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.) Ahh, the slipperiness of identity… what a terrifying thing!
But Ebbb make it feel a little less daunting on their swirly new single, “Public.” Vocalist Will Rowland repeats a comforting mantra in the chorus (“You know who you are”) like some strange guardian angel, offering reassurance amid the existential freefall. Like much of Ebbb’s music, “Public” is shot through with an irrepressible effervescence. Its synths glow with a kind of bioluminescence, while Rowland’s vocals reach beyond the self.
Ebbb turn glinting synth-pop into a gentle reminder that we can keep searching for truths just out of view without losing our footing entirely. If you're going to release a 10-minute single, you need to earn that time. You need to ask some big questions.
For instance: What if early-'90s Neil Young tried making his own 4AD-style dream-pop version of "November Rain"? On "Love Song," Philly DIY eccentrics Knifeplay get maximal but never excessive. They start out with nothing but a strummed acoustic guitar before layering on dramatic strings, blazing leads, warm organ-flutters, and elegantly bummed-out meditations on the nature of love itself.
They conjure a mood, and then they let you luxuriate in it for what feels like forever. You could live in a song like this, at least for 10 minutes at a time. —Tom "Hum Of The City" turns a hotel visit into an act of self-mythology: Williamson recalls staying in the exact same room years earlier, then hears a song at the hotel bar by someone she knows, with whom the personal history has gone sour. It's rendered cinematically, in a way that makes her story feel larger than life, and it lets her show off her vocal prowess again and again — especially when that pre-chorus hits, the melody shoots upward, and Williamson delicately requests, "Just play some old country music." Most days I'd rather hear this. —Chris New Zealand has a long history of obliquely catchy indie rock, and the young Auckland band Awning seem to exist both inside and outside of that lineage.
The itchy, minimal chug of "Little Green Book" contains echoes of Flying Nun Records history. But when they gets to the skronky, explosive chorus, they start to sound at least a little bit like a basement hardcore band, or like they've absorbed the knotty skronk of Archers Of Loaf. The ingredients are all familiar, but Awning combine them into something fresh and exuberant and new, something that lives and breathes and moves. —Tom Star Moles songs feel like old classics on impact, but Emily Moales writes and records them in a way that makes them stand out from this timeline, like hits from a world where Carole King's Tapestry was the biggest hit of 2021, not 1971.
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