5 songs you need to hear this week
Featuring Iceage’s erotic, blood-red drama, DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ’s techno maximalism, and Thomas Dollbaum’s ragged guitar seance.
Photo of Iceage by Alva Le Febvre
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: Iceage, “Star”
Who’d have guessed that the best Iceage song since 2018 would be the Danish band’s poppiest mark yet? Maybe I should have, considering how tight Elias Rønnenfelt and Dean Blunt are these days, and “Star” arrives like an outcome of that, though it’s also not too far off from the melodic punk on New Brigade. But no matter how good his and Blunt’s Lucre was last year, not all of Rønnenfelt’s escapades are created equal, and I find him to be at his most compelling when he’s pronouncing “Louisiana” like a psychopath (seriously, he could stump a dialect expert with that one) or chewing on the high-drama of erotic images like “every inch of my earth and sky you can occupy, cover me entirely” and “you emanate everywhere near me.” Rønnenfelt and his bandmates put some serious jangle in this gothic jawn, brooding through the sex-and-death decay of off-beat drums, blood-red bass licks, tearing riffs, and postcard lyrics (“sunlike in the battered sky”). More handclaps in rock and roll, please.
Bill Orcutt & Mabe Fratti: “Almost Walking”
I’m seated whenever Bill Orcutt’s guitars go sideways or inside-out, like they did on “Giving unknown origin” a month ago, but what he and Guatemalan experimentalist Mabe Fratti accomplish on “Almost Walking” is a strange yet inviting overcast. Orcutt’s guitar holds the melodic line while Fratti’s cello talks above it; her droning bows make faces at his chrome tapestry until they exchange position in tangly harmony. The notes pull apart, fuse into each other, rinse, and repeat as Orcutt and Fratti wrench a lot of motion out of their instruments. Together in “Almost Walking” they have built a castle.
I adore DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ’s work because every song of hers is like a museum. She’s always in motion, always making something. In December she shared a 40-song, four-hour masterpiece called Fantasy, and here she’s returned with “HeartsDesires,” eight sprawling minutes of ecstatic EDM production and Underworld 1992-2002 disc comp worship. Sabrina was my gateway into house music, and she’s been my gateway into techno ever since. “HeartsDesires” is a portal to both, with its montage of found-media audio, a spiraled backbeat, glossy synths, and pop-chart voicings. The track, like all of Sabrina’s best ideas, just piles and piles and piles, rarely receding. Density, in her maximalist elysia, is its own art-form. But it’s impossible to know where any of this noise comes from, because Sabrina operates in a world unlike our own. 
Last year Thomas Dollbaum released Drive All Night, an EP that was part-funeral, part-archival, and part-folktale. Upon returning to his native Tampa, he learned that an old pal had passed away suddenly. So Dollbaum wrote not about him but about the hot and wild flatwoods life they shared together before growing apart like most childhood friends do. I think his new song, “Dozen Roses,” returns to those memories: “When you were a kid the whole world felt like a lonesome ocean, closing in with every wave that seems to come your way. I look now and it’s just tide pulled out of motion, a couple walks and then a dozen roses on their way.” With accompaniment from Nick Corson, MJ Lenderman, and Josh Halper, Dollbaum locates his true power in remembering the light and timber. He and his bandmates interlock for five soaring minutes, tailing ghosts and preserving a ragged, noisy groove even when Lenderman’s lead lines distend. “Dozen Roses” runs on borrowed time, as Dollbaum tells us there’s not enough of it. —Matt Mitchell
If you’re going to name your band after a Beat Happening song, you may as well sign to Calvin Johnson’s record label, too. Touch Girl Apple Blossom certainly got the message and now they’re on K/Perennial, making great pop-guitar music. And, look, you can never have too many pop-guitar bands, especially the heart-on-their-sleeve ones that record on one-inch tape. Touch Girl Apple Blossom bring a Scottish jangle to the limestone hills of Texas, and their recent single “Vacation” is like the Twerps, Orange Juice, and Feelies balled into one dose of fuzz. Spanky riffs, anodyne vocals, and a vibrating snare give “Vacation” its mileage, and a lot of players could learn a thing or two about melody from these guys. Touch Girl Apple Blossom has guitar lines for days. “Vacation” is syrupy but never sleepy. 
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