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: Zara Larsson / PinkPantheress, “Midnight Sun (Girls Trip)”

Zara Larsson wasn’t on my radar until PinkPantheress put her on the “Stateside” remix last year. I was not immediately up on Midnight Sun, nor did I know anything about the viral “symphony” dolphin meme or Larsson’s sector of gay Twitter. Apparently, being chronically online does have its limits. But not every missed train is gone forever. Exhibit A: I’ve been drinking Larsson’s Kool-Aid by the liter since autumn. Her new Midnight Sun: Girls Trip album, which isn’t “new” so much as a remixed, reduxed, detonated, all-women collection of dance songs à la Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, is a fucking awesome party I’m happily showing up late to. Larsson’s cultural stock hasn’t depreciated this many months after the “Stateside” remix (and Olympic champion figure skater Alysa Liu’s fondness of it), so why not return the favor and get PinkPantheress on a remix of her best Midnight Sun track? They’re a good match, and it seems that PinkPantheress’s affinity for bite-sized songs has rubbed off on Larsson, who shaved nearly twenty seconds off the “Girls Trip” version. What can I say about “Midnight Sun (Girls Trip)”? It’s pop-stardom that goes down like sugar; dance music as picturesque as a Windows 10 screensaver; Swedish trance meets UK garage. We’re on an empty road, listening to a playlist with the volume turned up. We’re in Delaware, thinking about the beach in Mexico City. Margo XS, MNEK, Count Baldor, and Troy Taylor’s drum’n’bass production goes hard in the paint, flexing maximalist hyperpop ideas like it’s not a dead genre. Yeah, man—a midnight sun has entered my eyes. It’s gonna be a Eurosummer to remember. —Matt Mitchell

Case Oats: “Bottom of an Afternoon”

I deeply enjoyed Case Oats’ debut album, Last Missouri Exit, last August, so I couldn’t be more pleased to see the (recently engaged!) indie-folk power couple of Casey Gomez-Walker and Spencer Tweedy back at it again—and “Bottom of an Afternoon” is a doozy. “In the absence of your ghost / There are pages I still dog-ear,” Gomez-Walker sings in the first few seconds of the song, her lower register clear and open as ever. The song’s a “mantra for grief,” per the press release, and it wields the heft of loss without ever hitting us over the head with it. Tonally, it’s somewhere between Bob Dylan and Diane Cluck, feeling nauseous about asking God for answers and getting Theodore Roethke back in return (as always, I am an easy-to-please English major, so hearing a line from “My Papa’s Waltz” was, quite literally, music to my ears). But “Bottom of an Afternoon” takes a different tack than much of Last Missouri Exit, a pure alt-country record through and through, instead couching the bluntness of her words in electric guitar, chugging percussion, the idiosyncratic looping of Tweedy’s Optigan, and even a trumpet solo. No matter the instrumentation, Case Oats’ work is always no-frills, allowing the strength of Gomez-Walker’s voice and lyricism to bear the burden of the music’s raw emotion, and evidently, she has yet to ever buckle under that weight. —Casey Epstein-Gross

π. Διονύσιος Ταμπάκης: “Techno ἐν Μοναστηρίῳ”

The best things in life are incomprehensible. Paradise Metal, the debut album by π. Διονύσιος Ταμπάκης (Father Dionysios Tabakis), hit my timeline this week and I can’t make heads or tails of it. In other words: I’m obsessed. Tabakis is a 53-year-old Grecian priest in the Church of Panagitsa in Nafplio, a coastal city in the Argolic Gulf, and records music at home alone. The Paradise Metal liner notes on Bandcamp give a crash course on Tabakis’ style: Byzantine theory “as logic” and compositional fluency in qanun, oud, cümbüş, ney, zurna, Politiki and Pontic lyra, kabak kemane, and yali tanbur. Fretless electric guitar is the anchor, bending pitches beyond the flexibility of most Western charts. It’s Sunn O))), Scott Walker, and Enya fed into microtonal Greek ritualism. I don’t know who wrote the aforementioned liner notes, but “slow, heavy, meditative drone that carries the mass of stone walls and sustained prayer” is as good a portrayal of Paradise Metal’s many devotions as any. “Techno ἐν Μοναστηρίῳ” (transl. “Techno in Monastir”) is my very favorite. In this holy collection of Pontian hymns and epiphanic, old-world spells, Tabakis shockingly imbues his album’s centre with a techno chant-song. It’s a textured trance that sounds like a Byzantine interpretation of a Marty Robbins gunfighter ballad in Berlin, as aerated synths, high-beam drones, and drum machines coagulate into this impossibly transcendent two-minute landscape. It’s part-cowboy, part-cathedral, and part-club with a smear of THX electro blast. I don’t know anything about Greek music, really, but I do believe that songs like this one are portals meant to find us. —Matt Mitchell

Kim Petras: “Jeep”

Kim Petras on some Madonna American Life, Eurotechno, Alex G folktronica bullshit? Fuck it, I’m in. I am by no means a Petras evangelist, but “Jeep” is undeniable. It’s cosmic country wiped with ridiculously sticky Auto-Tune and a Porches co-write—not just a detour from Petras’ usual hyperpop style, but a time capsule of those psychedelic early 2010s in the Midwest captured perfectly by a German transplant in Los Angeles. It’s giving Ugg boots and white Monster energy drinks. We’re going to truck night at the lake. Ridiculousness is on the TV and it’s awesome. “Most Trashy” is a superlative you want to win. That guy with a BMX bike you like looks hotter than ever. “We can just drive around! Listen to tecccchno! Listen to Emmminem! Listen to Sliiipknot!” Petras sings on the bridge. “Sex in the parking lot, gas station! Maybe you can buy a new shirt there, too!” I was genuinely gobsmacked by how hard that part goes. “‘Cause we got history and history repeats” is immediately one of Petras’ smartest choruses. “Jeep” is the “middle American shit” sibling to Charli XCX’s “White Mercedes.” —Matt Mitchell

Lambchop: “Weakened”

Lambchop’s first song in four years begins with a church-esque choir. Gotta say, I didn’t have that one on my bingo list—but, God, does it work. “Weakened” is a straight-up folk hymn, Kurt Wagner’s even-keeled crooning floating above castanets (the only percussion on the album, apparently) and cutting through the chorus of voices behind him. It’s not pure church, though; electronic spirals and hums weave in and out of earshot. Most of the song is sparse, just acoustic strums and light banjo (from Justin Vernon, of all people), but every time that harmony of voices reaches up to buoy Wagner’s vibrato, it feels borderline transcendent. “How does it feel?” he asks, earnest and honest, as the choir around him builds and builds. The answer comes: “I don’t feel.” When those six voices fill the space around him in the chorus—“the weaker souls,” repeated three times—it feels like something metaphysical is opening up. It’s gorgeous, somehow unbearably intimate and utterly expansive all at once. —Casey Epstein-Gross

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