Every week the Stereogum staff chooses the five best new songs of the week. The eligibility period begins and ends Thursdays right before midnight. You can hear this week’s picks below and on Stereogum’s Favorite New Music Spotify playlist, which is updated weekly. (An expanded playlist of our new music picks is available to members on Spotify and Apple Music, updated throughout the week.)
Jordan Raf & Shallowater - "From My Wings"
Shallowater's recent album God's Gonna Give You A Million Dollars, among the more compelling forays into alt-country-tinged slowcore in recent memory, certainly has its bolder moments. But even those are still presented with a loose, patient quality — not necessarily the type of background you'd expect to hear with vocals from Jordan Raf, a singer with an R&B background who delved into folksier projects after moving to New York City. Through their shared Texas roots and mutual friends, Shallowater played a gig one evening with Raf that eventually led to "From My Wings," a collaborative single that gives Shallowater's trance-inducing twang a shot of pop straightforwardness. It works remarkably well. —Abby
Sweet Pill - "No Control"
Zayna Youssef explained this week that she was feeling "like my self worth was cheap, and that I had no boundaries as a healthy person" when Sweet Pill wrote "No Control," calling the song "sort of my way to rock bottom." Yet like just about every track by the Philly emo anthem-slingers, their new album's lead single has an electrifying, uplifting effect. After spending most of its runtime with a stop-start momentum that lends every riff and vocal its spotlight moment, the track builds to its inevitable explosion in the end, making Youssef's breaking point sound like a breakthrough. —Chris
fakemink - "Black Jeep" (Feat. Fimiguerrero)
It really does go hard and go dumb. —Chris
Jane Remover - "So What?"
Is this... pop music? Jane Remover's output has floated all over the place, from nerve-jangling rage-rap splitter-splats to fuzz-rush alt-rock, but they've never entirely embraced the TRL aesthetic the way they do on "So What?" The track has all of Jane's built-in restlessness, and it always seems ready to explode into chaotic shards of breakbeats and glittering acoustic guitars and siren-squeals and atomized robo-voices. But somehow, the song holds together the love-dazed sweetness and hungry passion of its melody keeping all of its pieces locked into their gravitational orbit. You probably won't hear "So What?" on the radio anytime soon, but imagine if you did. —Tom
Draag - "Miracle Drug"
Shoegaze: There's a lot of it. Draag's effervescent, hypnotic sound has made them stick out from the endless mass of fuzzy bands, but now they're spicing it up even more by incorporating screamo. If you don't like screamo, you still might find yourself enchanted by it in the context of gauzy guitars and twinkling synths, in addition to conventionally beautiful vocals from Jessica Huang that float serenely against Adrian Acosta's squalls. Who knew a song with so much screaming could sound like a pleasant daydream? —Danielle
