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

This week at Paste, the last week of June was a busy one for music fans. Lucinda Williams dropped her collaboration with jazz legend Charles Lloyd; Gorillaz, The Innocence Mission and Florence + The Machine released solid new music; we highlighted some stellar singles from up-and-coming bands; and we debuted Amanda Palmer’s new animated video. In the studio, KT Tunstall covered Tom Petty, and Yonas brought in a brand-new backing band. Check out everything you might have missed below.

BEST ALBUMS
The Innocence Mission: Sun On The Square
The entrancingly beautiful folk-pop that Karen and Don Peris have been releasing for the past three decades under the name The Innocence Mission is a monument to a simpler way. The band’s 11th album, Sun on the Square, starts off lovely and never lets up. Along the way, we get an extended peek into Karen’s evocative wordsmithery, which is heavy with references to the natural world (light of winter, gentle lions, leaves on leaves, darting birds), streaked with color and shot through with an ever-present sense of wonder and exploration. When you scan the lyrics for Sun on the Square, you realize just how often she is posing a question. All told, the album feels like a hand-crafted work of art, put together carefully by its creators, charmingly imperfect but much preferred over a mass-produced piece with no stitch out of place, and no soul to match. —Ben Salmon

Gorillaz: The Now Now
The Now Now, the sixth full-length from Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s cartoon band Gorillaz, is the spiritual cousin of 2010’s The Fall, an album that was created entirely on the road, recorded directly into an iPad. This one is a little more fleshed out than that, with many of the songs conceived and demoed in hotel rooms during last year’s Humanz tour but then properly recorded in London’s Studio 13 with the help of current band members James Ford and Remi Kabaka. It rolls along like a travelogue of the journey that Albarn and co. undertook in 2017 through a world that was shaken to its core by some serious political upheaval. In contrast to the lightness of the music—a sleek funk that feels like what songwriters and tech geeks from the ‘80s imagined the future would sound like—the lyrics are paranoid and despairing, sorrowful and confused. —Robert Ham

BEST SONGS

Amanda Palmer: Pulp Fiction
Amanda Palmer is of course the multi-talented, multi-discipline musician and New York Times bestselling memoirist. We were thrilled to debut her new video directed and stop-motion-animated by acclaimed comic artist David Mack, who provides cover art for the Dark Horse Comics’ adaptation of American Gods, the novel by Palmer’s husband Neil Gaiman. We’ve also got an exhaustive, fly-on-the-wall discussion between the two artists that touches on art, collaboration, context and Palmer’s feelings on American Gods (hint: Neil wasn’t thrilled with her reaction). —Steve Foxe

Lauren Balthrop: Don’t Ever Forget
After serving as a backing vocalist for the likes of Bob Weir, Kevin Morby, Benjamin Booker and Elizabeth & The Catapult, singing in girl-group doo-wop trio The Bandana Splits and performing as Dear Georgiana, Lauren Balthrop is stepping into the spotlight to release her debut album, This Time Around. Balthrop says “Don’t Ever Forget” was inspired by Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” a meditation on the evanescence of joy and its accompanying nostalgia. It’s a steady-moving reverie highlighted by—what else?—Balthrop’s dulcet vocals, which are layered over fuzzed-out electric guitar and bright acoustic strumming. —Scott Russell

Valley Queen: Ride
California psych-rockers Valley Queen have shared the third single from their forthcoming debut album, Supergiant, out July 13 via Roll Call Records. It’s called “Ride,” and if the record’s second single, the hurried “Boiling Water,” is Supergiant’s tipping point, then “Ride” could be its steady incline. “Boiling Water” and the title track are rollercoaster headbangers, but “Ride” takes its time, slowly building feeling and sound until an emotional bridge has been constructed. —Ellen Johnson