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: Styrofoam Winos, “Pearls”

Every once in a while, you come across a song that feels like it was made just for you—and as an indie-folk-loving English major who grew up on Courtney Barnett and the New York School of poets, I felt an immediate sense of kismet the moment Styrofoam Winos’ Frank O’Hara-inspired, Barnett-evoking slacker-folk banger twanged to life. The Nashville trio (Lou Turner, Trevor Nikrant, and Joe Kenkel) has started to build a reputation as your favorite artist’s favorite artist: Will Oldham sings their praises and MJ Lenderman (who employs Winos members in his touring band The Wind) declared, “They know how to boogie.” And boogie they do on “Pearls.” The track is unhurried but never loose, propulsive in the way a long walk with nowhere to be is propulsive. It grew partly from O’Hara’s poem “Today,” a giddy inventory of ordinary objects—sequins, chocolate sodas, aspirins, and, of course, pearls—that insists these things “do have meaning. They’re as strong as rocks.”

Turner takes the idea and maps it across the Americas: pearls found in Mississippi oysters, heard in conch shells of the Caribbean Sea, farmed in West Tennessee mussels. Each location is repeated in warm, stacked harmonies, the bass boosted on each one, until the place names themselves start to feel like incantations. But the song’s real move is the pivot inward: all that cataloguing of the world’s hidden treasure is really just a runway for telling someone that they’ve got a pearl “tucked inside of [their] clammy tendencies,” that their presence brought “an iridescent perspective” to a life that had momentarily convinced itself nothing was right. It’s a love song that operates like the poem that inspired it—finding something luminous inside the ordinary, then holding it up to the light just long enough for everyone in the room to see it shimmer. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Gelli Haha: “Klouds Will Carry Me to Sleep”

I am thoroughly possessed by the bonky puppetry and paint splatter of Gelli Haha, whose Switcheroo album from last year still makes my head feel all funny and my stomach feel all glowy. Born between Studio 54 and Area 51, her dance parties sound like a mouth full of bouncy balls. Think Sarah Sherman but popstar. From where I’m standing, Gelli is keeping primary colors in business. Her whimsical new single, “Klouds Will Carry Me to Sleep,” comes powered by post-disco synths, electrocuted singalongs, and a stomping low-end groove. Take enough tabs of this and you’ll turn into vapor. The song, in all its intoxicating maximalism, embodies the club and the candy. The textures are wacky and the electropop cumulus is a sensory overload. Say, who gave Chuck E. Cheese all this peyote? —Matt Mitchell

Jim Legxacy: “idk idk”

I don’t quite know where Jim Legxacy puts all his ambition. He’s a self-made producer with the craft of a Jai Paul-schooled pop savant, churning out great mixtapes like homeless n***a pop music and black british music (2025) and filling Afrobeat, gospel, and Jersey club songs with young ideas about displacement, poverty, and popstardom. These days, Legxacy drops two-minute bangers so often he’s got his own economy for them. New single “idk idk” excels because of how its miniature runtime is blown apart by life-altering perspective, as Legxacy mourns the death of his sister and collages the tragedy with images of recent success, singing about “if I die a legend, hope they lay me with my friends” and “I been living my flaws, fighting with my thoughts.” He’s hung up on grief but trying to play it cool over a chopped soul sample, chipmunk vocals, and tropical drum snaps. Even when he’s still figuring himself out, Jim Legxacy sounds like a showstopper. —Matt Mitchell

oldstar: “Whiskey”

Get me to Panama City Beach pronto, because this new oldstar jawn is 100 amps tall. Zane McLaughlin is barely old enough to be a college graduate, let alone this good at chasing tones. “Whiskey” is five minutes going on an hour because their guitar crunch stretches like a wet T-shirt. Personally, I like my distortion sloppy as a drunk kiss, and oldstar uncoil with the best of them on “Whiskey.” Lamenting the critical mass of alt-country, somebody online recently said, “Put down the pedal steel and pick up a DS-1,” but I just think we oughta let Daniel Haas through this one time. Those bends? Hotter than the gator sun. McLaughlin’s lyrics sound like they were written on a napkin. “Trash truck don’t mean much right now, wish I could unsend that letter somehow” tells me everything without saying too much. “Whiskey” builds into a guitar blowout that could baptize a newborn. Here is oldstar’s true Econoline fever dream, where stiff drinks and Florida rain taste the same. Shit, what a time to be young and bit by the bug of rock and fucking roll. —Matt Mitchell

Squirrel Flower feat. Babehoven & Billie Marten: “Wheels”

Squirrel Flower’s Ella Williams, Babehoven’s Maya Bon, and Billie Marten? Fellas, this is my boygenius, gorgeous harmonies and all. The story goes that a gas station attendant on a previous tour had told Williams “may your wheels stay on the ground,” and evidently the phrase stuck—you can hear it in the second line, a prayer dressed up as a lyric. Williams brought the then-unfinished song to Bon’s house in Hudson, who wrote the stanza that cracks the song open (“You said you wanted / Something I don’t / I am always coming / Just as you go”), and Marten layered her harmonies remotely. The whole track was cut live at midnight in a makeshift studio, and the final vocal is the original scratch take, sleepy and unguarded and intimate. Williams has said she wanted to write something that let her voice breathe in a way her heavier material doesn’t always allow, and inspired by the holy trinity of Dolly, Linda, and Emmylou’s Trio, that’s exactly what she got: three voices braiding together with the kind of effortless warmth that makes you briefly forget the world outside is a freezing highway at two in the morning. —Casey Epstein-Gross

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