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: Cut Worms — “Windows on the World”
Most Cut Worms songs sound like a county fair to me. It’s all twinkling rides, shit-hot air, and skies wearing bubblegum costumes in Max Clarke’s treasure chest of sun-soaked doo-wah-ditties. I go to him when I need a precious reimagination of some American Songbook ideal. An album like Nobody Lives Here Anymore is perfect for that. Plus, his voice sounds good spilling from a car with its top down and he’s from Strongsville, Ohio. Clarke may not be a Rockefeller but his new song, the Jeff Tweedy-produced “Windows on the World” (soon to appear on the Jeff Tweedy-produced Transmitter), is the richest he’s ever sounded. It’s him singing while Tweedy dotes on a six-string and Glenn Kotche pounds the snare and pats the ‘rine. (Hi, Glenn!) “Windows on the World” is a musical misnomer: it’s a catchy and cute tune you could find at the bottom of a cereal box, but the lyrics are as serious as a heart attack. Clarke can see a light-up American Dream about to burn the fuck out. The county fair’s closed for the season. “Caught in space, printed in pain inside the walls of how we were,” he sings while Tweedy’s chords noodle in the margins. “On a clear day, you can see almost forever.” Past lives, ephemera, and plate-glass reflections abound, Clarke knows exactly how this play ends. Charmingly, his two-man band falls in line right behind him and his melty, homespun, cosmic conclusion. “I keep an open mind that we still might meet again,” he says. Shit, I’ll have a piece of that. Where do I sign? —Matt Mitchell
Daphni: “Good Night Baby”
As Caribou, Dan Snaith embraces the macro, expansive palette of electronic music, but as Daphni, he sharpens his focus, aimed squarely at the dancefloor. Such is the case with “Good Night Baby,” another preview of the forthcoming Daphni album, Butterfly. Like the preceding singles, “Good Night Baby” is another highlight reel of Snaith’s abilities as a club producer, where even the mellower moments feel suffused with a festive, nocturnal adrenaline. Snaking melodies, thumping kicks, and pillowy bass reign supreme. Even if it’s technically a side project, Daphni sounds nothing like an afterthought.—Grant Sharples
E L U C I D: “First Light”
E L U C I D has never been especially interested in clarity for its own sake. Built on a skeletal frame—handclaps, low-end pressure, sounds that drift in without announcing themselves—“First Light” refuses the satisfaction of a drop. The beat never quite resolves; it just accumulates, patiently, while E L U C I D moves through it at an oblique angle, treating rhythm less as a grid than a suggestion. His voice slides, doubles back, mutters, flares; language operating more as atmosphere than message, even as specific lines stick like burrs (“Dragging luggage, scraping knuckles, piecing together, almost high”). This is not a song that explains itself. It’s a song that waits you out. And, of course, there’s no better fit for that than E L U C I D himself; where other rappers might fill the space, he leaves it exposed, trusting that attention itself is the engine. —Casey Epstein-Gross
Ghais Guevara: “2MANYKNIGHTS”
Does Ghais Guevara ever miss? The prolific Philadelphia rapper had a landmark year in 2025, releasing two LPs and one EP, not to mention lending “The Old Guard Is Dead” to Kendrick Lamar to use as the walkout music for his Super Bowl halftime performance. Now, just weeks into 2026, he’s dropped a pair of new singles; while B-side “ANTI-HERO” stretches his bars out into a syrupy, glitch-out slow jam, “2MANYNIGHTS” charges at top speed in the opposite direction, showcasing Guevara’s signature lyrical density and directness over a jittery, fuzzed-out trap beat. “Praise don’t pay the bills,” he raps on the Bandcamp-exclusive single, showing no hesitation as usual as he attacks the ongoing evils of Western imperialism overseas and at home (“Public broadcast no longer funded / Social work seppuku / Cut the stamps and folks was gutted / I splayed the horse and slept inside its stomach”). “2MANYNIGHTS” plays like a bad trip in a shopping mall, seeing American ugliness for what it is and meeting it with all due disrespect. —Grace Robins-Somerville
Kim Gordon: “Not Today”
Kim Gordon has spent the last few years doing something that most legacy icons either can’t or won’t do: refusing the museum. Her new single “NOT TODAY,” the lead from PLAY ME (out March 13, 2026, via Matador), feels just as vital and present as her music ever has—rhythm-forward, tight, slightly unreal, as if the song is pacing the room while it talks. The track is beat-led and hypnotic, moving with the blunt confidence of something assembled quickly on purpose, somehow feeling both physical and lush all at once. Gordon made PLAY ME with Justin Raisen again, and you can hear the continuity: the sense of rhythm as architecture, the refusal to sand off the edges just to make the outline easier to brand. Her voice, though, is the selling point here. Not the iconic cool of it—that’s the Kim Gordon baseline—but the moment it opens into something more melodic than she’s been letting herself do lately. She’s described it as slipping into a way of singing she hadn’t used in a long time, like an older instrument resurfacing in her mouth without asking permission. And boy, does it still play beautifully. —Casey Epstein-Gross
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