11 Best Songs of the Week: Cheekface, Julien Baker and TORRES, Miki Berenyi Trio, Momma, and More
Feb 28, 2025
Welcome to the sixth Songs of the Week of 2025. This week Andy Von Pip, Caleb Campbell, Matt the Raven, and Scotty Dransfield helped me decide what should make the list. We considered over 30 songs and narrowed it down to a Top 11.
Today we announced Issue 74, The Protest Issue. It features Kathleen Hannah and Bartees Strange on the two covers and can be bought from us directly here.
We’re also hoping to get 600 new (or renewed) subscribers on board in the next three months and so we’re offering 30% off subscriptions right now.
To help you sort through the multitude of fresh songs released in the last week, we have picked the 11 best the last seven days had to offer, followed by some honorable mentions. Check out the full list below.
1. Cheekface: “Living Lo-Fi”
Los Angeles-based indie rock trio Cheekface have been teasing a new album, Middle Spoon, on social media for about three weeks and as promised, it was released earlier this week. They also shared a video for the album’s latest single, “Living Lo-Fi.” Stream the album here.
Ben Epstein and David Combs directed the “Living Lo-Fi” video, which guest stars fellow musician Chris Farren and centers around a music video shoot gone wrong.
Cheekface is vocalist/guitarist Greg Katz, bassist Amanda Tannen (formerly of stellastarr*), and drummer Mark “Echo” Edwards. Greg Cortez produced and recorded the album at New Monkey Studio and 64Sound in Los Angeles. Tannen did the album’s cover artwork, as is always the case with the band. Cheekface surprise-released a new album, It’s Sorted, in March 2024. It was one of our Top 100 Albums of 2024. Middle Spoon is the band’s fifth album.
Julien Baker and TORRES (aka MacKenzie Scott) are releasing their debut album together, Send a Prayer My Way, on April 14 via Matador. This week they shared its third single, “Tuesday,” which is sung by TORRES and about a girl she had a crush on in her youth and the resistance to it from the girl’s mother.
A press release says the song “centers on trying to overcome and heal from the guilt, shame and religious abuse that so many people experience discovering their identity and growing up Queer.”
Send a Prayer My Way is considered a country album. The duo released their debut single together, “Sugar in the Tank,” in December only days after the two beloved queer indie rock singer/songwriters performed the song on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. When the album was announced they released its second single, “Sylvia,” which made our Songs of the Week list.
The album has been in the works since the two first performed together in 2016 and one of them suggested that they one day make a country album.
TORRES released a new album, What an enormous room, in January 2024 via Merge. In August 2024 she teamed up with Fruit Bats for the collaborative EP, A Decoration, also on Merge.
Baker’s last solo album was 2021’s Little Oblivions, which was followed by the accompanying B-Sides EP, both released via Matador. Little Oblivions was one of our Top 100 Albums of 2021. Read our Protest Issue interview with Baker, where she discusses the album, here. Also listen to our Under the Radar podcastinterview with Baker here.
Miki Berenyi Trio—led by the former singer/guitarist with 1990s shoegaze, dream pop, and Britpop band Lush—are releasing their debut album, Tripla, on April 4 via Bella Union. This week they shared its third single, “Big I Am,” via a music video. Sébastien Faits-Divers directed the song’s video, which was filmed at the Consortium Museum (Contemporary Art Center) in Dijon, France.
The song tackles macho aggression and toxic masculinity, including misogynistic social media personality Andrew Tate, as Berenyi explains in a press release: “I’ve witnessed 50+ years of the trends in masculinity and frankly, nothing much changes—as ever, there are good men and there are shit men, and there are boys who can be misguided but easily mature into the best of their sex. But this latest incarnation of ‘winning’ the sex war is a laughably infantile and wilfully regressive new low.”
Tripla includes the band’s debut single, “Vertigo,” which was released in May 2024 and was #1 on our Songs of the Week list that week. When the album was announced, they shared another new song from it, “8th Deadly Sin,” via a music video. “8th Deadly Sin” was also one of our Songs of the Week.
After Lush, Berenyi was also in the band Piroshka and for the trio she is backed by two members of that band—Berenyi’s life partner KJ “Moose” McKillop (of ’90s shoegazers Moose) and guitarist Oliver Cherer. Miki Berenyi Trio (or MB3 for short) is a full on collaboration between the three members and not just a Berenyi solo project. Tripla is the Hungarian word for “triple,” named in a nod to Berenyi’s Hungarian father.
Bella Union is the label founded by Simon Raymonde, formerly of Cocteau Twins, a band previously associated with Lush. Bella Union also released the two Piroshka albums.
Paul Gregory (of Bella Union labelmates Lanterns on the Lake) mixed the album. The album was recorded at home and the trio have also taken a DIY approach to touring. “There is something very ‘grass roots’ about what we’re doing,” says Berenyi. “There’s no point following the ‘announce the album, then tour, then record the next album’ route—we just want to wring as much enjoyment out of this as we can, and hope that it resonates somewhere!”
In 2022, Berenyi released her acclaimed memoir, Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success, and the trio was partially born out of the need to perform at book events.
Berenyi did a joint interview with Australian dream pop artist Hatchie in The ’90s Issue of our print magazine, where she discussed her memoir and Lush. Buy a copy directly from us here.
Pirohska, which also features former Elastica drummer Justin Welch, released their second studio album, Love Drips and Gathers, in 2021 via Bella Union. Read our interview with them about it here.
Pirsoshka also contributed to our Covers of Coversalbum in honor of our 20th Anniversary, where they covered Grandaddy’s “The Crystal Lake.” Berenyi was also one of the artists on the cover of our 20th Anniversary Issue.
Brooklyn-based band Momma are releasing a new album, Welcome to My Blue Sky, on April 4 via Polyvinyl/Lucky Number. This week shared the album’s third single, “Bottle Blonde,” via a music video self-directed by the band.
Momma is Etta Friedman (songwriter/vocalist/guitarist), Allegra Weingarten (songwriter/vocalist/guitarist), Aron Kobayashi Ritch (producer/bassist), and Preston Fulks (drummer).
Friedman and Weingarten wrote “Bottle Blonde” and collectively had this to say about it in a press release: “We wrote this song as a letter to our past selves, when we were 23 and 24, stumbling through an extremely grueling tour that ended up taking a huge toll on our hearts and minds. We both had bleached hair and were in the midst of making huge decisions that would change our lives and also our perceptions of ourselves. The song started out as kind of an affirmation to our younger selves, that everything would be ok if you just follow your heart, but now looking back on it the lyrics could also be read as us talking to each other.”
Ritch produced the album, which was recorded live with the full band at Studio G in Brooklyn.
“With this album we were less concerned with sounding cool and heavy and rock & roll and much more focused on good, clean songwriting that hopefully inspires people to sing along and mean every word,” said Weingarten in a previous press release.
In 2023 Momma released the single “Bang Bang.” It was also one of our Songs of the Week, but it’s not featured on the new album.
Momma’s last album, Household Name, came out in 2022 via Polyvinyl.
