10 Best Songs of the Week: Magdalena Bay, Blondshell, Geordie Greep, Amyl and The Sniffers, and More
Plus Fontaines D.C., Laura Marling, Floating Points, and a Wrap-up of the Week’s Other Notable New Tracks
Aug 23, 2024
Welcome to the 27th Songs of the Week of 2024. This week Andy Von Pip, Mark Moody, Matt the Raven, Scotty Dransfield, and Stephen Humphires helped me decide what should make the list. We considered over 25 songs and narrowed it down to a Top 10.
Recently we announced our new print issue, The ’90s Issue, featuring The Cardigans and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth on the covers. Buy it from us directly here.
In recent weeks we posted interviews with Hamish Hawk, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and more.
In the last week we reviewed some albums.
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. Magdalena Bay: “That’s My Floor”
Los Angeles-based electro-pop duo Magdalena Bay (aka Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin) released a new album, Imaginal Disk, today via Mom + Pop (stream it here). Earlier this week they shared its fourth single, “That’s My Floor,” via a trippy music video. Amanda Kramer directed the video, which continues the narrative from the other videos for the album.
The band collectively had this to say about the song in a press release: “This song is about how we imagine a party must be like. We’ve never been to one.”
Also below as an honorable mention is the disco-influenced “Cry For Me,” one of our favorite album tracks not previously released as a single.
Yesterday we posted our rave 9/10 review of Imaginal Disk. Read it here.
Imaginal Disk includes “Death & Romance,” a new song the band shared in May that was one of our Songs of the Week. Then they shared a sci-fi themed video for the song featuring UFOs, portals, and doppelgangers. Magdalena Bay also previously announced The Imaginal Mystery Tour, a U.S. tour this fall. When the album was announced, they shared its second single, “Image,” via a music video. “Image” was #1 on our Songs of the Week list. Then they shared its third single, “Tunnel Vision,” which again was #1 on our Songs of the Week.
Imaginal Disk is the band’s sophomore full-length album and follows 2023’s mini mix vol. 3, a surprise-released a seven-song EP and an accompanying short film that featured videos for every song. The EP’s “Wandering Eyes” made our Songs of the Week list.
In 2021, Magdalena Bay released their debut album, Mercurial World, which was one of our Top 100 Albums of 2021 and several songs from the album were featured on our Top 130 Songs of 2021 list. Then in 2022 they released a deluxe edition of the album that included several bonus tracks and remixes incorporated into the main tracklist of the original album, presenting a completely different listening experience.
Read our interview with Magdalena Bay on Mercurial World here. By Mark Redfern
2. Blondshell: “What’s Fair”
This week, Blondshell, the music project of Sabrina Teitelbaum, released a new single and accompanying video titled “What’s Fair.” This track follows her 2023 self-titled debut album, as well as her recent cover of a Talking Heads song for A24’s Everyone’s Getting Involved and a collaboration with Bully on the track “Docket” (one of our Songs of the Week).
Teitelbaum’s latest release continues to showcase her keen ear for memorable grunge-fueled melodies and raw poetic lyrics. Regarding the inspiration behind the song, she shares: “I think that any relationship between a mother and a daughter is inherently complicated. Maybe it’s because of my own relationship, which was grounded in a lot of trauma and loss, but I think it’s always confusing. What are you allowed to expect, what is normal, what behavior from a parent is okay or not okay, etc? And to what extent does ‘normal’ even matter when your experience is all you have?”
She further elaborates: “I was just trying to sift through the past when I wrote this song and I mostly had a lot of questions.” By Andy Von Pip
3. Geordie Greep: “Holy Holy”
This week, Geordie Greep of black midi announced his debut solo album, The New Sound, and shared a video for its first single, “Holy Holy.” He also announced some tour dates. The New Sound is due out October 4 via Rough Trade. Check out the album’s tracklist and cover artwork, as well as the tour dates, here.
“Holy Holy” sounds a bit like Steely Dan, which is surprising given the experimental artrock black midi are known for. Greep recently posted to Instagram that “black midi was an interesting band that’s indefinitely over,” implying that the band was broken up or on hiatus.
Black midi’s most recent album, Hellfire, was one of our Top 100 Albums of 2022.
“The main theme of the record is desperation; you don’t hear an unreliable narrator but someone who is kidding themselves that they have everything under control, but they don’t,” says Greep on the new album in a press release.
He adds: “With recording The New Sound, it was the first time I have had no one to answer to. And with every impulse I had, I was able to completely follow it through to its conclusion. Being in a band (black midi), we often have this ‘we can do everything’ feeling, but you are also kind of limited in that approach, and sometimes it’s good to do something else, to let go of things.”
Greep recorded the album with over 30 musicians in São Paulo and London. “Some of the tracks we had recorded already, elsewhere, but it just wasn’t right, so we re-recorded them with new people,” he explains. “Half of the tracks were done in Brazil, with local musicians pulled together at the last minute. They’d never heard anything I’d done before, they were just interested in the demos I’d made. The tracking was all done in one, maybe two days. Then we did the overdubs later, in London.”
As for his future solo endeavors, Greep says: “My plan is to ‘do a Keith Jarrett thing,’ have a different group of session musicians in a different place and lean into the fact that we’re not going to get it the same.” By Mark Redfern
4. Amyl and The Sniffers: “Chewing Gum”
This week, Australian punks Amyl and The Sniffers announced a new album, Cartoon Darkness, and shared a new song from it, “Chewing Gum,” via a music video. Cartoon Darkness is due out October 25 via B2B Records / Virgin Music Group. John Angus Stewart (of PHC Films) directed the “Chewing Gum” video. Check out the album’s tracklist and cover artwork, as well as the band’s upcoming tour dates, here.
