This Week’s Music is a weekly column that discusses the weeks’ best, worst, and most interesting songs. We try to select songs of different artists and genres to keep things interesting and to please a variety of music fans.
On this week’s column we highlight three music genres: Pop, Rap and a Thom Yorke song, which is always impossible to box in, even though we tried. Two of the songs featured on this list show up in upcoming movies. Check them out:
Pop
Maggie Rogers – Light On
Maggie Rogers last single is a pleasant song, a mix of Haim and Rita Ora only much more restrained. Light On discusses the singer’s fast rise to fame, prompted by Pharrell’s sudden discovery of her while mentoring an NYU class. Rogers was brought into the spotlight with her first single, Alaska, which went viral and got her on the Tonight Show. While Light On is not as catchy or as fun as Alaska, it’s still a dreamy and breezy couple of minutes; a great song to listen to while in a coffee shop or driving around in your car, closing your eyes and breathing in.
Instrumental
Thom Yorke – Volk
Volk belongs to the Suspiria movie soundtrack, and it’s just as unnerving and claustrophobic as it should be. By using those loopy and freaky sounds that remind you of nails running down a chalkboard, Thom Yorke traps you in six thoroughly unpleasant minutes. It’s not until the fourth minute when things start to kick up, introducing other scary instruments and making you sigh with relief once you hear drums, because you can finally recognize a familiar sound. Volk is not an easy listen, but it makes up for this by being moody, hypnotizing and thoughtful.
Yorke has worked on short films and commercials before, but this is the first time where his contribution leaves such a big imprint on the end result.
Rap
Post Malone ft. Swae Lee – Sunflower
Post Malone has become an expert at blending rap with catchy and popular sounds, and his latest single is no different. Featuring Swae Lee, Sunflower is the official song of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and you can tell. With its boppy and bright sounds that grow old after the first chorus, Sunflower is a good song for a movie, where you’ll only have to listen to it for a couple of seconds. You might forget it five minutes later, but at least you had fun.
