The 5 Best Songs Of The Week

Every week the Stereogum staff chooses the five best new songs of the week. The eligibility period begins and ends Thursdays right before midnight. You can hear this week’s picks below and on Stereogum’s Favorite New Music Spotify playlist, which is updated weekly. (An expanded playlist of our new music picks is available to subscribers on Spotify and Apple Music, updated throughout the week.)5bloodsports - “Ten Thousand Feet”What happens to time when the body falls apart? Does pain make time speed up or slow down? Are we suspended outside of it, or moving miles beyond the present moment? In May 1939, Major League Baseball player Joe Sprinz attempted to break the world record for catching a baseball dropped from a great height. He was one of three players to successfully catch a ball dropped from 437 feet, the equivalent of a 43-story building. A few months later, he attempted to double that height, trying to catch a ball dropped 800 feet from a blimp. (Like, what the fuck, my guy, why?!) The ball eventually struck his glove, driving it into his face, breaking his jaw in a dozen places and rendering him unconscious. He suffered from headaches for years afterwards but lived to the age of 91. It’s a miraculous and terrifying story, one woven into the lyrics of Bloodsports’ latest achievement, "Ten Thousand Feet." Sam Murphy’s vocals drag and wane, stretching time into something almost unrecognizable. The song builds with an ominous tension that feels all the more cathartic when everything finally comes undone. There’s a slithering melody that peaks through the end that satisfies an immense thirst. This song feels abysmal in the best way — an empty-spaced pulse turns into a hypnotic drive. Almost like bloodsports are soundtracking the ball, its quiet moments before it leaves the blimp and then as it collides into Sprinz’ body. —Margaret4smush - “john dearly”"Another year/ I still don't feel like I got older." Singer/bassist Emily Borrowman opens "john dearly" with this confession, sounding resigned over colorful, fuzzy guitars. The song is about "being in your early adulthood and still feeling like a child," Borrowman explains, and it's equal parts apathetic and energetic before erupting into frenetic swirl of a finale. It's an angsty, fun, undeniable banger. —Danielle3Fire-Toolz - “Clustered Around My Opening!”No one is doing it like Fire-Toolz, and I mean that literally. No one else is taking new age synth pads, prog-rock guitar solos, glitchy IDM beats, jazz fusion, and throat-shredding black metal vocals and shaking them up together until they explode into a beautiful mess of candy-colored digital gloop. Although "Clustered Around My Opening!" isn't a particularly long track, it's a miniature suite in four parts, progressing through multiple universes of melted '80s sounds as Angel Marcloid traces the contours of a relationship from her youth. "The song embraces both the darkness & the light in that relationship as I stepped through the portal & flew through the wormhole that is the transition from childhood to adolescence," she explains. By the end, you too have stepped through the portal, flown through the wormhole, and ended up irrevocably changed by the experience. —Peter2Crate - “Crushed To Nothing”Hype has followed the Brooklyn shoegaze band Crate like shimmery distortion. Not many bands can build such a buzz releasing one song per year. With their full-length debut finally dropping next week, they've somehow found a way to send our anticipation skyrocketing even higher. New single "Crushed To Nothing" is the platonic ideal of a shoegaze power ballad. Ezra Engler's lyrics are about the power of hindsight and the inability to help those who won't help themselves, sentiments Crate have translated into woozy, breathtaking beauty. —Chris1Sufjan Stevens - “On This Christmas (It Only Gets Better)”Sufjan Stevens has referred to his grand return to holiday music as "a Christmas apology." There's something simultaneously beautiful and crushingly sad about the notion of using a holiday as a way to seek absolution, a time for contritio. The place where beauty and crushing sadness overlap is exactly where Stevens lives. "On This Christmas (It Only Gets Better)," Stevens' first Christmas song in 15 years, floats on that bittersweet tide. The heart-frayed tenderness of the man's voice floats over a flickering guitar figure and a few lightly glitchy effects, gently pulling us in every emotional direction at the same time. —Tom