The 5 Best Songs Of The Week

It’s incredible how much we don’t know. The whirl of a tornado is just as mysterious as why blistering distortion sounds so good to the brain. Sure, they’re both familiar sensations, but no less phenomenal for it.

"Blue Earth," the latest single from Seattle’s Spiral XP, was inspired by a run-in with a twister in Blue Earth, Minnesota. They make a humbling encounter with Mother Nature sound effortless and cool. Lena Farr-Morrissey’s vocals hang like a cool haze as the grit and humidity of swirling bass and guitar rival each other, building toward the perfect storm. Spiral XP’s controlled distortion mimics the unpredictable yet recognizable shape of a cone-shaped storm, balancing chaos and structure in a way that makes the track feel both disorienting and strangely comforting. —Margaret

At its core, "Shifting Sands" could be an '80s power ballad playing at your dentist's office between Richard Marx and "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." But John Errol explicitly cites the influence of darker, edgier artists like PJ Harvey, Nine Inch Nails, and Perfume Genius, and you can hear it in this song's atmosphere. Mike Hadreas in particular shines through in Errol's ability to make the painfully sweet and vulnerable feel avant-garde. —Chris

Sophie Allison has come a long way since 2018's Clean. The sound of Soccer Mommy has expanded into the undefinable, especially after her woozy work with Oneohtrix Point Never on 2022's Sometimes, Forever. But "Rings Of Saturn" feels like a return to the innocent, simple place of her debut studio album that served as her breakthrough. The singer-songwriter said she wrote the tune "during a difficult time when I would often take my telescope out into the yard to look at the moon or at planets." In the face of the cosmos, "Rings Of Saturn" goes back to the basics, and that's where Soccer Mommy really shines. —Danielle

"Lapsang" feels like the kind of song that could only exist right now. It's part of a whispery indie singer-songwriter lineage stretching from Phoebe Bridgers and Alex G back to Elliott Smith, but its hypermodern approach to guitar music feels like the culmination of countless indie trends, from slowcore to chillwave to grunge revival. Regardless of where you situate the song, what sells it is the way it piles up impeccable details. The vocal tradeoffs between Chris Steward and Rosie Long Decter, the overlap between nimble fingerpicked guitar and fried lead work so hot it might sting you, the way the music moves like a rock song and post-genre festival core at the same time — it adds up to an alluring whole that . —Chris

Sinéad O'Connor famously stared at the camera for almost the entirety of her "Nothing Compares 2 U" video, her eyes vast and pleading, a single teardrop finally sliding down her cheek. Fellow Irish singer Radie Peat similarly holds the center of the frame for the seven-minute entirety of her clip for "The Moon And Stars." But the effect is different. Peat's eyes are hard and accusatory, and the shadows across her face are as severe as the song's haunted foghorn drone. For Peat, a great many things might compare 2 U.

In the band Lankum and on her own, Radie Peat twists the familiar sound of traditional Irish folk music into darker, more ominous shapes than what we're used to hearing. "The Moon And Stars" is a poetically harrowing wallow in lust and guilt and expectation: "I'll go down to my father's garden, and I will sit and cry my fill/ For when I gave myself away, it was of my own free will." Peat's allusions to homemade abortion remedies hit harder when you remember that her homeland didn't legalize abortion until 2019. Peat's voice is icy and monumental, and she surrounds it with a pounding, swirling arrangement that sounds like howling choirs of ghosts. Her narrator cries up to the moon and stars, but their weeping cannot save her. —Tom