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May 14, 2021 By Mark Redfern (with Emma Goad)

Welcome to the 18th Songs of the Week of 2021. This week the CDC relaxed mask guidelines for those who have been vaccinated, helping to further pave the way for live music to return this fall. Although, right now there’s no clear way for venues or stores to check if someone is vaccinated. And political talk show host Bill Maher just got COVID-19, despite being vaccinated (apparently he’s got no symptoms). Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney was removed from House Republican leadership due to her criticism of former President Donald Trump and his false election fraud claims, further leading the GOP down a dark path. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict escalated this week, with a full-scale war being a possibility. And there was panic buying for gasoline in the U.S., due to a ransomware attack shutting down the Colonial Pipeline.

Now onto Songs of the Week and this week’s other content on our website. It was a blockbuster week for new songs, so we’ve got a Top 12 this week.

In the last week we posted interviews with Creeper Lagoon, Cautious Clay, Sarah Neufeld, actor Clayne Crawford, actor/musician Matt Berry, and Leon Bridges.

In the last week we also reviewed a bunch of albums.

And the new episode of the Under the Radar Podcast came out, featuring an interview with Emmy the Great.

Don’t forget that last month we announced our new print issue. The issue features Japanese Breakfast and HAIM on the two covers and is another edition of The Protest Issue, which examines the intersection of music and politics and features musicians photographed with protest signs of their own making. It follows Protest Issues we also published in 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016.

To help you sort through the multitude of fresh songs released in the last week, we have picked the 12 best the last week had to offer, along with highlighting other notable new tracks shared in the last seven days. Check out the full list below.

1. TORRES: “Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head”

On Wednesday, TORRES (aka MacKenzie Scott) announced a new album, Thirstier, and shared its first single, “Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head,” via a video for it. She has also announced some North American and European tour dates. Thirstier is due out July 30 via Merge. Check out the album’s tracklist and cover art, as well as her upcoming tour dates, here.

Thirstier is the follow-up to 2020’s Silver Tongue, which was her first album for Merge following a one-album stint on 4AD with Three Futures. Thirstier was recorded in the fall of 2020 at Middle Farm Studios in the UK and Scott co-produced the album with Rob Ellis and Peter Miles (she self-produced Silver Tongue). A press release says the album “marks a turn towards a bigger, more bombastic sound for TORRES. The anxious hush that fell over much of Scott’s previous music gets turned inside-out in songs tailored for post-plague celebration.” The press release also compares the production to that by Butch Vig on ’90s albums by Nirvana and Garbage.

“I wanted to channel my intensity into something that felt positive and constructive, as opposed to being intense in a destructive or eviscerating way,” Scott says in the press release. “I love the idea that intensity can actually be something life-saving or something joyous.”

Scott indicates that she’s in a good place in her life right now and that the album stems from that. “I’ve been conjuring this deep, deep joy that I honestly didn’t feel for most of my life,” she says. “I feel like a rock within myself. And I’ve started to feel that I have what it takes to help other people conjure their joy, too.”

Scott calls “Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head” her “relentless arena country star moment—my shameless Tim McGraw cheeseball hit.”

Read our 2020 interview with TORRES on Silver Tongue.

Read our 2017 interview with TORRES on Three Futures.

Read our 2015 interview with TORRES on Sprinter.

2. SPELLLING: “Boys At School”

SPELLLING (aka Chrystia Cabral) is releasing her third studio album, The Turning Wheel, on June 25 via Sacred Bones. On Tuesday she shared another song from the album, “Boys At School.”

In a press release Cabral explains that the new song “steps back into my younger self, my teenage self to voice my angst, desires and disillusionments. I knew when I created the main motif on the piano that it was striking something really raw and both delicate and fierce. The notes just immediately transported me to the era of my youth, of this time when you are really beginning to confront the mirror of yourself to the outside world.”

Cabral previously shared the album’s first track and lead single “Little Deer” (which was inspired by the Frida Kahlo painting Wounded Deer). “Little Dear” made it to #1 on our Songs of the Week list.

