From New York
Recommended if you like Todd Rundgren, Congratulations-era MGMT, Connan Mockasin
Up next Songs and Music for Film released 30 September; forthcoming acting roles in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, out on Friday, and Marty Supreme (January 2026)
New York’s Paul Grimstad has the kind of strange bio that befits his clowny, 70s-inspired avant-pop. Born in the midwest and based in New York since the 90s, Grimstad is a literature professor at Yale, has written essays on Jimi Hendrix and Alan Turing for the New Yorker, and has composed music for a number of films, including last year’s The Sweet East, to which he contributed Evening Mirror, a charming hypno-folk track featuring lead actor Talia Ryder. He’s also an actor, and has small parts in Paul Thomas Anderson’s new Thomas Pynchon adaptation One Battle After Another, as well as Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie’s ping pong biopic starring Timothée Chalamet and Gwyneth Paltrow.
And then there’s Songs, his debut album, released this month alongside Music for Film, a compilation of his scores. A maniacal odyssey of prog, jazz, boogie rock, psych and pop, Songs pays homage to the hi-fi chaos of 70s art-rock classics such as Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, a True Star, rarely staying in one lane for more than a couple of minutes across its breakneck 16-track, 40-minute runtime. Performed, produced and engineered entirely by Grimstad, Songs is catchy, hilarious and terrifying in equal measure: passages of sleek funk-pop rub up against snatches of psychotic haunted-house laughter and songs indebted to Philly soul at its sleaziest. Grimstad is an astoundingly talented producer, and it’s a credit to his skill that, despite all the bird coos and whiplash-inducing changes of pace, Songs is a delight to listen to – lush and ludicrous in all the right ways. Shaad D’Souza
This week’s best new tracks
Juana Molina. Photograph: Verena Algranti
Juana Molina – Siestas Ahí
The Argentinian experimental legend returns after eight years away with this gorgeous devotional about dissolving in someone’s kisses, her strange, ticking guitar suddenly gleefully unfurling like a party blower. LS
UFOs – UFO
French touch royalty Braxe + Falcon and Phoenix unite for this woozy, melancholy throb, with Thomas Mars singing about the irrational nature of belief as he pleads to be let back into someone’s heart. LS
Paul St Hilaire and Shinichi Atobe – Time to Wake Up
St Hilaire is the defining vocalist of dub techno, and his new album pairs him with an awesome array of producers from Mala to Batu; Japanese deep house genius Atobe gives him an insistent, aqueous riddim. BBT
Lael Neale – Some Bright Morning
Omnichord and vintage drum machines power the momentum of Neale’s ode to the dream of a day when work is finally over. We’ll never get there, but she makes the sisyphean task shimmy. LS
Kennedy – Starman
The title suggests the theme tune for some astral superhero and the Amsterdam dance producer’s track duly follows suit, with E2-E4-style Balearic sonics powering this cosmic house rocket. [Not on Spotify: listen here] BBT
Spaced – Pressure
A chorus of bicep-flexing, deep-lunging muscularity squats at the heart of the new one from the Buffalo hardcore punks, featuring funky chanting about the weight of the world. BBT
Ady Suleiman – Never Meant to Hurt You ft Kofi Stone
The UK-Swahili heritage heart-throb is back after a few years away, and this is an expertly rendered piece of yearning, conflicted neo-soul, hard rimshots cutting through smooth Spanish guitar. BBT
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