“Nothing (In My Head),” the new track from the Baltimore band Pinkshift, is a bazooka. In press material accompanying the release, the band explains that the song is about feeling trapping and longing for escape. The annotation is hardly necessary, … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Pinkshift, “Nothing (In My Head)”

I don’t know I can be expected to resist this. Suede’s new single, “She Still Leads Me,” moves with a swoop and dramatic grandeur that evokes the nineteen-nineties heyday of Britpop overstaters, such as Pulp, Oasis, and, um, themselves, I … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Suede, “She Still Leads Me”

I guess it’s official: I’m destined to immediately fall — and fall hard — for new tracks that merge a nineteen-nineties guitar fuzziness with early twenty-first century indie-rock yearning. Waxahatchee is undoubtedly the standard bearer for the sound, but Try … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Try the Pie, “Last of You”

The opening plinking tones, the gently kneaded sample of Hugh Masekela’s version of the R&B song “Stop,” the easygoing urgency of Black Thought’s rapping: there’s so much about “No Gold Teeth” that commands attention. Presented as an introduction to a … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Black Thought and Danger Mouse, “No Gold Teeth”

This is exactly the sort of breezy melancholy I’m looking for in my summer jams. Set against a shuffling indie-rock rhythm and lithe synth and guitars, the track expresses that sense of stasis that twentysomething scufflers have been humming about … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Sunflower Bean, “In Flight”

Yeah, that’s the stuff. We, the new album from Arcade Fire, is scheduled for release in May. Continue reading This Week’s Model — Arcade Fire, “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)”

I come by the selections for this weekly feature in a variety of ways, but I think this is the first time the cut in question first found my earholes because it was lobbed into my social media feeds by … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Linqua Franqa, “Oh Fxck”

Anna Calvi does not underachieve. After being hired to compose the score for late-series episodes of Peaky Blinders, Calvi just kept going, writing some songs inspired by the show’s main character, Tommy Shelby (played by Cillian Murphy). “Ain’t No Grave” … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Anna Calvi, “Ain’t No Grave”

Shilpa Ray has never struck me as an artist who is reticent about sharing her heated thoughts. Her new single, “Lawsuits and Suicide,” takes aim at a former abusive partner who followed the adhered to the common pattern of greeting … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Shilpa Ray, “Lawsuits and Suicide”

When the COVID-19 pandemic roared into destructive dominance in the spring of 2020, there was a lot of discussion online and elsewhere of the way it was upended the music industry. When venues shut down and acts couldn’t tour or … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Adia Victoria, “Ain’t Killed Me Yet”