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: Modern Woman — “Dashboard Mary”
When Modern Woman’s Sophie Harris sings, you can feel it in your ribs. On “Dashboard Mary,” her voice moves like a sprung trap: taut with pressure, capable of sudden force, and brutal when it snaps. The song unfolds as a charged overnight vignette—age gaps, bad decisions, long drives, the queasy silence of the morning after—rendered with a novelist’s eye for detail and restraint: “She thought that he was regretting, cos his hands on the wheel were blue / If the boy at home had woken and if the Dashboard Mary knew.” The instrumentation thrives on tension and contradiction, gliding between hush and abrasion as violin, saxophone, and rhythm section pull against one another—at least until the song’s final stretch, which is all riotous distortion. Nothing here is smoothed over or moralized; the thrill curdles, the momentum keeps going, and the picture never quite resolves. It’s an utterly gorgeous and brilliantly structured track, possibly one of my favorites of the year thus far (granted, it’s only mid-January, but still). Modern Woman’s debut record, Johnny Dreamworld, is set to release this May, and believe you me, I’m already lining up to hear it. —Casey Epstein-Gross
Joshua Chuquimia Crampton: “Ch’uwanchaña 〜El Golpe Final〜”
A year ago, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton and his sibling Chuquimamani-Condori made a masterpiece together: the psychedelic, structureless Los Thuthanaka. Now Crampton’s first solo full-length since 2024’s Estrella Por Estrella is coming next month. Anata is dedicated to the Andean ceremony of the same name, “where we celebrate the Pachamama (Mother Earth) before the rainy season, giving thanks for harvest with offerings & the principle of reciprocity (Anyi) between humans/nature,” according to the liner notes. Crampton has totally redefined the compositional possibilities of guitar playing, and the elaborate “Ch’uwanchaña 〜El Golpe Final〜” is shredded noise captured in trance-y loops and crushing ascending lines. Surges of metal guitar couple with the acoustic backings of charango and ronroco into an overwhelming spate of texture. It’s blown apart and obscured, analogous to YouTube clips of Andean ceremonies where the audio’s bottomed out. The energy of “Ch’uwanchaña 〜El Golpe Final〜” takes me to a different place. It’s not magic but a creative experiment—an explosive, suspended tribute. —Matt Mitchell
Mitski: “Where’s My Phone?”
Everybody wants to figure Mitski out but nobody can. In the wake of her 2018 breakthrough Be the Cowboy (long before she landed a Billboard Hot 100 spot with “My Love Mine All Mine”), she gave management the keys to socials and has since maintained an enigmatic distance from her adoring audiences who’ve turned her into a patron saint of sad girls (a role which she has vehemently rejected). On the lead single for her eighth album, she’s fighting fruitlessly to de-clutter her mind—jangly guitars and dusty distortion crowding its corners, fogging up the “clear glass” every time she tries to wipe it clean. Mitski plays the in-between Mother to a Maiden and Crone, rounding out the Hecate trio in a music video that lands somewhere between The Haunting of Hill House and Grey Gardens. Following a wordless bridge of backing vocals and a rising tide of strings, Mitski returns to ask once again, “Where did it go?” Over a decade into her strange and unparalleled rise through the ranks of (and beyond) indie fame, it’s a joy to see Mitski revel in meta-madness once again. —Grace Robins-Somerville
OHYUNG: “all dolls go to heaven”
Between the exquisite You Are Always On My Mind and the delicate dressings of her Sorry, Baby score, OHYUNG was my most important artist of 2025. Lia Ouyang Rusli makes sounds that have stayed so wonderfully present in my body, and “all dolls go to heaven” stacks more on top of them. The song awakens IOWA, OHYUNG’s new record that documents the year she spent in Iowa City composing the music for Neo Sora’s Happyend and Eva Victor’s aforementioned, Oscar-shortlisted directorial debut. A detour from the pop exhibitions of You Are Always On My Mind, “all dolls go to heaven” approximates stillness. OHYUNG chopped up Christian choral music and ran it and doses of synths, stock presets, and field recordings through cassette tapes and tube compressors to make it. Rusli calls IOWA her “experimental trans Bruce Springsteen Nebraska.” I can’t quite get over the loping tape hiss or the hymns that rise and fall like this tempered, breathing chest. “all dolls go to heaven” sweeps through the sea-level holy, uncouples from its textures, and climbs into the mouth of a liberated afterlife. —Matt Mitchell
Snail Mail: “Dead End”
In the five years since Snail Mail’s last album, Valentine, Lindsey Jordan hasn’t exactly stayed still. She relocated from her hometown of Baltimore to North Carolina; started her own music festival; starred in Jane Schoenbrun’s A24 coming-of-age horror I Saw the TV Glow; performed at a Pavement museum “exhibit”; and even had a doppelganger go on a recent Jeopardy! hot streak. For the forthcoming Ricochet, Jordan tapped the recording acumen of Momma’s Aron Kobayashi Ritch, resulting in new material that doubles down on Jordan’s signature dreamy swirl of ’90s alt-rock, as evidenced by lead single “Dead End.” It’s not far off from Ritch’s own band or Jordan’s live cover of Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight.” Snail Mail’s latest song plays like a punchier, more polished version of her 2018 debut Lush, now with an ear for bigger hooks and stadium-ready sonics. —Grant Sharples
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