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 subscribers on Spotify and Apple Music, updated throughout the week.)
Fine - "Everything In The Shade"
The more I listen to “Everything In The Shade,” the more I begin to believe that the end is the best part. Like the very final chord. I don’t know why I’m obsessed with it. It’s subtle, but abrupt. After nearly four minutes of a gentle vocal waltz, smooth gelatinous bass, and tempered percussion, it all comes to an immediate stop. “I’m here/ Want it all/ If you just call,” Fine Glindvad sings, repeating the final chorus. Then, instead of letting that delicate, music box piano melody echo out, it stops dead. The ending feels severe. The first time I listened to the track while walking, I thought that it had been interrupted by a phone call. Its unnerving end made me realize how lulled I’d been the entire time. Was I lucid dreaming? “Everything In The Shade” is a soft silk pillow where I can lay my head, falling into dreams with every listen. —Margaret
DIIV - "Kid"
Trauma is something DIIV explore regularly. 2019's Deceiver felt like a dark reckoning, with lyrics about addiction hazily sighed over devastating guitars. Since then, their sound has increasingly become lighter, almost weightless. "Kid" relates adult pain to that of childhood, and how the desire to hide, to play, to be comforted never goes away. "Does it get better?/ Is it gonna get better?" Zachary Cole Smith asks, or, more accurately, begs, because he knows the answer is no, it only gets worse. Still, the song serves as a safe hiding spot from the darkness of adulthood — it's a rare empathetic perspective of the world when he sings, "You were someone's little baby/ Just like everyone." There is still some humanity left. —Danielle
AZ Chike - "Look Like My Mama" (Feat. Tyler, The Creator)
One hard, jubilant beat and bars on bars on bars. What else do you really need? Tyler made that music and delivers most of the flashiest lyrics here, but his fellow Angeleno is a mesmerizing presence, looming in the cut with the understated swagger the booming bass demands. Tyler: "I'm too rich to use a Zelle or a PayPal/ I stuff so many bitches in the Rolls, shit a Greyhound." Chike: "The whip so white, I had to let it read my rights/ It be the n****s I'm better than sayin' they can't see the hype." The piano and synth melodies are dazzling enough that this could work as an instrumental, but it ascends when these men talk their shit. —Chris
Rubber Band Gun - "Zombie In The Country"
If there was a thesis to “Zombie In The Country," it would probably be: "I hate the way this country sounds/ but I love when the music plays." Ain’t that the fucking truth. I’m probably reading way too much into it, but when I hear Rubber Band Gun's brilliant new song — a highlight from this week's surprise-released Bloodwork — I hear the dejection about this dumpster-fire era we are living in. But I also hear admiration for the art that keeps us afloat and the late forebears who kept our standards and our humanity in check. Maybe it’s the marriage of piano and harmonica or the witty nods to creative idols and pop hits, but “Zombie In The Country” sounds like an unearthed classic. Despite how upsetting it is to know how the sausage is made, this is the sound of humanity refusing to give up. —Margaret
Turnstile - "Never Enough (Rod Lee Version)"
More than two decades ago, the Baltimore club DJ and producer Rod Lee released "Dance My Pain Away," a song about his intentions to transcend money-related stress out on the dancefloor. The song helped turn Lee into a kind of envoy for a hyper-local underground scene, explaining why this particular form of rap-adjacent house music thrived in one embattled city and nowhere else. (If you're not from Baltimore and you know "Dance My Pain Away," that might be because you heard it on the soundtrack to The Wire; make of that what you will.)
Hardcore is also a place to dance your pain away when you got problems. Turnstile's new remixes-and-covers collection Never Enough: Versions goes a long way toward proving how strange and durable the band's melodies are, and Lee's take on the swelling-intro title track takes their Baltimore club flirtations further than the breakbeat and Wire sample that they dropped on "Look Out For Me." It's a giddy collision, with that classic drum-shuffle and Lee's party-rap patter supercharging Brendan Yates' reverb-drenched howl, giving it a new sense of fun and excitement. And when Lee gets into a back-and-forth with Yates' sampled refrain, he turns the song into a lament from someone who can never quite get over, just as he did on "Dance My Pain Away" all those years ago. —Tom
