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.)
Allegra Krieger - "See Through"
Just Cause Vol. 2 is the second installment in a series of benefit compilation albums assembled by Cody DeFalco and Evan Welsh. Released earlier this week with proceeds going towards the Immigrant Defense Project, the collection boasts a whopping 63 songs, one of which being a previously unreleased demo from New York's Allegra Krieger. Her gentle, airy guitar ballad "See Through" is a diamond in the rough, but that roughness is exactly what makes the track gleam: vague background strings, distant chirping birds, and an off-the-cuff delivery that feels incredibly personal. —Abby
Knumears - "Untitled"
It's been a weird, sad, bad week in the world of hardcore, and maybe everywhere else as well — the saving grace being all the hardcore songs about struggling and scramblng and hopefully surviving. LA trio Knumears don't make down-the-middle hardcore, but their two-minute fireblast "Untitled" fits the form anyway. It's got screamo catharsis and post-rock sweep, and it shapes those influences into the instinctively satisfying form of a riff-stomp rager, complete with the moment that the riff comes back slower and you know you're in danger. If you let it wash over you, it might help you take all those weird, sad, bad feelings and turn them into something else. —Tom
Tracey Nelson - "Hercules"
The countrified slacker-rockers are proliferating nearly as fast as the shoegazers, but there's a reason Asheville's Wednesday/Lenderman braintrust put its stamp on Tracey Nelson in particular. "Hercules," the title track from the NYC singer-songwriter's forthcoming debut, summons a woozy, aching bedroom-to-the-barroom vibe. Nelson's bleary vocals are an ideal delivery system for sentiments like "No one gives me heartache like my baby can/ In your arms you give me everything you have." The music cruises along, somehow both light as air and weighed down by the world. It belongs in conversation with 2010s indie singer-songwriter heroes like Kurt Vile and Mac DeMarco, but also decades-old country balladeers. —Chris
FILM - "Roundabout"
Algernon Cadwallader and the Starting Line make very different types of emo. The bands are from two different eras, but Algernon guitarist Joe Reinhart and Starting Line frontman Ken Vasoli came together with drummer TJ DeBlois to create something timeless with FILM. "Roundabout" is a simple song about a classic topic — going in circles, being unable to break a cycle — and the sound is cathartic yet contained. DeBlois tragically passed away in 2023, which makes it even more meaningful when Vasoli belts, "No promise of another day." It's a powerful, catchy existential reckoning that, at under two minutes, doesn't linger in the dread for too long. —Danielle
Gia Margaret - "Alive Inside"
Gia Margaret hadn't recorded in a studio for years before venturing to Eau Claire to work with S. Carey at the Hive. But she sure sounds comfortable creating in that environment. "Alive Inside" is the latest from Singing, the Chicago artist's return from instrumental music after a vocal injury. Here, she processes her voice as a means of amplifying its feeling, lending extra layers of resonance to lines like "With all the optimism you could fit into Lake Michigan/ I tried." The twinkling, spectral backing track gives the song the feeling of a grownup lullaby, though its soothing properties might also make you burst into tears. —Chris
