10 Best Songs of the Week: Stereolab, The Beths, Lael Neale, Blondshell, and More
May 02, 2025
Welcome to the 14th Songs of the Week of 2025. This week Andy Von Pip, Caleb Campbell, Scotty Dransfield, and Stephen Humphries helped me decide what should make the list. We considered over 30 songs and narrowed it down to a Top 10.
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To help you sort through the multitude of fresh songs released in the last week, we have picked the 10 best the last seven days had to offer, followed by some honorable mentions. Check out the full list below.
1. Stereolab: “Melodie Is a Wound”
Stereolab are releasing Instant Holograms on Metal Film, their first new album in 15 years, on May 23 via Duophonic UHF Disks and Warp. This week they released the album’s second single, “Melodie Is a Wound.” They also put out an accompanying crossword puzzle and expanded their tour dates. Check out the crossword puzzle and the tour dates here.
Alan Connor put together the crossword puzzle. Not only is he a Stereolab fan, but he has an impressive resume when it comes to puzzles. He’s the crossword editor for The Guardian, does the cryptic crossword for The Observer, has written several books (including 188 Words For Rain), and has also been question editor for the TV shows House of Games and Only Connect.
Connor had this to say about the Stereolab crossword in a press release: “Writing this puzzle I felt an unfamiliar sensation, at first in my knees. A recovered memory of Stereolab in a venue which sent the groop’s noise bursts—bass? sub-bass? whatever might be under that?—directly inside each of us in the crowd, reshaping us in wonderful ways. No one else has done that, but then no one else has done the alchemic things Stereolab has done. Happily for me, this is a band fond of titles which read just like fragments of cryptic clues. So long, that is, as your brain has been suitably warped by puzzles. Happily, mine has been warped this way—as well as my body by Stereolab. Thank you for the warping, thank you Warp and thank you Stereolab. By the way, I sincerely believe that anyone in public life would do public life better if they listened to Emperor Tomato Ketchup’s ‘Tomorrow Is Already Here’ a few times. What was then the future has borne out that one plenty.”
Previously Stereolab shared the album’s first single, “Aerial Troubles,” via a music video. “Aerial Troubles” was #2 on our Songs of the Week list.
Stereolab’s last studio album was 2010’s Not Music, although despite an indefinite hiatus the band has remained active since then reissuing older albums and since 2019 they have been touring. The band is led by founding members Laetitia Sadier and Tim Gane and also includes Andy Ramsay, Joseph Watson, and Xavier Muñoz Guimera. Instant Holograms on Metal Film also features Cooper Crain, Rob Frye, Ben LaMar Gay, Ric Elsworth, Holger Zapf, Marie Merlet, and Molly Read.
Instant Holograms on Metal Film was teased with an “Aerial Troubles” 7-inch being mailed to select fans (with an instrumental version of the song on the B-side). Cryptic posters featuring a Stereolab word search also appeared in some major cities.
In 2021, Sadier guested on Jarvis Cocker’s cover of Dalida’s 1973 duet with Alain Delon, “Paroles, Paroles.” It was featured on Cocker’s album, Chansons D’Ennui Tip-Top, which was a companion piece to Wes Anderson’s film, The French Dispatch.
The Beths are vocalist Elizabeth Stokes, guitarist Jonathan Pearce, bassist Benjamin Sinclair, and drummer Tristan Deck.
“In some ways ‘Metal’ is a song about being alive and existing in a human body,” Stokes explains in a press release. “That is something I have been acutely aware of in the last few years, where I have been on what one might call a ‘health journey.’ For parts of the last few years, I kind of felt like my body was a vehicle that had carried me pretty well thus far but was breaking down, something I had little to no control over. All of the steps in the Rube Goldberg machine of life are so unlikely, and yet here we are in it. I have a hunger and a curiosity for learning about the world around me, and for learning about myself. And despite all the ways that my body feels like a broken machine, I still marvel at the complexity of such a machine.
“I can hold that knowledge in one hand, and yet with the other hand I can point to my reflection and just be like ‘you are shit.’ Or ‘ugly.’ Or ‘worthless.’ I can reliably respond to any suggestion that I might be able to achieve any small thing with ‘no.’ And these are variations of the ‘short word’ referenced in the song.”
