Essential Tracks This Week: The Cure, ELUCID, and more
Let’s not beat around the bush: This week saw the release of the first new song from The Cure in over a decade and a half, which is reason enough to celebrate this week’s new music offerings. Hell, the rest of the songs wouldn’t even have to be that good! But, of course, they are. Among our other favorites are a handful of experimental hip-hop tracks, a gloomy slowcore standout and a Crescent City post-punk band. Check out this week’s best new songs.
The Cure – “Alone”
If you went to any of The Cure’s incredible live shows in 2023, you’ve already heard “Alone,” which opened their nearly three-hour sets. And it’s a great choice for doing so, its lengthy instrumental intro steeped in grand, gothic synthesizers and Simon Gallup’s buzzing bass, picking up the baton from where songs like Disintegration‘s “Plainsong” left off and drifting further into the band’s exploration of dark, dreamy atmospheres—a lifelong project, to be sure. It’s not until more than halfway through that we finally hear Robert Smith’s vocals, and more than 30 years after their most prolific and commercially successful creative period, his voice is unmistakable and expressive as ever. Some things are worth waiting 16 years for.
From Songs of a Lost World, out November 1 via Fiction/Capitol
ELUCID – “The World Is Dog”
Technically ELUCID released this single a couple years ago, but just this week the Armand Hammer emcee released a video for the song that helps reup its freshness and serves as a great visual aid to its frantic momentum. In the clip, ELUCID is in a room with a sole drummer, emphasizing the beats as much as ELUCID’s own clipped, chant-like delivery: “Fang bite, dog breath/Short leash, pit fight.” Meanwhile, the production spirals out into all manner of psychedelic weirdness against images of some guy in a suit tumbling down flights of stairs. “The World Is Dog” is all frantic energy, just on the cusp of spilling over into peril, and it’s all the more fun as a result.
From Revelator, out October 11 via Fat Possum
Fat Tony, Fatboi Sharif & Steel Tipped Dove – “Twin Peaks”
Fatboi Sharif’s Decay was one of our favorite rap albums of 2023, and likewise one of the best records to listen to as fall inches toward Halloween, full of haunted beats and ominous lyrical visions. Now he returns with a collaborative album with rapper Fat Tony and previous collaborator, producer Steel Tipped Dove with a new 20-minute set of psychedelic hip-hop hauntology on Brain Candy. Its leadoff track is suitably titled “Twin Peaks” but its less Lynchian than a classic two minutes of dark and eerie underground rap, Sharif providing an ominously low-key foil for Fat Tony’s breathless rapid-fire verses, set against Dove’s heebie-jeebie twinkling loops. It’s a little otherworldly, a little netherworldly, and it’s cool as hell.
From Brain Candy, out now
trauma ray “Spectre”
In October, Fort Worth shoegaze outfit trauma ray will release their debut album Chameleon, ahead of which they deliver the gorgeously dense slowcore track “Spectre.” Opening with graceful, understated licks of guitar and vocals from Uri Avila that split the difference between dream-pop haze and monastic chants, it ultimately rises up into a crunchy grunge climax. Yet Avila’s vocals remain ethereal and spectral in spite of the surge in volume, asking “are you afraid of me?” as if he were a ghost trying to communicate from the beyond. But, you know, with big riffs.
From Chameleon, out October 25 via Dais
The Convenience – “Routiner”
Twenty-first century post-punk runs a vast gamut from garagey bashing to sleek (unknown) pleasures to hi-hat riding dancepunk. New Orleans’ The Convenience somehow sits at the center of this triangle, casual enough not too feel too polished, tight without being showy, and steeped in elements of disco, dub and avant garde sounds enough to feel fascinatingly experimental without losing their sense of fun. “Routiner” is an effortless blend of Gang of Four-like guitar scratch against elegant traces of piano and just enough weirdness to keep it from ever sounding too easy.
Out now via Winspear
