Sep 29, 2026 · 40 min
Six songs turn loudness into emotional range
Phoebe Bridgers, Gilla Band, Wednesday, and more of the week’s best songs
The episode maps a week in new music through the tension between abrasive force, elaborate texture, and intimate release.
- 1Phoebe Bridgers scales a surprise soundtrack song into an arena-sized meditation on spectatorship and ethics.
- 2Gilla Band, Trentemøller, and Wednesday use distortion, collaboration, and remixing to make darkness physically vivid.
- 3Serpentwithfeet and Lily Konigsberg close the set with spiritual atmosphere and catchy, autobiographical catharsis.
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The brief
Robin Hilton and Dora Levite begin with a rainy punk festival on the National Mall, then set a clear premise: this week’s songs favor loudness, risk, and high-energy textures.
Phoebe Bridgers’ surprise song “On Video,” written for Primetime, pairs an arena-sized sound with shifting perspective and questions around the audience and ethics of To Catch a Predator.
Gilla Band’s “Placeholder” supplies punishing noise rock, while Trentemøller’s “Swerve” finds beauty inside shoegaze through collaboration and an exquisite-corpse-like construction.
Avey Tare’s remix of Wednesday’s “Carolina Murder Suicide” makes a dark narrative more texturally intense, turning a deluxe-edition exception into the episode’s clearest transformation.
The set resolves through Serpentwithfeet’s spiritual, layered “Sentinel” and Lily Konigsberg’s catchy “Freebird,” pairing expansive voices with autobiographical catharsis.