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: Dexys Midnight Runners, “My Life in England Pt. 1”

Huge news for all the Dexys-heads out there (myself very much included; Searching for the Young Soul Rebels is one of my favorite albums of the early Eighties): the English band is back for one final hoorah—under their full name of Dexys Midnight Runners for the first time since 1985, no less. But if you feel like you’ve heard “My Life in England Pt. 1” before, you probably have; an early version of the track came out on a 2003 compilation record. The reimagined song is an upbeat ode to frontman Kevin Rowland’s Irish immigrant background set to synths and keys, his utterly idiosyncratic voice howling atop the beat the whole time. (Seriously, does anyone have a voice like his?) It’s a funky marriage between old Northern Soul and modern muzak, but those kinds of unholy unions are precisely what Dexys Midnight Runners have always excelled at—and they haven’t lost their touch yet. —Casey Epstein-Gross

ear: “Ne Plus Ultra”

ear brings a certain “collage assault” je ne sais quoi to A24’s music label, as the IDM-ish duo’s hyperactive, exceptionally textured electronica slots in well beside mark william lewis and Sophia Stel. Rumspringa lead single “Ne Plus Ultra” is a tense, impulsive addition to this current phase of “laptop twee,” as ear uses Sparklehorse and digital hardcore to locate the dissonance of its lowercase sound. “Ne Plus Ultra” translates to “nothing further beyond” and, at one point in the middle of the track, the duo fades a crying kitten into a synth. I’m obsessed with how disorienting it all is, especially when the bleeps, celestial-sigh vocal parts, and buzzsaw bass tears streak through ear’s cut-and-paste glitchscape. “Ne Plus Ultra” is two Bard students’ miniature cosmic opera. —Matt Mitchell

Le Ren: “Free Wheeling”

Summer’s here and Le Ren knows it. “Top down on summer’s day, you can go my way if you’ve got nowhere to go,” she sings, clear as a songbird. “Bathe me in the morning light, I could go all night just to find the great unknown.” Le Ren’s first return after 2021’s Leftovers is yet another gorgeous tug at the heartstrings: “Free Wheeling” is all soft twang and warm strings, her full tone yet another instrument in the arrangement. It’s a beautiful number, chronicling the ebb and flow of love across its verses—if you’re planning on a summer fling these upcoming months, “Free Wheeling” will undoubtedly be your go-to listen. “We’ll part ways on the interstate with no words to say,” Le Ren sings in the final verse. “Just a feeling that it’s time.” —Casey Epstein-Gross

Vince Staples: “White Flag”

Vince Staples is intentional. Simplicity in his art never comes without meaning, like the phantom klansman behind a hanging American flag at the beginning of his new “White Flag” video. After literally painting that American flag white, he puts a hundred bullet holes into it. Peace gets thwarted by violence in “White Flag,” a decidedly slower counterpart to last month’s “Black Marmalade.” For two minutes, Vince calls out Kendrick (“Squabble up, I see the Devil in all of y’alls”; “Hip-hop taught me all y’all love Black folks, but it’s not enough”), references Amy Winehouse (“Love’s a losin’ game like Amy sang, I don’t got time for that”), and remembers dancing to the beat of .23s and AR-15s. Lyrically he’s in his Big Fish Theory bag, but musically he’s tailing the ghosts of Ramona Park Broke My Heart, trading the Paris Texas-style rap-rock of “Blackberry Marmalade” for a slinky bassline and celestial backup vox. Vince raps to the psychedelic beat about love turning into war, about traffic cops probing him like an alien: “Hard to move from in the casket, stars are born and we’re galactic / When a pig see a Black man in traffic, why they treat me like I’m in a UFO?” Catchy music with a cutting message. Vince is drip-feeding us an AOTY contender, going “out of the box, because of God’s grace.” —Matt Mitchell

Wesenyeleh Mebreku: “The Old Times Came to My Mind (ትዝ አለኝ የጥንቱ)”

“The Old Times Came to My Mind” is a beautiful artifact from Ethiopia’s mythologized cassette era. The Eighties tune, part of Wesenyeleh Mebreku’s recently reissued Resonance of Time, was composed entirely on a Casiotone CT-201 keyboard. What you hear is Ethiopian folk music reimagined through lo-fi experimentation—kignit in conversation with Western harmony, and Mebreku’s “deep trust in melody as a storyteller.” Every melody is colored by a countermelody, creating a language Mebreku uses to welcome us into his world, much like Hailu Mergia and Mulatu Astatke do in theirs. Plinky analog riffs reflect sunshine jazz rhythms like glassy water. “The Old Times Came to My Mind” pulls many moods out of Mebreku’s Casio, its vibrating tempo recalling a child’s toy xylophone in an 8-bit videogame. In these five minutes, I’m able to “remember, imagine, and feel freely,” just as Mebreku intended. —Matt Mitchell

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