The 5 Best Songs Of The Week

Love is a beautiful and tortuous thing. On "Chains Of Love," the cinematic second offering from Charli XCX’s Wuthering Heights album, romantic devotion is as vibrant, painful, and sensual as your beloved licking clean the blood from freshly cut skin. Teaming up with Finn Keane and Justin Raisen, Charli continues to make anthems perfect for sobbing in the pouring rain, tears indistinguishable the sky’s condensation. "Chains Of Love" is haunting, and not just from the many references to bodily devastation ("I'd rather lay down in thorns/ I'd rather drown in a stream/ I'd rather light myself on fire"). But it sounds like a True Romance session that she’s swept the cobwebs off of — impassioned, industrial pop with a hint of new wave and lots of drama. (Fitting, cause Raisen worked with her on that album!) With aching orchestral strings and spectral backing vocals, "Chains Of Love" is equally magnetic as it is unnerving, capturing how an intangible thing like love can feel more like prison than our own corporeal cages. —Margaret

"Nothing prepares you for this or is a cure," Jana Horn sings. "No way." She's singing, softly and slowly, about an emptiness she can't contend with. "Go On, Move Your Body" is a song adrift, the sonic equivalent of the plastic bag from American Beauty. Into that gaping expanse, Horn murmurs scary questions like "Is this all there is?" and "What did he write in that book? Follow your bliss? But what do you do when there's no scent of it?" Her conclusion could be read as hopeful or resigned, but in the context of this music, it's haunting: "You just go on moving your body." —Chris

Following the release of her breakthrough 2022 album Janky Star, Grace Ives endured a self-described "crash out," which consisted of "drinking and hiding and hurting." Now, the indie-pop up-and-comer is recovering and reckoning. "Avalanche" is a refreshing whirlwind that exudes empowerment in a sincere, exciting way. She puts it well herself: "I feel their darkness, but also their buzzing energy to keep moving," she said of her new tracks. The restless, fluttering movement in the song is contagious, making you feel like you're overcoming something alongside her. —Danielle

"Dopamine" is not a deliverance. When you're dealing with an artist like Robyn, someone who has a history of making stunningly perfect immortal ragers and who takes seven-year breaks between albums, it can be tempting to hail any return as either a a divine visitation or a crushing disappointment. "Dopamine" is neither of those, though it's closer to the former than the latter. It's just a very good Robyn song. We haven't gotten one of those in a while, so it hits like a mug of hot chocolate on a chilly afternoon.

"Dopamine" has the things that you want from a Robyn track — the swirling heart-tugging synth riffs, the dramatic explosions of drums, the aching vocoder-smeared vocals, the lyrics that find cool new ways to express devastatingly familiar lyrics. In this case, Robyn tries to steel herself for the terrifying vulnerability of new love by telling herself that the feeling is just chemicals reacting in her mind, but that knowledge does her no good. She'll helpless. And so she's made a song called "Dopamine" that triggers actual dopamine. Heard in the right setting, maybe it feels like deliverance after all. —Tom

We've seen plenty of stars bridge the gap between classical roots and contemporary pop, but we've never witnessed a trajectory quite like Rosalía's, whose Spanish folk and flamenco background paved the way for her to become one of today's most inventive voices in pop. Her 2022 album MOTOMAMI began to unpack the dissonance she felt as her star grew, feeling like a universal outsider while simultaneously not wanting to compromise her artistry by staying inside one box. "Reliquia," from Rosalía's stunning new album LUX, takes it one step further: How do you keep pouring your heart out after you, yourself, become a commodity?

As Rosalía tells it on "Reliquia" -- Spanish for "relic" -- she's well aware that fame has granted her some truly extraordinary experiences, but not without compromise: "I lost my tongue in Paris, my time in LA/ My heels in Milan, my smile in the UK," she sings in her native tongue, her voice fluttering over stellar orchestral strings. For each club night in Berlin and each blunt smoked in Mexico, there were countless heartbreaks and self-discoveries, each experience amplified by the nature of being an artist in the public eye: "My heart has never been mine, I always give it away/ Take a piece of me, keep it for when I'm gone/ I'll be your relic." I don't perceive that self-objectification as a dedication to one specific lover, but instead as a promise to the world that provided all the highs and lows to put into song in return. And yet, as "Reliquia" swells into a blast of distorted breakbeats, Rosalía doesn't seem to hold too much resentment — she simply loves this shit too much to quit. —Abby