The Turning Wheel is described in a press release as revolving around “themes of human unity, the future, divine love, and the enigmatic ups and downs of being a part of this carnival called life.” The album, orchestrated and self-produced by Cabral, features an ensemble of 31 collaborating musicians.

Cabral’s most recent album, Mazy Fly, came out in 2019 on Sacred Bones.

Check out our My Favorite Album interview with Cabral.

3. The Goon Sax: “In the Stone”

On Wednesday, Australian trio The Goon Sax announced a new album, Mirror II, and shared its first single, “In the Stone,” via a Mara Palena-directed video for it. Mirror II is due out July 9 via Matador, their first for the label. Check the album’s tracklist and cover art, as well as the band’s upcoming Australian and UK tour dates, here.

The trio features Louis Forster, Riley Jones, and James Harrison. Mirror II is the band’s third album and the follow-up to 2018’s We’re Not Talking, which was released by Wichita.

John Parish (Aldous Harding, PJ Harvey) produced the album, which was recorded in Bristol, England at Invada Studios (which is owned by Geoff Barrow of Portishead and Beak>). Since their last album, Forster moved to Berlin and worked in a cinema, while Jones and Harrison formed a post-punk side-project, Soot.

“The first two albums are inherently linked,” says Forster in a press release. “They had three-word titles; they went together. This one definitely felt like going back to square one and starting again, and that was really freeing.”

“We lived in a shared house together, this tiny little Queenslander we called ‘Fantasy Planet,’ where we wrote the album,” Jones explains of the album’s genesis. “We were able to go to each other’s rooms and say anything that came to mind and go to the practice room three times a week. It was pretty intense.”

Of the album title, Jones adds: “I was reading The Philosophy of Andy Warhol the other day. He said something so perfect… ‘I’m sure I’m going to look in the mirror and see nothing. People are always calling me a mirror, and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?’ The name [Mirror II] was totally arbitrary to begin with, but it became about reflecting on reflection: we all get so influenced by each other. You find other people who show you yourself, who you are.”

Influences on the album cited in the press release run the gamut and include HTRK, Young Marble Giants, Stereolab, The Motels, Justin Beiber, Les Rallizes Dénudés, Keiji Haino, Kylie Minogue, The Walker Brothers, Jandek, Felt, and Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett.

“I got into Syd Barrett’s lyrics because they were hazy, relatable and honest but up in the air. That’s how I felt,” says Harrison. “I was experiencing romantic love for the first time, it felt out of my control, and there’s something about Syd Barrett’s lyrics… it doesn’t just come from inside us; it is the moments that are happening to us as well.”

Speaking of the album’s first single, Forster says: “‘In the Stone’ is set in Berlin where I moved with my partner at the time, just after finishing school and recording our last album We’re Not Talking at the end of 2017. We were both exploring ourselves—accepting each other’s changes and celebrating flux—but also reckoning with the complicated need for a solid sense of self and the person we loved. Musically the song was influenced by what was playing in the background of our conversations which often took place in Ubers, supermarkets, outside parties etc. So, it probably bears more of a subconsciously absorbed modern pop influence than anything else we’ve done as a band.”

Read our interview with The Goon Sax on We’re Not Talking.

4. Wolf Alice: “No Hard Feelings”

On Tuesday, Britain’s Wolf Alice shared a new song, the dreamy and understated “No Hard Feelings,” via a video for the song. It is the third single from their upcoming new album, Blue Weekend, which was due out June 11 via Dirty Hit/RCA, but the band have now announced that it will come out a week earlier, on June 4. Jordan Hemingway directed the video, which features frontwoman Ellie Rowsell at a bus stop at night with a lover. It’s the same setting as the album’s cover art.

Rowsell had this to say about the song in a press release: “I started out trying to make a really cheesy almost Motown-y, Ronettes kind of song about the end of a relationship, and feeling ‘What’s the point of being miserable about it?’ But it was short, because originally it was played so fast. I tried to make it longer, but I didn’t have any more words—I had said everything I wanted to say perfectly, and didn’t want to ruin it with more. So instead we slowed it down, and I felt way more moved by it like that.”