The press release says “the track sees The Beths fully embracing jangle rock.” As Stokes explains: “There was a propulsion to the acoustic strumming pattern on the original demo. Tristan’s drums meet that feeling so perfectly, the feeling of a train pushing up the tracks. Jonathan got to play his Burns 12 string guitar as sparkly as he wanted, and Ben as usual can’t be contained to the lower register. I think we ended up with an arrangement that embodies the frenetic intricacy of an engine in action. There’s a lot going on, until there isn’t.”
Minimalist singer/songwriter Lael Neale released a new album, Altogether Stranger, today via Sub Pop. Earlier this week she shared its third single, “Wild Waters,” via a self-directed music video.
Neale had this to say about “Wild Waters” in a press release: “The video for ‘Wild Waters’ was a collaboration with choreographer and dancer Sandi [Denton]. I had this vision of dancers playing the part of interdimensional beings performing a dance that would open a portal, calling my character through. In perfect synchronicity, when I approached Sandi with the idea, she had already been building a two-person dance that fit seamlessly. I love working with Sandi for this reason.”
Regular collaborator Guy Blakeslee produced and mixed the album, which was recorded at home. Chris Coady mastered Altogether Stranger.
Neale also had this to say about “Wild Waters”: “While the album was made by just me and Guy, the really fun part of creating this film was getting to include our friends in the production and experiment alongside some of the many visionary artists who are active in Los Angeles right now to bring the story to life. The guiding ethos for both the record and the film was an intuitive (vs. technical) approach, embracing the primitive simplicity of making things by hand.
Today Neale released music videos for all the remaining songs from the album as a short film.
Altogether Stranger finds Neale returning to Los Angeles after three years of living in rural Virginia. She was born and raised in Virginia before moving to Los Angeles then back to VA during the pandemic and now back to LA again. The video for “Tell Me How to Be Here” superimposes images of LA on top of a double exposed Neale as she sings the song.
“On returning to Los Angeles I felt like an extraterrestrial landing on a dystopian planet so I’m writing from the perspective of a being from another realm witnessing the peculiarities of humanity,” says Neale in a press release.
“In the course of writing this record there was one song I could never finish. The main line was, ‘I don’t belong here, I am an altogether stranger.’ I meant ‘stranger’ as a noun, not an adjective. Even though I abandoned the song, the lost chorus stuck with me & became the unspoken motif of the record,” says Neale of the album’s title.
Blondshell (aka Sabrina Teitelbaum) dropped her highly anticipated sophomore album, If You Asked For a Picture, today via Partisan. In the lead-up to the release, earlier this week Teitelbaum shared the final pre-release track, “Event of a Fire.”
A slow-burning epic, “Event of a Fire” begins with a fragile guitar arpeggio, building to a powerful crescendo of harmonies and crashing drums. Written during a haze of tour-life exhaustion The song explores existential fatigue, delving into body image, family tension, and the weight of just trying to hold it all together.
The song’s accompanying video stars up-and-coming French actress Ghjuvanna Benedetti and was directed by Emilé Moutaud. The narrative follows a diving team and one diver’s internal burnout, juxtaposing the mundane aspects of her life with the crushing weight of what she’s feeling inside.
You can grab our print issue (Issue 71) to read our exclusive interview with Blondshell. Read our review of her debut album here. By Andy Von Pip
5. Indigo De Souza: “Heartthrob”
This week, Indigo De Souza announced a new album, Precipice, and shared its first single, “Heartthrob,” via a music video. Precipice is due out July 25 via Loma Vista. Check out the album’s tracklist and cover artwork, followed by her upcoming tour dates, here.
Precipice follows 2023All of This Will End, which was released on her previous label Saddle Creek. De Souza worked with Elliott Kozel on the album.
“Life feels like always being on the edge of something without knowing what that something is,” De Souza says in a press release. “Music gives me ways to harness that feeling. Ways to push forward in new directions.”
Of the new single, De Souza says: “I wrote ‘Heartthrob’ as a way to help process something that is often hard to talk about—the harmful ways I’ve been taken advantage of in my physical memory. ‘Heartthrob’ is about harnessing anger, and turning it into something powerful and embodied. It’s about taking back my body and my experience. It’s a big fuck you to the abusers of the world. A sarcastic, angry cry for all bodies that have ever been touched in harmful ways.” By Mark Redfern
