“Freak Mode” is immediately a great name for a song, but it’s even better when it’s by the Welsh indie rock crew the Tubs. Their 2023 debut Dead Meat was a great start, packed with cinematic, Smiths-esque jangly greatness, and “Freak Mode” is another ebullient, impassioned earworm. Even when Owen Williams is singing “I know it’s over,” the tune rushes forward with infectiousness and instead feels like the beginning of something great and promising. —Danielle

Sharon Van Etten could’ve kept doing the singer-songwriter thing forever. She’s very good at it, and the audience for tender, accessible acoustic-indie stuff never seems to go away. Instead, Van Etten has pushed toward something grander and more ambitious, and it has paid off. Van Etten has gradually added more gothy synth-rock flourishes to her music, and there’s plenty of that on “Afterlife,” the first single from her new album with the Attachment Theory, her backup band. But “Afterlife” adds more than the pulsing keyboards and drum machines of her last few albums. It’s also got a titanic gospel-informed singalong chorus and a churning New Order-style bassline. It’s bigger and louder and more nakedly emotional than anything she’s done since “Seventeen,” and it hits that same anthemic register. Something special is happening here. —Tom

Often, yeule songs sound like melodrama playing out in the digital realm, like Soccer Mommy surfing the matrix. New single “eko” ups the pop quotient on that formula with spectacular results. The drums have a skip in their step. The guitars surge forward with giddy momentum. Their usual hazy production is nudged into focus, but not without strategic bursts of static to reinforce the song’s impact. As yeule sings brightly and sweetly about a powerful infatuation, “eko” whips up a similar allure, until it’s kicking around your head like the object of yeule’s affection is whirling around theirs. —Chris

People have been using Viagra as an easy punchline since the drug was introduced in the ’90s; it might be the thing that Bob Dole is culturally best-remembered for. But Russ Fitzgibbon, the Australian dance-rocker who records as Skeleten, isn’t here to make jokes. Instead, he’s concerned with what it means when you can literally buy a drug that makes your dick hard — when commerce plays a role in human bodily systems. I don’t know how that kind of thinking leads someone to write a propulsive, rippling floor-filler, but that’s what Fitzgibbon has done — chanting “violence is Viagra” over a tingling cascade of drums and bells and keyboard flutters. If you hear this in a crowded club at the height of the night, maybe that could change your bodily chemistry, too. —Tom

“You guys ever feel like you’re just, like, always in Ohio?” Momma’s Etta Friedman asked a cozy crowd attending the band’s set at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn last Monday. For most people who, like the founding members of Momma, grew up near Los Angeles and now call New York home, spending a disproportionate amount of time in the Midwest might not be an obvious metric of success. But most of those people aren’t in bands that rock as hard as Momma.

In the two and a half years since their breakthrough album Household Name, Momma have had to quickly acclimate to a life spent often on the road, where temporal constraints are irregularly measured: “These nights are getting busier by my design,” Friedman and bandmate Allegra Weingarten sing on their gleeful new single “Ohio All The Time,” a grunge-pop banger about those immediate, major life changes that cast everything in a welcome new light. Over ridiculously catchy hooks, the song makes “fucking up my life” feel like living the ultimate dream. “I never got Ohio, babe, but now I do,” Friedman and Weingarten sing, as if through flirtatious smiles. Don’t underestimate the magic of a good change in scenery. —Abby