Essential Tracks This Week: Mount Eerie, Ibibio Sound Machine, and more

As fall arrives, our weekly Essential Tracks roundup brings with it some splendidly autumnal tracks, including some arty post-punk, moody industrial metal, and the return of a prolific troubadour. But there’s also some funk-heavy dance music for good measure. Turn up this week’s Essential Tracks and read about them below.

Mount Eerie – “I Walk”

Phil Elverum announced the release of the first new Mount Eerie album in five years this week, and with it he delivered two new singles, just a couple pieces of a 26-track album that is planned as something of a spiritual successor to The Microphones’ The Glow, Pt. 2. One of those two songs, “I Walk,” is a return of sorts to that album’s atmospheric mystery, wrapped in ambient wind sounds and a kind of haunted stillness, as well as a jazzy sensibility that marks a stunning stylistic transition for Elverum and offering a wondrous sign of things to come.

From Night Palace, out November 1 via P.W. Elverum and Sun

Ibibio Sound Machine – “Honey Bee”

Just a few months after the release of the UK group’s latest full-length album Pull the Rope, Ibibio Sound Machine returns with another new EP, Black Notes, featuring two remixes from that album as well as the brand new title track. But the standout moment on the short-player is “Honey Bee,” an infectiously funky dynamo that merges thumping house rhythms with Afrobeat horns and buttery smooth funk guitar licks that bring the rhythms of Africa 70 into the club. Which is something they’ve done before, but “Honey Bee” is the best kind of reminder of how damn good they are at it.

From Black Notes, out now via Merge

MJ Lenderman – “Wristwatch”

I don’t typically make a habit of populating our Essential Tracks column with songs from albums we’ve already reviewed. And you might have noticed that MJ Lenderman’s latest album Manning Fireworks is our Album of the Week (it’s great!). But this week the singer/songwriter also released “Wristwatch” as a single, and it’s another spectacular country-rock song steeped in satire and pathos, a gorgeously shimmering pedal steel riff underlining reflections on the kind of toxic masculinity that gets you a podcast empire these days, and the empty materialism that often accompanies it: “I got a beach home up in Buffalo/And a wristwatch that’s a compass and a cell phone.” But also, like most Lenderman songs, it doubles as a song about loneliness, with a glimmer of classic country sadness to drive its sardonic message home.

From Manning Fireworks, out now via Anti-

Thus Love – “On the Floor”

Vermont’s Thus Love made an auspicious debut with 2022’s Memorial, putting forth a soaring and hook-laden take on a post-punk revival sound that offered something bigger and more heroic than the usual Factory Records worship. With “On the Floor,” they reveal just how far that ambition can go, with slinky, taut verses giving way to an infectious, eruptive chorus. Vocalist Echo Mars even evokes the abstract ’60s-era art-pop of Scott Walker in their croon, which is just one of the surprising elements that comes into play in this dynamic anthem.

From All Pleasure, out November 1 via Captured Tracks

The Body – “End of Line”

The Body are great at making noise, industrial metal and terrifyingly dense slabs of sludge, but they’re even more interesting when they ease back enough on the din the reveal the melody beneath the onslaught. Following an excellent, electronics-heavy collaboration with Dis Fig, Orchards of a Futile Heaven, the prolific duo continue to mine the subtler, textural aspects of their sound on “End of Line,” a track that, in its climactic eruptions, still unmistakably sounds like The Body, but seems to be in no rush to reach those explosive moments. Instead it leaves more open space and an almost downtempo sensibility, Chip King’s harsh shriek even layered with effects to give it the feeling of a sample rather than a live take. You know a song by The Body when you hear it, but what that means is thrillingly ever more complicated all the time.