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.)
Heavy Lifter - "Backyard"
Cherub Dreams is killing it right now. Over the past year the Bay Area record label has been ceaselessly launching scrappy, inspired indie rock projects into the world, including recent releases from Tricky FM, starbelliedbug, towhead, and both Welcome Strawberry and Strawberry Panic. None of those are household names even by underground standards, but the hit rate is high, and Heavy Lifter are contributing to it. The Oakland group does the "'90s revival with a Gen Z sensibility" alt-rock thing better than most. "Backyard," their latest, makes me feel like I'm at a hard-hitting basement show and whole galaxies of sound are opening up. —Chris
American Motors - "No Horses"
It's all about that lurch, baby. American Motors are clear students of '90s noise-rock, and they know how to construct a nasty riff and to present it in ways that feel perectly off. They hesitate. Silences arrive when you don't expect them. Guitar-stabs ring out like sirens. They drag us into the muck before frontman Dustin White sings a single word about a former one-horse town where they wish they still had a horse around. The lurch makes White's wasteland one-liners hit even harder. "Somewhere, I heard they're building a center/ Dialysis or data, does it really even matter?" "It's like covering up a bad tattoo with an even worse one." "And you used your one call to dedicate 'Little Miss Can't Be Wrong.'" That's the lurch, too. —Tom
Sophia Stel - "I Do"
Everyone wants to be a cool girl, but Sophia Stel embodies this ideal effortlessly. Her buzzy, dreamy songs balance the excitement of the club with the melancholy and the loneliness, and that's especially true on "I Do." She sings of a push-and-pull relationship with sleek detachment; she's feeling electric, wondering about a ring, and getting "stuck on the phone with my delusions." Even when she delivers a line as unpoetic as "It's crazy fucking stupid," the words sound revelatory from her airy, unconcerned voice. —Danielle
Soul Glo - "February Theory"
Soul Glo prove that hardcore and footwork were made for each other. "February Theory" is already captivating, opening with the wail of "Surrounded by death." Pierce Jordan’s vocal delivery grows corrosively fast. There’s a punchy chorus, howls from hell and laments about loss, but the unexpected breakdown takes “February Theory” to another level. Thrashing guitars and gnawing bass initially come at you in a dense, abrasive rush before the whole thing suddenly drops into a bouncing rhythm that feels almost unnervingly light on its feet. It feels it's teasing us. All that distortion and friction gets forced into a groove that keeps bobbing beneath the noise like it took no effort at all. It’s hardcore wizardry.
What starts as a furnace gradually becomes a controlled burn. The aggression is no less potent for being slightly more contained, and the bass transforms its menace, chewing away at the beat rather than simply driving it forward. The track’s fury doesn’t dissipate, but changes shape. A fierce inferno becomes a contained blaze, the flame not dying, only flexing control. —Margaret
The War On Drugs - "Who's That"
You know what it is right from those opening the opening notes, a softly crushing blanket of synths and pianos. Spoon's Alex Fischel is the person playing that piano, but he never sounds quite like that on a Spoon record. The tone, smothering sustain that speaks of dashed hopes and endless yearning, is enough to announce that Adam Granduciel is back up in this motherfucker, that he's about to take us on a trip through an internal cosmos.
The War On Drugs' first song in four years is a pocket epic that reaches so hard for a thing it can't quite gasp, finding beauty in the failure instead. Granduciel, his voice even craggier than when we last heard from him, gets caught wondering. Where does he belong? Would it be so wrong to be on the take? Did he blow it, or did it just explode? All around him, guitars and keyboards and backup vocals explode in ecstatic slow motion, triggering widescreen catharsis but never detracting from the central melancholy at work. Granduciel blazes a fat solo and then mutters that the lion hangin' on his neck is only his depression, bay-buh. If depression can sound this rapturous, maybe it's not the worst place to get lost. —Tom
