This week, WGSU is adding the leadoff single from the latest EP by Water From Your Eyes, Mp3 Player 1. The track, somehow incredibly surprising yet fascinatingly on-brand, is a delightful cover of a deep cut Chumbawamba album track, “The Good Ship Lifestyle”. Yeah, that’s right, Chumbawamba, the “I get knocked down/but I get up again” people. In line with their cover of Giant Sand’s “Warm Storm” earlier this year and their 2019 Somebody Else’s Songs covers album, Mp3 Player 1 tackles Adele and Al Green alongside the odd single (side note: the title of Somebody Else’s Songs is a play on their other 2019 LP Somebody Else’s Song. Yeah, these guys are fun). The oddball duo is having a red-hot year following loads of year-end-best-of nods for 2023’s Everyone’s Crushed and instrumentalist Nate Amos’s lauded solo album from this month Box for Buddy, Box for Star, as This is Lorelei.

Also being introduced to the rotation this week is newcomer Sophie Lilah’s new single “Content but I find”, a taste of her upcoming debut EP Fear/Instinct, out August 16. The 18-year old’s surprisingly mature lyrics reflect on the fresh wounds that you are left with at the end of a friendship. Whereas most 18-year-olds (especially young me) wouldn’t be able to unpack the reason why they are tired the morning after going to bed at 4 a.m., Lilah has created a beautiful, purposeful track that exceeds expectations. Lyrics aside, the guitar work and melody are all-together enough to be side-by-side with the likes of Snail Mail or MJ Lenderman.

Clairo joins the WGSU music rotation today with “Nomad” from her new album Charm. Produced by resume extraordinaire Leon Michaels (toured with the Black Keys, Wu-Tang Clan, Charles Bradley; produced for Norah Jones, Chicano Batman; frontman of El Michaels Affair), