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: Wild Pink, “Round of Applause at the End of the World”

Wild Pink is back, the Kennedy brothers are dead, and our phasers are fried. I can’t prove it, but John Ross seems like the type of guy who names random NBA players with his friends. How else do I explain “Round of Applause at the End of the World,” a song about patsies killing patsies and a presidential motorcade driving through Ybor City? It’s Craig Finn circa 2004-meets-J Mascis doing Springsteen. There’s an accordion riff from Sparrow Smith at the beginning of the Still Coming Down lead single, then traces of Xandy Chelmis’ pedal steel. All of it wafts beneath an onslaught of guitar crunch and tangles with a hue of twang. Ross doesn’t overwork his references, nor does poetry seem as inscrutable now as it did on Dulling the Horns two years ago. Sirhan Sirhan and Jack Ruby are hypnotized and follow their own moral codes while the South laughs, but no beat here feels forced. Ross sighs through the refrain, singing “I don’t know what my idea of fun is anymore” until Smith’s squeezebox starts to whistle again. In Wild Pink’s hands, rock and roll is here to stay.

Charli XCX: “SS26”

The consequence of overstimulation and oversaturation powers Charli XCX’s recent single, “SS26.” In the aftermath of Brat and The Moment, the song feels less like a continuation than a trend exit, even more so than her earlier dead dancefloor paean, “Rock Music.” With A.G. Cook and Finn Keane’s minimalist, lo-fi guitar co-production threaded through the track, Charli riffs on Notes app apologies, press strategy politics, and getting hacked while walking on a runway that “goes straight to Hell.” In less than three minutes, she finds deliverance in separating herself from Brat, its shade of green, and the tie-in A24 movie, because none of those things can stop the end of the world. The line “nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion, or film” feels truthful in the same way “‘cause my career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all” did in “I think about it all the time.” Where “Rock Music” was taking the piss, “SS26” is sad to a near-violent degree.

Norman D. Loco: “i want a beer”

Norman D. Loco: good band name. “Guitar music with lemon zest”: good description. “i want a beer”: good debut single. The London quartet features a singer named Salad and a bassist with four names, one of them Elvis. I don’t know what the Guildhall conservatoire is about, but a few of its graduates know how to make good patchwork psych-pop fuckery à la feeble little horse. “i want a beer” is three months old but new to me, and I’m obsessed with its half-whacked-out, half-whacko textural paradise, which press materials use words like “bespoke” and “mangled” to describe. The “Do you want a lighter? Suddenly you’re a biter” lyric alone has me eating out of this band’s hand. When “i want a beer” came out in February, Salad said he “tried to write a Sean Baker movie in my head and this song is on the soundtrack.” I’m skeptical about the tune fitting into Red Rocket or Tangerine, but what’s undeniable is how much of a squirmy, scattershot hangover it is. I’m getting the spins just thinking about the full-band burst at the 2:27 mark.

SML: “Roundabouts”

SML’s last album, How You Been, was pieced together from live recordings until it essentially became a sampled jazz recording. The people you hear—Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, Gregory Uhlmann, Booker Stardrum, Anna Butterss, scraps of audience chatter—never do the same thing twice. Every concert is their chance to pull a new idea out of thin air, and the quintet tears through tones and theory in doing so. I find SML’s work to be mostly incomprehensible. What you hear on its records is the outcome of shared intuition. I’m talking about early Kraftwerk, electric Miles Davis, Cluster, Fela Kuti, Can, Susumu Yokota, Jeff Parker, Jim Baker. Guitarist Gregory Uhlmann told me something last winter that still rings true about his bandmates: every player’s voice goes beyond their instrument. But where How You Been arrived like an edited, fully lucid piece of music, SML’s new single “Roundabouts” is twenty-four minutes of a freakout, in-the-round workshop captured at Zebulon—a jump, hop, and skip from the Interstate 5 overpass cutting through Frogtown. I noticed myself marking the important intervals. Eight minutes in, twelve minutes in, seventeen minutes in. “Roundabouts” doesn’t have twists and turns so much as multiple selves fusing into one. The composition captures the best band in America, totally uncut and spontaneous.

Westside Cowboy: “Kick Stones (The Boys)”

“Kick Stones (The Boys)” is real Manc noise that blisters like “What Goes On” just popped its cork at the Matrix in San Francisco. Westside Cowboy are in total forward motion here, singing about plastic-covered cars swimming in rain that sounds like bells. If you like rhythm guitar, you’re gonna love this: Britainicana trance music restless with garage-rock nerve, an uncoiling streak of noodly infinities, and Paddy Murphy’s insane beat. I’d listen to an hour of “Kick Stones”: all part-choogle, part-backwards Bo Diddley, part-Wedding Present jangle. There’s no chorus, just the “have you heard that the boys, they are gone this time” refrain repeated over and over by Jimmy Bradbury and Aoife Anson O’Connell. I’m blown away by Westside Cowboy’s assault and by this unforgettable line from Bradbury: “you know you got a face like a bullet when you talk like that.” They’re liable to name a building after him for that. Westside Cowboy sound upside down on “Kick Stones.” And then it ends.

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