Every week the Stereogum staff chooses the five best new songs of the week. The eligibility period begins and ends Thursdays right before midnight. You can hear this week’s picks below and on Stereogum’s Favorite New Music Spotify playlist, which is updated weekly. (An expanded playlist of our new music picks is available to members on Spotify and Apple Music, updated throughout the week.)
Dent May - "The Big One"
Dent May is a smooth operator. The LA-based Mississippi makes lush retro pop that seems to have glided straight out of the '70s. It's feel-good music even when he's singing about feeling bad, and it doesn't get much badder than the apocalypse. "The Big One," the title track from May's forthcoming LP, sounds like the opposite of a freakout. There's none of the livewire unease of, say, David Bowie's "Five Years" or any number of new wave nuclear-anxiety anthems. Yet the eerie calm with which May approaches our impending doom somehow does not feel out of step with the music. We'll all be lucky to be this cool and collected when facing down oblivion. —Chris
Getdown Services - "I Can't Die Like That"
Minhead duo Getdown Services make a particularly British kind of knowing fuckaround music. Lots of UK groups kick playfully deadpan non-sequiturs over synth beats, and Getdown Services do just fine in that lane. But their whole thing jumps up a few levels when you add a nasty riff to the mix. "I Can't Die Like That" has a bluesy guitar-slither that wouldn't embarrass Keith Richards, and it gives a whole different context to the drawling, panting vocals. As in: Suddenly, these guys are singing harmonies. —Tom
Mary In The Junkyard - "New Muscles"
Mary In The Junkyard are a force to be reckoned with. Their new single might be their strongest yet, melodically alluring and deeply unsettling in equal measure. There’s skinamarink percussion rattling beneath ghostly, witch-like coos, while the chorus line, "New muscles all over my back," lands like some body-horror transformation sequence, as though the trio have tapped into occult powers…or just hit an especially intense gym routine. "I could will you down with one finger" sounds like something Nancy Downs would hiss across a candlelit bedroom in The Craft. It’s powerful, unnerving, catchy stuff. —Margaret
Nick Hakim - "Real Here Now"
Grief is as much a universal experience as it is an individual one. Nick Hakim's stunner of a new piano ballad "Real Here Now" was written with his own dearly departed family members in mind: "My sister, she’s been learning magic/ She claims she talks to grandpa in the attic," his buttery vocals recall in the first verse. But over the track's five minutes, as the Queens virtuoso explores holding on to a person's memory in their wake, his little pensive quips start to encompass loss in a plethora of forms: "My ears can't believe what they are seeing." Maybe you'll feel the same. —Abby
Westside Cowboy - "Kick Stones (The Boys)"
"We always thought if we can pull this off it could be really fun — taking this mad '70s rock thing but then having it played by a bunch of scrawny kids." That's the thought process behind Westside Cowboy's new track "Kick Stones (The Boys)," which is inspired by a live recording of the Velvet Underground's "What Goes On." The way the song slowly unravels — accelerating and building, ricocheting between quiet and loud without formula, disposing of choruses altogether — has the scrappy, invigorating texture of a jam session from a bygone era. Who needs a chorus when you can just repeat the refrain a bunch of times while shredding your heart out? —Danielle
