5 songs you need to hear this week (February 12, 2026)
Featuring MUNA’s wall-banging pop perfection, Kevin Morby’s cosmic Bible Belt adventure, and E L U C I D’s anti-empire wisdom.
Photo of MUNA by Dean Bradshaw
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: MUNA, “Dancing on the Wall”
I’ve been rooting for MUNA since 2021, when a Columbus crowd made the newly-released “Silk Chiffon” sound like a #1 sensation. If you were there that night, you’d have sworn the trio were taking the express lane to superstardom, too. Are they there, though? If opening for Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour or having a Tiny Desk concert count, then sure, they’re flirting with the A-list. It seemed like Katie Gavin, Josette Maskin, and Naomi McPherson found their rightful place in the queer pop pantheon on MUNA. “Anything But Me”? Now that’s a hit song. Every MUNA number should sound that huge. “Dancing on the Wall” somehow sounds huger. It’s not just a gay pop banger on steroids, but a lead single that knocks the door off its hinges with a catchy, thudding kick. Everything I wanted MUNA to be five years ago is out the window. This is bright, loud, transportive pop music: pitch-shifted “when I’m with you, I’m on the wall” playbacks that soothe; a tasty chorus woven into a smart tempo shift at the bridge. I’d bang my head against the wall for a million more songs like it. —Matt Mitchell
Belgrado: “Labirynt Marzeń”
I’ve been spinning the new Belgrado EP since it dropped last Friday. The once-upon-a-time post-punkers have walked through hallways of dub and wave music to get here, to the hallowed halls of Cabaret Voltaire, Pet Shop Boys, and Movement-era New Order. El Encuentro is four ceremonies of intoxicating, big-room synth energy, but “Labirynt Marzeń” es lo mejor de lo mejor. Spain’s got some great pop music spilling into its streets (what’s Melenas up to these days?), and this track especially pockets an elegance baked red by a Balearic sun. Patrycija Proniewska’s vocal shards refract her bandmates’ vibrations: Fernando Marquez’s guitar bends are full of chrome, while Louis Harding twirls a damp bass line above Jonathan Sirit’s throbbing, ritualistic snares. I think a song like this could power an entire city. “Labirynt Marzeń” spangles all the way down. —Matt Mitchell
On Bandcamp Friday, Chuquimamani-Condori shared an EP of country music refinements. Luzmila edits is a fast but enchanting listen that pairs big, Western melodies with Chuquimamani-Condori’s style of Andean rhythms and clipped blasts of noise. Their use of David Ball’s “When the Thought of You Catches Up With Me” in “thought of you e dj edit” is splendid, scratched by disarming interstices of found sounds, electronic collages, and maybe a José Padilla sample too, though I haven’t yet confirmed that one. Ball’s voice is interrupted by a laughing vignette, crackles of static, and unsettled noise but resumes above the mix. His singing grows louder and louder, the chords tighten up and coil, and Chuquimamani-Condori’s touch fully emerges in warped howls and guitar-string squeaks that become one sun-white spume. “thought of you e dj edit” is an activated, time-traveled re-imagination. —Matt Mitchell
The strings on the latest single from I Guess U Had To Be There creep along like shivers up a spine, slowing at the track’s outro into a deep, trudging bass line. Over this eerie, paranoid waltz, E L U C I D raps, “Scarcity is a lie of the state.” His voice grows gruffer and more desperate, digging up the roots beneath his “bad nerves” only to find good reasons for them—mass surveillance, manufactured inequity, state violence. He may be “getting [his] hands dirty” but the empire he’s living in has blood on theirs. Wisdom doesn’t come without fear, and sometimes the most frightening forces are not the ones that take you by surprise, but the slow, banal evils lurking in the periphery. —Grace Robins-Somerville
I’ve been a Morbyhead ever since the folk rock singer-songwriter’s excellent track “Parade” closed out an equally excellent episode of BoJack Horseman back in 2015, so obviously I’m thrilled there’s a new record on the horizon—all the more so now that lead single “Javelin” has dropped. Morby’s first proper single since his last album cycle in 2022 (for This Is a Photograph) finds him back in middle America: a half jet-lagged troubadour, half anxious husband-in-progress, padding around “this old cowtown in the Bible Belt” while the frame widens around him into something almost cosmic. The arrangement is all charming affability and unhurried brightness—springy drums, jangling guitar, Aaron Dessner resisting the urge to overdecorate—yet the lyrics keep bending toward eclipse imagery, the sun slipping behind the moon as time itself “paints a picture now,” turning what could’ve been a simple road song into something closer to a secular hymn about sticking around. And then there’s Amelia Meath’s voice, multitracked into a one-woman choir that keeps ghosting in around Morby’s lines, like the person he’s always flying back toward is literally baked into the horizon. For a song preoccupied with whether you’re a has-been or a husband, a passing fling or a life partner, “Javelin” lands on something simple and stubborn: you fall, you get back up, you run—back through the air, down the highway, toward the life you keep choosing even when it scares you. —Casey Epstein-Gross
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