5 songs you need to hear this week
Featuring Blood Sucking Maniacs’ postcard paean, heavensouls’ Afrobeat collage, and My New Band Believe’s meal-prep romance.
Photo of My New Band Believe by Daisy Ayscough & Tomos Ayscough
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: My New Band Believe, “Love Story”
Cameron Picton’s got hits, but in a Bert Jansch sort of way. What I mean is Picton’s music is beautiful in an inaccurate way—it’s so much about feel, possibility. If Jansch had John Renbourn’s technically exquisite ear for baroque music on Bert and John, then, 60 years later, Picton has his counterparts in My New Band Believe. Their new single “Love Story,” not to be confused with black midi’s Taylor Swift cover, lands somewhere between Van Dyke Parks and caroline. Lyrically it’s more literal than Taylor’s Shakespearean fantasy, as Picton writes about his lover in images of meal-prep, Asics sneakers, and favorite songs. With a 12-piece backing behind him, he delivers his “now you’re a river in me, you’re in my bones, I wanna swim to the sea” lines brightly. “Love Story” is maximalist yet never overcomplicated, touched by sedated piano, orchestral cut-ins, squeaky string bends, and an excellently spotlit bass clarinet part. Picton’s vibrato when he sings “I’m feeling sexy tonighhhhhht” sounds like it’s coming from a popstar who can’t get enough of Paris 1919. “Cinematic” is such a tired term, but there’s no better way to describe what My New Band Believe is doing here.
Blood Sucking Maniacs: “Down to the River”
The Blood Sucking Maniacs is a family affair spanning 121 years and five generations, as Terry and Jo Harvey Allen perform with their sons Bukka and Bale and grandsons Kru, Sled, and Calder. An album is coming next month, and “Down to the River” is its sweet and spiritual paean centerpiece. The world stops when Terry and Jo duet. Here, they’re lovers dreaming of all the destinations they haven’t reached yet. Terry sings the “come on, baby, let’s go” refrain while Jo recites the verses, filling us with stories about the Bay of Bengal, “bad microphones” blasting love songs, slow dark oxen, the Nile at Aswan, pickup trucks, dark secrets, and that “mighty Mississippi” and that “beautiful, beautiful Seine.” If not today, then tomorrow, Jo beckons, as she and Terry find shelter within each other and a piano harmonizes around them. “Down to the River” is quiet as a lamb, just two good, curious people talking about going someplace prettier than a postcard.
Appearing on “allstar” together in 2020, Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE have linked up at every interval since. Their inaugural joint record, POMPEII / UTILITY, finds the two rappers on some Speakerboxxx/The Love Below shit, splitting 33 songs semi-evenly across two halves. SURF GANG produced it, which is a very good thing, because the collective’s evilgiane produced one of Earl’s greatest singles (“Making the Band (Danity Kane)”) three years ago. “Minty” and “Earth” introduce the project, giving us one MIKE track and one Earl track each, respectively, and the accompanying music video combines the two efforts, separating them only by a Macbook now-charging sound beat-flip. Both singles are 90 seconds long but capture two G.O.A.T.s mid-prime on two sides of the same tape—sensei and protege trading in their boom-bap impulses for trap flows and minimal mechanics. Telepathic wordplay and somnambulant rhythms connect Earl and MIKE across the tracks. MIKE’s “on some geek shit” and Earl gives us a tercet for the ages: “Shorty impressed with my cursive, how I hung onto every curve. She broke her lil’ back, I run with the earth.”
Chidi Obialo is a Nigerian-born producer living in Houston and making a name for himself in the digicore universe. Tap into one of his projects and you’ll hear plunderphonics, Southern rap, Afrobeat, Discord chat clatter, glitch-hop, and IDM, sometimes in the same song. He works with Atlanta’s stickerbush as The Sidepeices (their January tape DARKLIGHT is a sampling achievement). But he also works under a pseudonym of his own, heavensouls, and the 19-year-old’s latest full-length, westside trapped, is ridiculous and unquestionably my shit. He’s channeling Funkadelic, Tek lintowe, Janet Jackson, and Laraaji in loose, textured grooves and widescreen electronics. It comes out like James Ferraro doing Fela Kuti. On “playing around wit a flip,” heavensouls concocts a live-band feel on his laptop, looping a sample of Bobby V’s “Tell Me,” unwound synths, and videogame menu-screen atmospherics together. It’s a sound collage that ends with a recital drum solo. No effects, no splices. Just rhythm. This is the music worth digging around for. 
SAUCEMAN is prolific and has been for a very long time. But his output is so expansive that you could never be late to the party. I discovered “Ballers1” eight days ago and nearly put it on last week’s best new songs list. When I revisited the Japanese musician’s Bandcamp page this week and saw that they’ve dropped five more releases on the platform since March 11, including the 続・応接間の曲 EP, I knew that I had to write about this. Like their counterparts Otomoni, Pencil, and The Goonyz, SAUCEMAN is a modern practitioner of Japanese juke and 160bpm. It’s well-crafted electronic music—“footcore,” you could call it. “続・応接間の曲4,” the concluding song from the new EP, makes me go full tilt, as SAUCEMAN dips us into a five-minute suite of watery dub synths, psychedelic guitar, intermittent harmonizing, and time-warped backbeats. It opens like a ‘90s G-funk sample before its footwork transmissions patch into some Long Season-type sweeps: epic mid-grooves; a perfect storm of mood. “続・応接間の曲4” is totally in the pocket, like somebody queued up a hypnosis tape in an elevator going up. 
Keep scrolling for more great stories.