The album includes “U Should Not Be Doing That,” a new song the band shared in May that was one of our Songs of the Week. They also shared the B-side “Facts” in May, which is not featured on the new album.
The band features Amy Taylor, Dec Martens, Gus Romer, and Bryce Wilson. They recorded the album with Nick Launay (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Yeah Yeah Yeahs). Cartoon Darkness is the follow-up to the band’s 2021 album, Comfort to Me.
Taylor had this to say about the new album in a press release: “Cartoon Darkness is about climate crisis, war, AI, tiptoeing on the eggshells of politics, and people feeling like they’re helping by having a voice online when we’re all just feeding the data beast of Big Tech, our modern-day god. It’s about the fact that our generation is spoon-fed information. We look like adults, but we’re children forever cocooned in a shell. We’re all passively gulping up distractions that don’t even cause pleasure, sensation or joy, they just cause numbness.
“Cartoon Darkness is driving headfirst into the unknown, into this looming sketch of the future that feels terrible but doesn’t even exist yet. A childlike darkness. I don’t want to meet the devil half-way and mourn what we have right now. The future is cartoon, the prescription is dark, but it’s novelty. It’s just a joke. It’s fun.”
Of “Chewing Gum,” Taylor says: “The adversity of life is desire never fulfilled. Doing the dishes cleaning, but never the one eating the meal, so close but it’s never enough, and trying to celebrate the ignorance of youth despite it being robbed away, so choosing ignorance, choosing to be dumb and choosing love, despite everything, choosing bad decisions for love, for life, because it is short, or is it long? Surrendering to joy, surrendering to being a vision, in your own power, because making decisions based on emotion rather than logic is liberating, and despite the external inferno, you walk away unscathed, through flames, burnt but only superficially, unstopped, unaffected, unhuman. Life is work, life is not free, we can never work enough because the end goal doesn’t exist, so all we can do is choose to be wrong.” By Mark Redfern
5. Fontaines D.C.: “In the Modern World”
Irish five-piece Fontaines D.C. released a new album, Romance, today via XL. Earlier this week they shared its fourth single, “In the Modern World,” via a music video. Luna Carmoon directed the video.
Frontman Grian Chatten wrote the song during a 10-day visit to Los Angeles in early 2023. A press release says it’s likely Chatten’s favorite track on the album and compares it to Lana Del Rey, old Hollywood soundtracks, and the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard.
Yesterday we shared our rave 9/10 review of the album. Read it here.
Previously the band shared the album’s first single, “Starburster,” via a music video. “Starburster” was #1 on our Songs of the Week list. Then they shared its second single, “Favourite,” via a self-directed video. It was also one of our Songs of the Week. The album’s third single, “Here’s the Thing,” was again #1 on our Songs of the Week list.
Then they announced a fall North American tour. The one-month trek runs from September 20 to October 20 and NYC band Been Stellar will be the opening act.
Then they performed “Starburster” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
Romance is the band’s fourth album, the follow-up to 2022’s acclaimed Skinty Fia (which was #1 on both the UK and Irish album charts), 2020’s Grammy-nominated A Hero’s Death, and 2019’s Mercury Prize-nominated Dogrel. It finds them working with producer James Ford for the first time.
The band was formed in Dublin but is now based in London and features Grian Chatten (vocals), Carlos O’Connell (guitar), Conor Curley (guitar), Conor Deegan (bass), and Tom Coll (drums). Ideas for the new album started to form while they were touring the U.S. and Mexico with Arctic Monkeys. Then the band members went their separate ways for a while, before reconvening for a three weeks of pre-production in a North London studio and one month of recording in a chateau near Paris.
In a previous press release, Deegan said of the album title: “We’ve always had this sense of idealism and romance. Each album gets further away from observing that through the lens of Ireland, as directly as Dogrel. The second album is about that detachment, and the third is about Irishness dislocated in the diaspora. Now we look to where and what else there is to be romantic about.”
Chatten relates the theme of the album to Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s 1988 anime movie classic Akira, where, as the press release put it, “the embers of love develop despite a maelstrom of technological degradation and political corruption around its characters.”
“I’m fascinated by that—falling in love at the end of the world,” he said. “The album is about protecting that tiny flame. The bigger Armageddon looms, the more precious it becomes.”
O’Connell added: “This record is about deciding what’s fantasy—the tangible world, or where you go in your mind. What represents reality more? That feels almost spiritual for us.”
In 2023 Chatten released his debut solo album, Chaos For the Fly. Read our interview with him about it here. By Mark Redfern
6. Laura Marling: “No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can”
7. Floating Points: “Ocotillo”
8. Tindersticks: “Always a Stranger”
9. The Hard Quartet: “Rio’s Song”
10. Du Blonde: “TV Star”
Honorable Mentions:
These songs almost made the Top 10.
Being Dead: “Nightvision”
Broadcast: “Come Back to Me (Demo)”
Desire: “I Know”
fantasy of a broken heart: “Follow Your Captain”
Christian Lee Hutson: “Beauty School”
illuminati hotties: “Sleeping In”
Magdalena Bay: “Cry for Me”
Alan Sparhawk: “Get Still”
Here’s a handy Spotify playlist featuring the Top 15 in order, followed by all the honorable mentions:
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