Every Thursday, the Paste staff and contributors will choose their five favorite songs of the week, awarding one entry a “Song of the Week” designation. Check out last week’s roundup here. Follow @pastemagazine on TIDAL for weekly music playlists.
Song of the Week: My New Band Believe, “Numerology”
After black midi’s split, all eyes went to frontman Geordie Greep and his eclectic impulses. I won’t knock Greep’s bag—his solo debut did splashy, head-spinning things—but I’ve always been more endeared to bassist Cameron Picton, who always flew under people’s radars despite lending lead vocals to “Speedway,” “Near DT, MI,” “Slow,” and the fucking ecstatic “Eat Me Eat”/“Still” double-feature. So while The New Sound caught all the fuss in 2024, I figured Picton would come up with something brilliant on his own eventually. “Eventually” turned out to be 2025, when he formed a new band, My New Band Believe (yes, that’s the name; Picton came up with it while ill and “overcome by flashes of weird imagery and loose ribbons of scrambled text” in a Chinese hotel room) and shared a single called “Lecture 25” that he made with players who aren’t even in My New Band Believe anymore.
But it seems that Picton has settled on a semi-permanent crew on this week’s new track, “Numerology.” If I’m being honest, I don’t want to hear that pretentious New Sound racket ever again. I want anything and everything that sounds like this tune. I want all the MPB, funk, calypso, and free-jazz maximalism that Picton and his crew can muster, and I want them touched by transitions as streaky and unpredictable as the ones in these four minutes. Picton gives us Nascimento, Bejar (pre-Kaputt), Blockheads, Byrne (True Stories-era, nothing else), and the Velvets (before Cale left). Do I sense a little bit of ELO vocoder in there, too? There’s so much who, what, when, and how in this song that I’m now hallucinating a multiverse of influence inside of it. “Numerology” is a funny name for this single because its contrasts are practically unquantifiable. All we can do is untangle Picton’s serpentine, skronking, ritzy madness, affix some references to his rhythms, and blast the thing sky-high. —Matt Mitchell
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Garretson & Gorodetsky: “Fresh Hell”
Weba Garretson and Ralph Gorodetsky’s latest tape, Sunshine and Cyanide, is a strange and twisting smorgasbord. Powered by the engine of a honking brass section, the LA duo roll through the focus track “Fresh Hell” like they’re tripping on peyote but still need to remodel their garage. The tune is sweaty—drenched, honestly—with the sounds of Bazooka, Saccharine Trust, Universal Congress Of, and SHRIMPS. All of the duo’s impulses ball into a high-speed-chase of proggy, devlish, sexy experimentation. It’s no wonder that Garretson & Gorodetsky surfaced on SST Records’ jazz-punk bent 40 years ago. Garretson sends her voice up the ladder, singing like her microphone is a Ouija board, talking about settling scores, “wounds deeper than any wound should go,” and scaring off the Gustapo and oligarchs “in their space age clown car.” The tune goes every which way but straight. —Matt Mitchell
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Irreversible Entanglements feat. Motherboard: “Don’t Lose Your Head”
The thing about “Don’t Lose Your Head” is that it won’t leave your head. I listened to roughly the first fifty or so seconds yesterday before getting a phone call, and it promptly wormed its way into my internal monologue for the next four hours. Talk about irreversibly entangled. Over a lean, brain-massaging groove from drummer Tcheser Holmes and bassist Luke Stewart, the criminally underrated quintet (alongside a smooth feature from MOTHERBOARD) build something closer to a chant than a chorus, repeating that title phrase—“Don’t lose your head / Messing with the gods”—until it feels like a spell. The band’s usual free-jazz squall is still there, the sax and trumpet worrying the edges and the textures flickering in and out, but it’s cinched into this tight, head-nodding pocket that makes the song sonically addictive even as Camae Ayewa (of Moor Mother excellence) is talking about execution, persecution, land theft, and liberation. As the track moves, the arrangement keeps shifting in little ways—horn stabs answering the vocal, the rhythm section slipping between swagger and simmer—so the mantra never quite resolves the same way twice, like a protest march seen from different street corners. “Don’t Lose Your Head” functions as both rallying cry and earworm, the kind of fight song that sneaks into your bloodstream and stays there, like a mantra, like a prayer. —Casey Epstein-Gross
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Ms Ray feat. Nourished by Time: “Miss You”
“Miss You” makes heartbreak, of all things, go down easy. London vocalist Ms Ray is all shimmer and sheen as she croons up and down a synth-pop beat that plucks at your neural pathways like a harp. There’s a softness and simplicity to the way she remembers—“dive down, take me backwards,” “you were shy like me”—that makes it feel less like wallowing than fondly running your fingers over a bruise you don’t quite want to fade. It’s no secret that we here at Paste are fans of Nourished by Time, seeing as he snagged the #1 spot on our best albums of 2025 list, and his feature here doesn’t disappoint: when he slips in, he doesn’t break the spell so much as tilt it; suddenly we’re in the head of the person always “on tour,” saying prayers, insisting that the lack of response doesn’t mean they’re not listening. The pair’s voices coil around each other in the chorus, turning “I miss you” into something almost weightless. For a song about absence, “Miss You” feels weirdly companionable, its bright, ricocheting groove wrapping the ache in something soft and gleaming. —Casey Epstein-Gross
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Ozzie Hair: “Have You Got The (Guts)”
I love how Ozzie Hair’s new tape, Madhouse, practically falls apart in your hands. The best tune on it is “Have You Got The (Guts)”; it’s pure brain-rotten garage mania buried beneath a hundred corpses of noise. Hair also plays guitar in the Prize and the Judges, and his licks on “Have You Got The (Guts)” are just as deep-fried and blown-up, but instead of patching his ax into power-pop goodies, he lets it melt into a sludgy, psychic death-inducing foxhole. It’s Simply Saucer doing Fun House—real lights-out, “Valhalla of decadence”-type rock and roll. Hair’s got some melody in these abrasions, but his distortion pummels more than it swings. Good. I thought I could only find chaos like this inside my own head. “Have You Got The (Guts)” answers its own question by eviscerating me with super-charged riffs. Cloud nine’s been turned inside out. —Matt Mitchell
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