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: Charli XCX, “Rock Music”

Charli XCX and her friends have sold their turntables and bought guitars. “I think the dancefloor is dead,” she sings through a microdose of her characteristic Auto-Tune. It’s a sentiment she expressed in a recent British Vogue interview. Funnily enough, Charli’s claims about the dancefloor are the same ones that people have been making about rock and roll for nearly as long as the genre has existed. With the breakthrough of BRAT, it seemed the mainstream had finally gotten hip to this cult favorite artist who’d spent over a decade being hailed by those in the know as the “future of pop.” Since that future arrived, Charli’s done her fair share of digging into her musical past. Her soundtrack for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights—which featured collaborations with John Cale and Sky Ferreira, the latter of which has been the subject of some copyright controversy—harkened back to the techo-goth and synthwave sonics of her 2013 debut album, True Romance.

Her latest single, “Rock Music,” fuses chunky, distorted guitars with fuzzy, electronic vocal manipulations for some Sucker–sounding pop-punk. In some ways, it’s nothing new to her, but it’s a sound she slips into like a pair of perfectly broken-in leather pants. To those of us who were blasting “Break The Rules” out our windows back in the day and remember when Rivers Cuomo having a writing credit on a Charli song wasn’t a joke made by someone on r/mu but a fact, there’s a familiarity to hearing what Charli called “our version of analog” (“our” referring to longtime collaborator AG Cook, who plays guitar on the new track). In the wake of BRAT, Charli has been reignited by her back catalog, revisiting its more rock-oriented inclinations with a looseness and clarity that comes with years of moving in the opposite direction of that sound. She’s demonstrated something that her musical descendants like 100 gecs, underscores, and Slayyyter have all proven: the existence of hyperpop/pop-punk horseshoe theory. To paraphrase the late great Alex Chilton, “Rock Music” is here to stay. —Grace Robins-Somerville

Daughn Gibson: “Sacred Life”

It’s been over a decade since Carnation, Daughn Gibson’s last full-length record, but “Sacred Life” alone proves the Pennsylvania crooner’s still got it. It’s all heartland twang and reverberating synth, Gibson’s deep bass filling out every corner of the room—like some long-lost Matt Berninger-fronted country ballad. “You die bloody inside the bank / A bloody body’s not your fault,” Gibson sings, rumbling and resonant. “But I know you can’t live in the same soul.” After years away, he sounds newly emboldened, turning a song about status, shame, and reinvention into something strangely triumphant. It’s a reminder that his music still lives in that sweet spot where noir fatalism meets plainspoken, barlit empathy. —Casey Epstein-Gross

KatzPascale: “HOLD ME (SLOWLY)”

Life’s greatest inevitabilities: death, taxes, and Elise Soutar recommending good bands. I’m grateful for the Brooklyn tastemakers in my phone, and I’m grateful for the “L’Rain meets Alice Coltrane” subject line that reached my inbox on Monday with KatzPascale’s “HOLD ME (SLOWLY)” tucked into the body of the accompanying email. Comparing a duo with just four songs in their catalog to the authors of Fatigue and Turiya Sings… let’s not make a habit out of that, but KatzPascale—the team of saxophonist Sammi Katzmann and cellist/singer Jenna Pascale—turn transformation into a gradual, amorphous epiphany on “HOLD ME (SLOWLY).” The single’s beginning is deceptively peaceful: gentle, neoclassical strings walk through a subconscious warp of sampled voices then modulate into club music decorated with ribbons of Katzmann’s saxophone, plastic drum machine, and Pascale’s swirling whispers. It’s like a VHS tape being rewound, or an airplane descending. I say “HOLD ME (SLOWLY)” is radical euphoria. KatzPascale find spiritual tension in a delayed fuse. —Matt Mitchell

Les Rallizes Dénudés: “The Night Wind, The Candle Flame”

“The Night Wind, The Candle Flame” is a sedative to freakout maximalism. Its makers, Les Rallizes Dénudés, aren’t a new band and neither is this song—which previously surfaced as “But I Was Different” on a Cable Hogue bootleg—but the chrome still comes wrapped in shrink. For seven minutes, these Kyoto psychonauts swim out of the metallic and into flesh and blood. After the noise exhausts every possible color possible, Takashi Mizutani’s falsetto enters like a ramshackle hushaby bit by unbounded sorrow. Hiroshi Narazaki’s bass lines hold the song’s myth while Takeshi Nakamura’s slide guitar slips in and out of consciousness, threatening to bottom out of the transmission at any moment. Reverb hangs from “The Night Wind, The Candle Flame” like a talisman and Les Rallizes Dénudés’ mystique never lessens. As the guitars uncoil, the band’s fangs tear through the gumline. —Matt Mitchell

Tasha: “Clarion”

We really enjoyed Tasha’s 2024 LP All This and So Much More, so the news that the Chicago singer-songwriter is back with a new album couldn’t be more welcome. “Clarion,” our latest taste of next month’s You Are Spring!, is warm and crisp in equal measures, Tasha’s clear tone cutting across twinkling instrumentation—a soundscape that feels exactly like the season her new album is titled after. She describes the song as being “about coming and going, about wanting to change your life but not quite knowing how you’re going to do it, but feeling suddenly on the edge of figuring it out.” And it’s true: there’s a kind of sparkling hope latent in the song’s construction, bubbling up from beneath the surface. Spring might technically be ending, but with You Are Spring! on the horizon, something tells me the season will stretch well into the summer. —Casey Epstein-Gross

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