5 songs you need to hear this week
Featuring Grace Ives’ fizzy synth-pop, Heather the Jerk’s old-world garage-punk, and Swapmeet’s woozy, overdriven blur.
Photo of Grace Ives courtesy of True Panther Records
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.
Song of the Week: Grace Ives, “Stupid Bitches”
Pop music—like real pop music—isn’t dominating the Hot 100 like bro-country, reggaeton, theater-kid melodrama, and TikTok-audio slop are. To be honest, I like it when dance and electronic music aren’t powering the mainstream. Existing in culture’s analytical undertow lends opportunity for DIY artists like Grace Ives. Janky Star is still my pick for this decade’s best pop tape, so my expectations are high for the forthcoming Girlfriend. “Stupid Bitches” is a delicious tapestry of mellotron, strings, synth, and laptop drums. Co-producer Ariel Rechtshaid’s touch is all over the track. Ives’ hardscrabble potpourri is a sobering and electric counterpart to Rechtshaid’s work with Sky Ferreira. She patches the “doesn’t hurt me anymore” hook into “Stupid Bitches” with a shifting, buggy falsetto, but I can’t stop thinking about the phrase “wound myself up to curl into you.” But Ives is always dropping crushingly good lines into her fizzy crashout hits (see: “I think I could be like the air” in last year’s “Dance With Me”). Not to get too dramatic here, but her sound rings like a revolution. —Matt Mitchell
“parepare” goes all over the place and I’ve followed each thread to its end. This is the lead track on Bobo & Behaja’s new tape Aia Haja?, invented someplace between Budapest and Zurich and recorded using horn loudspeakers, karaoke amplifiers, and homemade pedals that “reproduce the sonorities of the bal-poussière ceremonies of southwest Madagascar.” Bobo & Behaja blend free jazz, garage rock, and tsapiky together, corking feral guitar lines with saxophone honks that strobe then spiral. On the topline, Ekaly’s vocal unspools like an instrument governed by its own chaos, while François Rosenfeld and Gérard Rakotoniaina’s half-staccato, half-anarchic rhythm section brightens the tune from below. These are Malagasy virtuosos bouncing off each other’s impulses. I’ve never heard anything like it. —Matt Mitchell
Any of the ten tracks on Heather Sawyer’s new Heather the Jerk tape, Scroll If You Love Devil, could have taken this spot. In our young year, it’s already a top-five record for me. Sawyer, who also plays in Boo/Hiss, Baby Tyler Band, and Proud Parents, is a student of Brill Building yore and girl-group throwbacks. Her homespun garage rock on Scroll If You Love Devil especially exists in service to old-world pop music, and “I’m On My Way” is teeming with punchy tones and a veneer of bleary distortion. But beneath that fuzz is a surfing melody that’s hooky as all get-out, thanks to Sawyer playing every instrument herself. “I’m On My Way” is easy on the ear even when it’s shouting at me. Look, I’m easy to please. Just plug some lo-fi guitars into this heart of mine and I’ll start lassoing the moon. —Matt Mitchell
Who doesn’t want some good ol’ power pop to close out the week? “I Didn’t Mean to Change My Mind” sounds like it fell out of a forgotten ’90s college-radio rotation and landed squarely in 2026, blinking in the light but already halfway through its chorus. Prism Shores pile up chiming guitars and fuzz like it’s second nature, all bright jangle on top and this low, satisfying crunch underneath, and then have the nerve to sing over it with a flattened, shrugging delivery that makes every hook feel like an offhand confession. The song moves in a straight, unfussy line—no big left turns, no reinvented wheels—yet every few seconds some new harmony or little textural flourish elbows its way into the frame. Maybe that’s why it feels less like nostalgia bait and more like a lived-in favorite you swear you’ve known for years already, even as you hit play again. —Casey Epstein-Gross
“I Know” starts with one lonely guitar note being rung like a doorbell, over and over, until the rest of Swapmeet tumble in around it. The riffs start out clean and a bit woozy, slowly picking up grit until they blur into this warm, overdriven haze, but the arrangement never turns to mush; every drum hit and bass run feels precise. Venus O’Broin’s vocal threads through the middle with that offhand, slightly sardonic lilt, repeating the title until it stops reading as confidence and starts sounding more like someone talking in circles at 1 a.m. on the curb outside a bar. In the band’s own words, “‘I Know!’ was written accidentally—a song arising from an in-between practice jam. The lyrics alike arose pretty spontaneously too, without much over-analysing or fluff,” and you can hear that in the way the track feels discovered rather than designed—three minutes of restless, heartsore indie rock that tumbled out in one go and, thankfully, got caught on tape. It’s just great fun. —Casey Epstein-Gross
Keep scrolling for more great stories.