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.) What happens to time when the body falls apart?
Does pain make time speed up or slow down? Are we suspended outside of it, or moving miles beyond the present moment? In May 1939, Major League Baseball player Joe Sprinz attempted to break the world record for catching a baseball dropped from a great height.
He was one of three players to successfully catch a ball dropped from 437 feet, the equivalent of a 43-story building. A few months later, he attempted to double that height, trying to catch a ball dropped 800 feet from a blimp. (Like, what the fuck, my guy, why?!) The ball eventually struck his glove, driving it into his face, breaking his jaw in a dozen places and rendering him unconscious. He suffered from headaches for years afterwards but lived to the age of 91.
It’s a miraculous and terrifying story, one woven into the lyrics of Bloodsports’ latest achievement, "Ten Thousand Feet." Sam Murphy’s vocals drag and wane, stretching time into something almost unrecognizable. The song builds with an ominous tension that feels all the more cathartic when everything finally comes undone. There’s a slithering melody that peaks through the end that satisfies an immense thirst.
This song feels abysmal in the best way — an empty-spaced pulse turns into a hypnotic drive. Almost like bloodsports are soundtracking the ball, its quiet moments before it leaves the blimp and then as it collides into Sprinz’ body. —Margaret "Another year/ I still don't feel like I got older." Singer/bassist Emily Borrowman opens "john dearly" with this confession, sounding resigned over colorful, fuzzy guitars. The song is about "being in your early adulthood and still feeling like a child," Borrowman explains, and it's equal parts apathetic and energetic before erupting into frenetic swirl of a finale.
It's an angsty, fun, undeniable banger. —Danielle No one is doing it like Fire-Toolz, and I mean that literally. No one else is taking new age synth pads, prog-rock guitar solos, glitchy IDM beats, jazz fusion, and throat-shredding black metal vocals and shaking them up together until they explode into a beautiful mess of candy-colored digital gloop. Although "Clustered Around My Opening!" isn't a particularly long track, it's a miniature suite in four parts, progressing through multiple universes of melted '80s sounds as Angel Marcloid traces the contours of a relationship from her youth.
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