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Every Thursday, the Paste staff and contributors will choose their five favorite songs of the week, awarding one entry a \u201cSong of the Week\u201d designation. Check out last week\u2019s roundup here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n When Modern Woman\u2019s Sophie Harris sings, you can feel it in your ribs. On \u201cDashboard Mary,\u201d 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\u2014age gaps, bad decisions, long drives, the queasy silence of the morning after\u2014rendered with a novelist\u2019s eye for detail and restraint: \u201cShe 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.\u201d The instrumentation thrives on tension and contradiction, gliding between hush and abrasion as violin, saxophone, and rhythm section pull against one another\u2014at least until the song\u2019s 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\u2019s an utterly gorgeous and brilliantly structured track, possibly one of my favorites of the year thus far (granted, it\u2019s only mid-January, but still). Modern Woman\u2019s debut record, Johnny Dreamworld<\/em>, is set to release this May, and believe you me, I\u2019m already lining up to hear it. \u2014Casey Epstein-Gross<\/em><\/p>\nSong of the Week: <\/span>Modern Woman \u2014 \u201cDashboard Mary\u201d<\/b><\/h2>\n