Wolf Alice previously shared a video for Blue Weekend’s first single, “The Last Man on Earth.” “The Last Man on Earth” was #1 on our Songs of the Week list. Then they shared the album’s second single, the bass-heavy “Smile,” via a video for the song. “Smile” was #2 on our Songs of the Week list. Then they performed “Smile” on The Late Late Show with James Corden, where they were also interviewed.

Pick up or download Under the Radar’s current print issue (Issue 68) to read our interview with Wolf Alice about Blue Weekend.

Blue Weekend is the band’s third album and the follow-up to 2017’s Visions of a Life, which won them the coveted Mercury Prize.

The band’s full line-up is Ellie Rowsell (vocals, guitar), Joff Oddie (guitar, vocals), Theo Ellis (bass), and Joel Amey (drums, vocals). The band stayed in an Airbnb in Somerset, England and worked on some demos in a converted church. Markus Dravs (Arcade Fire, Björk, Brian Eno, Florence + The Machine) then produced the final album.

Visions of a Life was our Album of the Week, we gave it a rave 9/10 review, and it was also #5 on our Top 100 Albums of 2017 list.

Read our 2017 interview with Wolf Alice on Visions of a Life.

Wolf Alice released their debut album, My Love Is Cool, back in 2015. It made it to #3 on Under the Radar’s Top 100 Albums of 2015 list and landed Rowsell on the cover of our Best of 2015 print issue, in a joint cover with Father John Misty.

Read our Best of 2015 article on Wolf Alice. Also read our earlier 2015 print article on Wolf Alice, as well as our 2015 Pleased to Meet You Spotlight article on Wolf Alice. And read our review of My Love Is Cool here.

5. St. Vincent: “Down”

St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark) released a new album, Daddy’s Home, today via Loma Vista. On Monday she shared the album’s third, “Down,” via a video for it. Bill Benz directed the video, which seems to feature Clark as a private detective in 1970s New York City.

Previously St. Vincent shared the album’s first single, “Pay Your Way In Pain,” via a video for the track. The sleazy and funky “Pay Your Way In Pain” sounds like something from Beck’s Midnite Vultures album (from 1999) and was one of our Songs of the Week. The song was previewed with a teaser video. Then she shared “The Melting of the Sun,” which was also one of our Songs of the Week. Then she shared a video for “The Melting of the Sun.”

St. Vincent also performed “The Melting of the Sun” on Saturday Night Live, along with “Pay Your Way In Pain.”

Daddy’s Home was teased with a series of outdoor advertisements. Jack Antonoff co-produced the album with Clark, which was recorded by Laura Sisk, mixed by Cian Riordan, and mastered by Chris Gehringer. In 2019 Clark’s father was released from prison after being incarerated for nine years, hence the album’s title, Daddy’s Home. This led her to revisiting the vinyl records her dad used to play her when she was a child. As a press release puts it: “The records she has probably listened to more than any other music in her entire life. Music made in sepia-toned downtown New York from 1971-1975.” Hence the vibe of the album’s promotion and packaging is decidedly ’70s.

In the press release Clark puts it this way: “Daddy’s Home collects stories of being down and out in downtown NYC. Last night’s heels on the morning train. Glamour that’s been up for three days straight.”

St. Vincent’s last studio album, MASSEDUCTION, came out in 2017 on Loma Vista, and made it to #3 on our Top 100 Albums of 2017 list.

6. Leon Bridges: “Motorbike”

Today, Leon Bridges announced a new album, Gold-Diggers Sound, and shared a new song from it, “Motorbike,” via a video for it. Today we posted our exclusive new interview with Bridges about the album and song and you can read that here. Gold-Diggers Sound is due out July 23 via Columbia. Fellow musician Anderson .Paak directed the “Motorbike” video, which takes cues from notorious bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde. Check out the abum’s tracklist and cover art here.

Gold-Diggers Sound includes Bridges 2020 single “Sweeter,” which was one of our Songs of the Week and which Bridges performed on The Late Late Show with James Corden and at the Democratic National Convention. The song was released in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and became something on an anthem for the times.

