The Week In Music: Paste’s Favorite Songs, Albums, Performances and More

This week we wrapped up May and kicked off June, which is starting on a high note thanks to a brilliant new record from Father John Misty. We also reviewed the latest music from Chvrches, Petal, Bardo Martinez and more. In the studio, we hosted exciting performances from Post Animal, Katie Von Schleicher, and Ainda Duo, all the way from Argentina. It was a busy week here at Paste, so scroll down to catch up on everything you might have missed.

BEST ALBUMS
Father John Misty: God’s Favorite Customer
After converting sharply honed cynicism and rampant misanthropy into a collection of witty, often scabrous and somehow deeply soulful songs on Father John Misty’s 2017 release Pure Comedy, Josh Tillman more fully targets himself on the follow-up. God’s Favorite Customer is a self-lacerating piece of work, mostly written during a six-week stretch in 2016 when he was living alone in a hotel room in the midst of an existential crisis. He’s opaque about the cause, but not the effects: The album plays like Tillman is watching himself have an out-of-body experience as he, or his Misty persona, behaves erratically in public, sends alarming texts to his wife in the middle of the night and repeatedly questions whether love is redemptive enough to save him.—Eric R. Danton

Snow Patrol: Wildness
Throughout Wildness, Gary Lightbody plays the role of world-weary enlightener and encourager against his band’s sparkling, beat-heavy songs. “Heal Me” is particularly successful, because its verses are a compelling collision of acoustic strum and glitchy electronics, and its chorus is positively heart-swelling. “Empress,” too, is a winner thanks to its urgent pace, its incandescent chorus and its hopeful message: “You don’t feel like an outcast anymore,” Lightbody sings as toms thunder and backing vocals flutter, “and something deep inside of you has wakened.”—Ben Salmon

Chvrches: Love is Dead
There’s a lot about letting go on the group’s latest, Love Is Dead: of old grudges, of toxic relationships, even of hesitation about honestly expressing oneself. For all the venting of psychic turbulence, Love Is Dead has a joyfully defiant feel, as if singer Lauren Mayberry is busily converting all the negativity in her life into sparkling, irrepressible pop melodies. The catharsis starts on album opener “Graffiti” as Mayberry lifts her voice in a soaring refrain that is at once effervescent and wistful on lyrics about leaving behind the promise, and also the folly, of youthful love.—Eric R. Danton

BEST SONGS
Bardo Martinez: ‘Love of Mine’
Written for his wife, the single is Martinez’s first self-produced release on his own label Yemayá Sol Records. It’s a declaration of love that he says also makes a strong personal statement. “With writing this song, it’s like saying to the world: ‘This is who I am. This is who I love. This is what I sound like,’” he says.—Beverly Bryan

Charli XCX: ‘5 in the Morning’
XCX released Sucker, her last full album, in 2014. The pop star has indicated that she intends to release new material throughout the summer—“You’re gonna be so fucking sick of me,” XCX joked on Twitter—though there’s no word on whether fans will get a full album anytime soon.—Katie Cameron