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: Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever — “Sunburned in London”
Across six minutes and several continents—Oslo glass towers, Tokyo turnstiles, garbage-slick New York canyons, Melbourne suburbs that feel like eternity—Aussie indie-rockers Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever keep spotting versions of the same thing: old empires, new money, friends in the street, ghosts in the hills, that nagging sense of being “nostalgically fucked up” no matter where you land. The band’s guitars move the way memory does, looping and layering, a bright jangle that slowly blurs at the edges while the rhythm section keeps nudging the song forward, a long tram ride you don’t quite want to get off. Vocally, Tom Russo’s delivery is almost conversational—half travel diary, half confession—until the repetition and multi-tracked vocals of “eyes aren’t dry” turns into something closer to a spell, leaving an almost hypnotic haze in its wake. By the time they “wind it back to the start,” you feel exactly like the song’s title: a little scorched, a little dazzled, a little dazed. —Casey Epstein-Gross
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Friko: “Seven Degrees”
“Seven Degrees” somehow sounds like it’s been around forever, some campfire standard tucked away in the back of your mind. Over gently blinking acoustic guitar, Niko Kapetan sings about “seven ties between us and anyone we’d ever wish to meet,” reworking a childhood bit of half-remembered wisdom into a full-blown cosmology of almosts and not-yets. It’s quiet and keening until it isn’t—until the chorus swings wide open, all voices and open sky. As the song builds, echoes of the Beatles can be heard lingering in the sound of the new four-piece lineup, as John Congleton’s production keeps nudging Friko toward something bigger and less fussy. The arrangement starts as small-room folk and keeps quietly inflating, like a balloon you’re sure will pop but never does, only getting larger and grander with each puff of air. By the final climb, “Seven Degrees” has stopped pretending it’s anything but an anthem, the kind you can already imagine drunkenly sung back at them in some overheated venue months from now, every person in the room briefly convinced that the next stranger they meet might actually change everything. —Casey Epstein-Gross
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Mandy, Indiana feat. billy woods: “Sicko!”
The depth of feeling, conveyed through Valentine Caulfield’s tangible presence, is one of Mandy, Indiana’s defining traits. On URGH!, they dial up the intensity by heightening and embellishing their core sound rather than delivering a simple reiteration. Through this methodology of escalating their industrial grit until it becomes almost unbearable, the album utterly shatters expectations. And it blasts when Caulfield steps aside for New York rap legend billy woods’ knotty verse on “Sicko!,” channeling the clipping. remix of “Pinking Shears” for one of the most adrenaline-inducing moments on the record. As he is often wont to do, woods cooks up a pot of phonetic soup, busting out of the gate with “Seasick in the soundbath / Ambulance sirens, soundclash, nerve gas at the opera, the paparazzi at the copter crashed.” A great time to be a sicko, indeed. —Grant Sharples
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Nashpaints: “Boyfriend First”
“Three people will die listening to this album,” the Bandcamp description of Nashpaints’ first record since 2020, Everyone Good is Called Molly, reads. “Zzz they will endup in the same place.” There’s no backstory to Finn Carraher McDonald, only mystery and angelic voicings spread across decaying pop tapes with a butter knife. Lead single “Boyfriend First” is this seven-minute mass of swirling noise with guitar streaks you’d have to break your nails just to make. There’s a lot of color in here even as the static fattens and the synths undress, because McDonald has melodies coming out the eyes. “Boyfriend First” sounds more like Natalie Imbruglia covering Deerhunter—or maybe it’s Deerhunter covering Natalie Imbruglia—in a sewer tunnel than the Duretti Column, my bloody valentine-type guitar reverb sewn into most of Blindman the Gambler five years ago. I’m just typing words now. Go listen to Nashpaints and find out if you’ll live to say you did. —Matt Mitchell
The Messthetics & James Brandon Lewis: “Deface the Currency”
“Deface the Currency”: where punk elders and avant-jazz twisters meet as one colossal, terrific monster. The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis first linked up in 2024, put out a great debut, and I’ve been hooked ever since. We’re talking about ex-Fugazi guys dropping pummeling rhythms that sound like fists tearing through paper, all while Lewis’ saxophone spirals like a bebop corkscrew and Anthony Pirog’s red-hot guitar talks in blistering power chords. “Deface the Currency” is robust, and the chemistry between the Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis is intense. It’s flesh and blood—a pile of prog-jazz intuition mixed with heady depth. These are tremors you can put in your pocket. —Matt Mitchell
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