard “Paint It Black” and thought “Man, I wish this melody was used in a song about the militarized aggression of our pigs in blue?” If so, you’re in luck: check out Patois Counselors’ “Cop City.” “I hear cop city and I think of what we lack,” Bo White sings in the exact harmonic minor scale of the Stones’ 1966 hit. There’s something almost musical-esque about the track: Bo White’s brooding vocals meshed with the overall hypnotic drama of the song make it a kind of post-punk miniature rock opera. “It’s looking like a who’s-who of opportunistic industrialists out here selling the hell out of tactical,” he sneers. “For what? Your pacifist neighbors?” “Cop City” doesn’t quite sound like anything else, really—attempts to slap a genre on it feel doomed to fall flat. But it’s one hell of a call to action. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Starcleaner Reunion: “Weather Instrument”

I wasn’t able to make last week’s Total Bummer Fest at Knockdown Center, but when I texted my friends partway through the night to ask who had the best set so far, I got a resounding “Starcleaner Reunion!!!” in response. I wasn’t surprised: I’ve caught the New Jersey quartet a few now (once with a Wii Tennis game projected onto them, which ruled), and they have yet to disappoint. On “Weather Instrument,” the dream-pop outfit channels Stereolab as effortlessly as they always do, but now with a bright horn section—courtesey of The Ladybug Transistor’s Gary Olson—involved. It’s a song about home in its myriad varieties: a person, a place, a feeling, a concept. “A warm sun spot in the kitchen,” Jo Roman cheerfully adds, by way of Lætitia Sadier. “A silhouette curled into a circle.” They manage to get that same sentiment across in the sound, too: warm and earnest, excitable and yearning. It’s a very June song—perfect timing and all. Starcleaner Reunion is a band that has always excelled in vibes, and “Weather Instrument” is no exception. —Casey Epstein-Gross

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