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: Charli xcx, “Camera”
In my time at Paste, I don’t think any artist has landed three singles from the same album on this weekly roundup. None of us on staff have even heard Music, Fashion, Film yet, but its teasers have already taken over our Slack. I’ve been especially skeptical about Charli xcx’s output this decade—after worshipping at the altar of Pop 2, I loved how i’m feeling now, but came away lukewarm on CRASH and Brat—but “Camera” may just be my favorite song of hers since “Track 10.” I love a good identity-crisis blowout, and Charli’s meditation on her acting pivot—a pursuit that makes her feel “something new and discovered and something kind of violent, daring to fail and being ugly”—is too good to French-exit from.
Nearly half her life has been spent onstage, and now music “makes me wanna throw my life away.” If “SS26” was “I think about it all the time,” then “Camera” is “I might say something stupid,” or even “party 4 u.” In a vocal fry, Charli sings about not feeling embarrassed if she sucks when the camera is on her, because she craves “an experience that feels dangerous.” And it would be easy—and probably fair—to roll my eyes at her for taking this position in her own creative impasse, considering that she released the most acclaimed pop album of 2024 and just made her own A24 movie about it.
But as soon as those synths pan from center to wide, all the monochrome pageantry of this era bursts into color. She’s outgrown indie fame, her eyes firmly fixed on the stars in the pavement. To hell with a bridge, to hell with compression sliders, to hell with flipping your hair around in a damp boiler room. “Camera” is full of dissonance: itch-scratching beats, textured guitars, a sudden ending without resolution. All of it proves that Charli’s partnership with A.G. Cook and Finn Keane hasn’t dulled her appetite for risk. The rollout to Music, Fashion, Film so far has grappled with the consequences of fame, industry pressure, and the long shadow of Brat. On “Camera,” the only consequence is that Charli feels “inspired and alive.” It’s something to root for. I’ve already listened to it forty times. —Matt Mitchell
Chuck Strangers feat. billy woods & Zeroh: “Breaking Atoms”
Naming a song “Breaking Atoms” is a hell of a bold move—that’s Main Source’s 1991 debut, the record that gave us Large Professor’s soul sampling and Nas’ first recorded verse ever, and you don’t invoke it casually. Chuck Strangers earns it. It’s the centerpiece of Glory of the King‘s Hand, five minutes on an album where most tracks tap out before three, and it’s built on a live jam from Human Error Club. The Fender Rhodes doesn’t loop so much as roam—wandering off, circling back, thinking out loud—while the drums rattle your fillings. Chuck raps like a man taking inventory of his own ascent, swagger always followed by a receipt, the East Flatbush specificity keeping every boast tethered to the mundane. Lines like “the internet killed the TV” land as both shrug and eulogy, while “it’s no music when it’s real life” serves as a functional thesis. billy woods slides in and blows the scale wide open, taking something intimate and turning it nuclear—there are few MCs who can keep up with woods these days, and it’s a pleasure to see Strangers add himself to the ranks. And just when you brace for a hook to tie it off, Zeroh floats in instead and dissolves the song entirely, a psychedelic sign-off that leaves the whole thing hanging wonderfully unresolved in the air. —Casey Epstein-Gross
deep glens: “ok ak”
Brett Bullion has engineered for acts like Low and Samia, but his electronic solo project deep glens catches the same winds of strangeness as Oneohtrix Point Never and Boards of Canada. “ok ak” was informed by the death of a friend, which Bullion learned about “via a social stream.” Instead of returning to the software improvisations that powered his debut album, he favored a tape-based approach using loops and harmony to process rather than dissociate. What emerges on “ok ak” is fragmented but beautiful: a five-minute accumulation of delicate bedroom production. The synths, half-prayer and half-interstellar, float above tactile rhythms that tick but never twist. Bullion captures a mood of loss through an act of musical tribute. With every passing second, another portal opens and we walk through grief together. —Matt Mitchell
Greg Freeman: “Indu”
It’s been less than a year since his excellent previous album Burnover, but the prolific Greg Freeman has a knack for mining inspiration from the everyday. As he broke ground on that record’s October-bound follow-up All Set the Bone, the Burlington-based musician fled the East Coast for a stint in the desert, temporarily taking residence in rural New Mexico before heading off to record in Los Angeles. The change in atmosphere reshaped Freeman’s perspectives and expunged any inhibitions. As a result, we get songs like “Indu,” a massive sucker-punch of a love song that feels like an instinctual coalescence of Freeman’s various guitar-music influences. I hear some punk attitude and a bit of a blues-rock swagger in the background of Freeman’s laid-back vocal delivery, though the feelings he’s singing about are anything but nonchalant: “She made me want to live / But that thought had a twin,” he sings, envisioning his bed as his final resting place with a “saguaro for a headstone.” Is it even love if you don’t get a little existential? —Abby Jones
Jake Xerxes Fussell: “Rock Island Line”
“Rock Island Line” has been sung by Lead Belly, Lonnie Donegan, and Johnny Cash, but before it was ever recorded, it was an antebellum spiritual hummed on Mississippi River Valley plantations. Jake Xerxes Fussell reimagines it here with verses he nicked from an old English nursery rhyme, weaving a yarn about wire, limerlock, and geese into a railroad ballad, giving an old tale an even brighter image of freedom. In Fussell’s museum melody, the organic and the industrial aren’t distant, nor are they living in harmony. A sweetness emerges from the stillness when Dominic Billett’s kick drum leaves a pulse in the neck of Fussell’s guitar. The Carolinian tells his best stories with his hands, but Wayne Horvitz’s harmonica co-authors a new path. “Rock Island Line” is a mighty good road. —Matt Mitchell
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