Bridges had this to say about “Motorbike” in a press release: “The inception of the song started with this Afrobeat-type instrumental that my homeboy Nate Mercereau made. Prior to the session, I was in Puerto Rico for my 30th with some of my best friends, and the energy of that trip totally inspired this song. ‘Motorbike’ is about living in the moment and escaping with someone. It’s the personification of that unspoken chemistry you have with that person. A special thank you to my man Anderson .Paak for the stunning visuals.”

The album features Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, and Ink. Bridges executive produced Gold-Diggers Sound with Ricky Reed and it was produced by Reed and Nate Mercereau.

In the press release, Bridges had this to say about recording the album: “I spent two years jamming in what often felt like a musician’s paradise. We effortlessly moved from the dance floor to the studio. We would be finishing our tequilas at 10:00 a.m. and waking up with coffee and getting to work at 10:00 p.m. It was all for the love of R&B and musicianship. This is my most sensual and confident album to date and I cannot wait to unleash it.”

Bridges’ last album, Good Thing, came out in 2018 via Columbia.

7. Sleater-Kinney: “Worry With You”

On Tuesday, Sleater-Kinney announced a new album, Path of Wellness, and shared a video for a new song from it, “Worry With You.” Path of Wellness is the first album to be self-produced by the band and the first to be recorded since drummer Janet Weiss left the band in 2019. Path of Wellness is due out June 11 via Mom + Pop. Alberta Poon directed the “Worry With You” video, which features two women (Fabi Reyna and Megan Watson) coping with living together in a tiny house, with the band’s Carrie Brownstein (guitar/vocals) and Corin Tucker (guitar/vocals) appearing on TV. Check out the album’s tracklist and cover art, as well as their upcoming co-headlining tour dates with Wilco, here.

Path of Wellness is the band’s follow-up to 2019’s The Center Won’t Hold, which landed them on one of the two covers of our My Favorite Album Issue, in which we interviewed each of them about The Center Won’t Hold and their all-time favorite album.

Brownstein and Tucker recorded the album in Portland, utilizing local musicians to back them up. The tour with Wilco was originally scheduled for 2020 but was pushed back due to COVID-19.

8. The Mountain Goats: “The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums”

The Mountain Goats are releasing a new album, Dark in Here, on June 25 via Merge. On Tuesday, they shared a new song from it, “The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums.” It features backing vocals from Susan Marshall and Reba Russell (Rev. Al Green, Lynyrd Skynyrd, U2).

In a press release, frontman John Darnielle says that “The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums” is an autobiographical song: “While the lines, ‘In a new universe/trying to find the mask that fits me’ would take on a newly literal connotation … the song is about going to metal shows at Fender’s Ballroom in Long Beach, California, in the late ’80s, and more broadly, about seeking a sense of identity and community in strange and occasionally forbidding places.”

Previously The Mountain Goats shared a lyric video for the album’s first single, “Mobile.”

Dark in Here is the band’s third album in just over a year, following April 2020’s Songs for Pierre Chuvin (which was recorded on a boombox and featured only Darnielle) and October 2020’s Getting Into Knives. Dark in Here was recorded in the week in between recording Songs for Pierre Chuvin and Getting Into Knives, at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It’s a studio that Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Gregg Allman, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and other legends have recorded at. “Mobile” features some Muscle Shoals legends as well, with Spooner Oldham (Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt) on electric piano and Will McFarlane (Bonnie Raitt, Tammy Wynette) on lead guitar.

Getting Into Knives followed 2019’s In League With Dragons, 2017’s Goths, and 2015’s wrestling-themed Beat the Champ. The band features frontman John Darnielle, drummer Jon Wurster, bassist Peter Hughes, and multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas.

Read our interview with John Darnielle on Getting Into Knives.

9. koleżanka: “7th St/7th Ave”

This week, Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter, guitarist, and producer koleżanka (aka Kristina Moore) announced a new album, Place Is, and shared a new single from it, “7th St/7th Ave,” via a video for it. Place Is will be out July 30 via Bar/None, her debut for the label. Check out the tracklist and cover art for the album here.

