Songs You Need In Your Life This Week
Tracks we love right now, in no particular order.
Songs You Need In Your Life This Week

Each week, The FADER staff rounds up the songs we can't get enough of. Here they are, in no particular order. Listen on our Spotify and Apple Music playlists or hear them all below.

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Mercury: “HIGH2GETBY”

A queen of unexpected samples, Mercury gets even deeper in her bag for “HIGH2GETBY,” a laser-sighted bop featuring a fileted excerpt of Bon Iver’s “Rosalyn.” She adopts a whisper flow across the track, like she’s rapping in your ear as she executes a successful home invasion. — Jordan Darville

Pa Salieu: "Belly"

"I've been gone for a while but I still make it back to you," U.K. rapper Pa Salieu says on "Belly," his first new song since being released from prison earlier this month. This vital reintroduction has the swing and swagger of an artist with no time to waste. — David Renshaw

Fazerdaze: “Cherry Pie”

The lead single from Soft Power, Fazerdaze’s first album in seven years, is an intoxicating, lush synth-pop rush to the head, evoking the sweeping, charming melodies of “Cherry-Coloured Funk” and the quiet exuberance of a cut off of the Drive soundtrack. “My mind is changing, forever is fading, so wе search for something elsе,” sings Amelia Murray over an explosion of wonderful dream-pop. — Cady Siregar

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Dawn Richard & Spencer Zahn: “Diets”

Lyrically, the third single from Quiet in a World Full of Noise — elastic New Orleans vocalist Dawn Richard and omnitalented NYC instrumentalist Spencer Zahn’s second collaborative full-length — is a reflection on maturation, using the direct metaphor of dropping fake friends and bad habits like calories to project a sense of serene weightlessness. The soaring synth arpeggios that enter halfway through support the track’s transcendent theme. But there’s something about Richard’s breathy, hushed delivery and the muddy, sustain-heavy keys tell a slightly sadder tale. It’s hard to place a figure on exactly what’s wrong, but it seems like some of the demons Richard professes to have banished might still be lingering at the edges of her consciousness. — Raphael Helfand

Fcukers: "Tommy"

Fcukers have been taking over Bushwick with their wonky takes on ‘90s house like “Tommy,” a dingy and dissociative track that combines a simple rat-a-tat hook with pupil-dilating loops and chintzy, candy-coated vocals that border on sickly. It’s hypnotic and mind-numbing music with an illegal warehouse soul and K-hole detachment. — Sandra Song

Aphex Twin: “th1 [evnslower]”

This 11-minute mini-opus from Richard David James isn’t exactly new. Left behind in the reportedly enormous amount of work cut from his seminal 1994 album Selected Ambient Works II, “th1 [evnslower]” was uploaded to the internet in November 2015, nine months after James published its cousins — ”th1” and “th1 [slo]” — on SoundCloud alongside hundreds of other offcuts. Now, a month out from the album’s expanded reissue, it’s a timely reminder of what makes SAWII so compelling. The soundtrack to an eerie, barren landscape, it is graceful and terrifying, slow-moving and colossal, sound unmoored from space. — Alex Robert Ross

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Autre Ne Veut: “About To Lose”

As Autre Ne Veut, Arthur Ashin created some of the mid-aughts most passionate and catchy underground R&B. The first single from Love, Guess Who???, his first album in nine years, brings back his anthemic woundedness at exactly the right time, and makes codependency feel like catharsis. — JD

Ethel Cain: "For Sure" (American Football cover)

There is a fragility to American Football's "For Sure" that has stood out since its release in 1999. In a cover recorded for the 25th anniversary of the band's self-titled debut, Ethel Cain pushes that gossamer-like quality as she stretches the song to the near-10-minute mark. In Cain's hands "For Sure" becomes simultaneously grander and more intimate, an epic post-rock extrapolation of an early emo classic. — DR

Samara Cyn: "Chrome"

Samara Cyn’s “Chrome” is her moody and ruminative meditation on whether the industry bullshit is worth her artistic freedom and musical autonomy. Despite being far from the first time we’ve heard this question, Cyn is an expert at keeping you on your toes with her agile, syllable-twisting flow and oddly morbid bars. — SS

Roy Hargrove: “Priorities”

Heralding Grand-Terre, an unearthed album from trumpet master Roy Hargove and his Cuban/American Crisol ensemble, “Priorities” is a fiery five minutes of pure synchronicity. Recorded in 1998 following the group’s Best Latin Jazz Album Grammy win, it finds Hargrove bringing his hard-bop background to the group’s playful polyrhythms, flying in and out of dense grooves and knotty chord progressions like a man possessed with pure confidence and endless imagination. — RH

Songhoy Blues: “Issa”

Heritage, the new album from Bamako-via-Timbuktu desert blues band Songhoy Blues, promises to be a “creative reimagining” of their sound, relying more on the acoustic guitar. If “Issa” is anything to go by, that shift won’t dampen their virtuosity; the track is richly textured, bubbling by on a bass thrum and typically inventive blues solos. Comparisons to Ali Farka Touré are inevitable, but then what’s wrong with being compared to the greatest? — ARR

Daryl Johns: “I’m So Serious”

The first track from session musician and Mac DeMarco band member Daryl Johns’s self-titled debut album could have been ripped straight from Californian soft-rock radio circa 1981. Even the way his voice thins out at the top of its register replicates the early VHS quality of the era. It’s catchy as hell. The trick is that, as the song’s title suggests, Johns isn’t playing some joke here; he clearly loves this hi-gloss Americana, and it shows. — ARR

Safe Mind: “6’ Pole”

On “Autonomy,” Augustus Muller’s first collaboration with Cooper B. Handy (LUCY) back in 2022, he opted for a sunnier bass sound and skippier beat than the ones he usually uses for the darkwave dungeonscapes he crafts in tandem with Jae Matthews as Boy Harsher. Back with Handy, now under the shared moniker “Safe Mind,” he takes a similar tack. But where Handy stayed in his earnestly tuneful wheelhouse for the former track, he shifts gears here, singing in a slurred half-snarl that’s four parts Blur-era Albarn and one part Gods Wisdom, the disturbed growler he’s worked alongside for decades. — RH

Arsenal Mikebe: “Omuzimu”

Arsenal Mikebe’s “Omuzimu” is an absolute adrenaline rush of polyrhythmic percussion that borders a little on anxiety-inducing. A multi-layered mix of bass kicks, cymbal clicks, and rim shots, the track leaves little room for anything other than the crests of a burbly synth that arrive in perfectly timed waves from what’s apparently a custom-built, reverse-engineered 808. — SS

Niontay: “Vice Grip”

Brooklyn-via-Florida upstart Niontay absolutely floats on a beat from Tony Seltzer, the N.Y.C. producer who’s helping the city’s rap underground find new dimensions of their depths. Niontay goes hookless for a song with a freestyle’s loose energy and the eminently quotable lines of a hit record. — JD

Touché Amoré: "Hal Ashby"

Hal Ashby, director of Harold & Maude and a key figure in the New Hollywood scene of the 1970s, is the inspiration for a Touché Amoré song about misunderstandings and attempts at recovery. Ashby's characters often found themselves in impossible binds and vocalist Jeremy Bolm roars from a similar place, pleading "I’ll try anything. If it’ll course correct me." The desperation is matched only by his desire to do better next time. — DR

Songs You Need In Your Life This Week