Listen along while you read.
1. Phoebe Bridgers: “Bobby”
This is a song about falling in love with the momentum and grace of someone falling down several flights of stairs. And it sounds like it, too — rushing, surging, a little calamitous. Those who know a thing or two about Bridgers’s personal life will pick up on some references to her boyfriend, the filmmaker and comedian Bo Burnham — the opening line gestures toward his pandemic-era experimental comedy special “Inside” — but there is also something universal about the infatuated ecstasy that courses through “Bobby.” Bridgers leans into the obsession, the neediness and even the delusions that can accompany the first flushes of love: “Bobby, this could be the end of wanting,” she sings with a quiver in her voice. “I exist only if you’re watching.”
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2. Ultra Lights: “Diamond Dreams”
A few weeks ago, friend of the newsletter and occasional guest Amplifier Dave Renard suggested I listen to an album he thought I’d like: “Pleasure’s All Yours,” the debut LP by the Atlanta band Ultra Lights. Dave was indeed correct — I like this album a lot. (Oh, to be seen and understood.) Though Ultra Lights is a relatively new project, its 42-year-old frontman and chief songwriter, John Robinson, is a veteran of several other underground bands and has been around long enough to make the sneering disillusionment that seeps out of his vocals sound particularly convincing. There’s certainly some of Pavement’s sass on “Diamond Dreams,” one of my favorite songs on “Pleasure’s All Yours,” but the stomping, garage-rock percussion and that taunting lead riff amount to something uniquely satisfying.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
3. Sweeping Promises: “Shooting Shadows”
Another tip of my hat to a friend who knows my taste: Thank you, Matt, for finally making me listen to Sweeping Promises. The punk duo — the guitarist/vocalist Lira Mondal and the drummer Caufield Schnug — just released its third album, “You Say I Romanticize,” and the whole thing is full of taut ferocity. The versatile force of Mondal’s voice is particularly on display on this lead track, its edges as jagged as a rusty buzz saw.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. L’Rain: “Elmyra”
On her excellent new album, “Fata Morgana,” the experimental musician Taja Cheek, who records as L’Rain, moves through a vast terrain of different genres, filtering them all through her distinctly fractured perspective. “I just don’t want to be put in a box,” she told Marcus J. Moore in a recent Times profile. “I feel limitless, and I want to remain that way and bring people with me into that feeling.” She also told Moore that this dreamy single was partly inspired by — of all things! — Elmyra Duff, a character from the ’90s cartoon series “Tiny Toon Adventures” who is known to squeeze the animals she loves so tightly that it hurts them. Accordingly, Cheek said, the song meditates on the question, “What does it mean to love too much or too hard?” The world needs a mash-up between this and the “Tiny Toon Adventures” theme song, if you ask me.