Moore talks about the new song in a press release: “This song lyrically encapsulates a lot of what the record was written about; being here while being there. I was feeling physically split between different homes. I had a home in Phoenix, a home in Brooklyn, and various homes I’d found while being on the road. As I spent time in one place, I felt the other grow farther. I have thought often about ‘place’ vs. ‘space’ the past three years. What makes space a place. If a place is only physically spaced. I used to have awful PTSD flashbacks and heavy dissociation, both of which would function differently, but would leave me feeling disoriented as if I had truly left my body and gone to another place and then come back and forget where I actually am. More recently, I’ve found myself caught in bouts of nostalgia, where I get caught in a memory and lose my footing in a physical space because the memory is so cinematic. Or I found myself returning home to Phoenix after moving and every part of the city felt filled entirely by events spanning years and it felt overwhelming. The song moves in three parts between three separate homes I was feeling all at once: walking from 7th st. to 7th ave. in Phoenix while the sun was setting, leaving Darlings at 3 a.m. one night in Bushwick and feeling this urge to run back to my apartment as fast as I could, and being at Barton Springs in Austin Texas on a tour, after visiting Barton Springs several times on several tours over a few years, and watching some kids climb a high tree and swinging into the spring from a rope over and over.”

This new track is a trip to the ’70s and a psychedelic vision with overlaying guitar synths and tones of percussion from drummer Ark Calkins. Koleżanka includes lyrics about existing in an “in-between” space much like truckers, flight attendants, and musicians on tour where home has no permanent meaning, and explores instead the emotional connection to a physical realm. Place Is continues to grapple the emotional and psychedelic experiences in life by turning them into sound.

Previously koleżanka shared Place Is single “Vegan Sushi.” By Emma Goad

10. Okkervil River: “In a Light”

This week, Okkervil River (the project of Will Sheff and backing band) shared a new song, “In a Light,” and announced some fall solo tour dates that will be co-headlining shows with Damien Jurado. Another new song, “It Hasn’t Happened Yet,” came out today (listen further below). Check out the tour dates here.

Okkervil River’s last album, In the Rainbow Rain, came out in 2018 via ATO.

Sheff had this to say about the new songs in a press release: “I wrote ‘In a Light’ with our guitarist Will Graefe right before I moved out of Brooklyn. We recorded it in one take at Figure 8 studios, with Frank LoCrasto adding piano and Ryan Dugre on second guitar. It sounded great instantly, but it didn’t seem like the right moment to release the track, and the track didn’t seem to be quite at home on In the Rainbow Rain. So I kept it under my hat. I’d had ‘It Hasn’t Happened Yet’ kicking around as well, and I’d always wanted to release that one on its own but I could never get the recording to sit quite right. Finally I had a tandem eureka moment with both of them—I figured out what I needed to do to fix ‘It Hasn’t Happened Yet’ and I felt the time was right for ‘In a Light.’ So I brushed them off and sent them to Dave Cerminara to mix. The whole process was incredibly smooth and easy. I think of these songs as two sides of the same coin, supporting each other by saying two different but complementary things. And even though I started them a couple years in the past they both seem to want to talk about the present and future.”

“In a Light” is over six minutes long and slowly builds into a bit of a psych rock jam.

Read our The End interview on endings and death with Okkervil River’s Will Sheff.

11. The Go! Team: “Pow!”

England’s The Go! Team are releasing a new album, Get Up Sequences Part One, on July 2 via Memphis Industries. On Wednesday, they shared another song from it, the energetic “Pow,” via a James Slater-directed video for the single. The song prominently features the skills of the band’s frontwoman, Ninja.

“I’ve always been interested in flipping between sections within the same song—a bit like channel hopping,” says The Go! Team’s main songwriter Ian Parton of “Pow” in a press release. “This track channels Curtis Mayfield one second, soaring Mellotron strings the next. Ninja’s old school rapping rubs shoulders with dive bombing guitars—The Go! Team’s always been about the difference between things.”

Previously The Go! Team shared the album’s first single, “World Remember Me Now,” via a video for the track (which was one of our Songs of the Week).

Get Up Sequences Part One was created as Parton was losing his hearing. “I lost hearing in my right ear halfway during the making of this record,” he explained in a previous press release. “I woke up one Thursday in October 2019 and my hearing was different in some way—it fluctuated over a few weeks and at one point everything sounded like a Dalek. I seem to remember listening to music was bordering on unbearable. Over time it settled into just a tiny bit of hi end being audible on my right side. I thought the hearing loss was from playing music too loud over the years but it turns out I was just unlucky and it was a rare condition called Menieres. It was traumatic to keep listening to songs I knew well but which suddenly sounded different and it was an odd juxtaposition to listen to upbeat music when I was on such a downer. The trauma of losing my hearing gave the music a different dimension for me and it transformed the album into more of a life raft.”

Back in November, the band shared the song “Look Outside (A New Year’s Coming)” for Memphis Industries’ Lost Christmas compilation.

Their last album, Semicircle, was released in January 2018, also on Memphis Industries.

12. Gaspard Augé: “Hey!”

This week, Gaspard Augé, one half of French electronic duo Justice, announced the details of his debut solo album, Escapades, and shared a new song from it, “Hey!” There’s also a music video for “Hey!,” although it features only a one-minute snippet of the song, so it’s more like a trailer. Escapades is due out June 25 via Genesis/Ed Banger/Because. Check out the album’s tracklist and cover art here.

In April, Augé shared the album’s first single (his debut solo single in fact), “Force Majeure,” which was also accompanied by a short video. “Force Majeure” was one of our Songs of the Week. At the time, the title of Escapades was announced but there was no info on the album’s release date, tracklist, or cover art.

A press release says that Escapades “sounds like a UFO landing from another galaxy; a baroque masterpiece that reimagines European classical music for the 21st century.”

“I’ve always been obsessed with making larger than life music,” Augé says in the press release. “Mostly because it’s more fun.”

Filip Nilsson directed the “Hey!” video, which was filmed in Turkey.

Justice’s most recent album, Woman, came out in 2017. It featured the songs “Fire” and “Pleasure.”

Honorable Mentions:

These four songs almost made the Top 12.

Desperate Journalist: “Personality Girlfriend”

Horsey: “Seahorse” (Feat. King Krule)

Shannon Lay: “Rare to Wake”

UV-TV: “Always Something”

Other notable new tracks in the last week include:

Max Bloom: “Palindromes”

Blvck Hippie: “Bunkbed”

Charles: “Impudent Hussy”

Claire George: “Northern Lights”

Cautious Clay: “Wildfire”

Crowded House: “Playing With Fire”

Erika de Casier: “Busy”

Martin Garrix: “We Are The People” (Feat. Bono and The Edge)

Herbert: “The Way” (Feat. Y’akoto)

Hildegard: “Jour 3”

Ida Mae: “Little Liars”

Islands: “Carpenter”

Jodi: “Softy”

Kississippi: “Big Dipper”

Koreless: “Black Rainbow”

Lavender Diamond: “Turn Around”

Manic Street Preachers: “Orwellian”

Laura Mvula: “Got Me”

Okkervil River: “It Hasn’t Happened Yet”

Liz Phair: “in There”

Loraine James: “Let’s Go”

Margo Price: “Long Live The King”

Mastodon: “Forged By Neron”

Thurston Moore: “Sketch Of Light”

Sarah Neufeld: “Detritus”

Xenia Rubinos: “Cógelo Suave”

Skrillex, Starrah, and Four Tet: “Butterflies”

Skrillex, Swae Lee, and Siiickbrain: “Too Bizarre”

Skullcrusher: “Cloudy Shoes” (Damien Jurado Cover)

Smile: “Dressed For Success”

We Are the Union: “Boys Will Be Girls”

Wild Pink: “Ohio” (Feat. Samia)

Xiu Xiu: “Killing Distance” (Long Hind Legs Cover)

Yaeji: “PAC-TIVE”

(Special thanks to Emma Goad for helping out this week’s list together.)

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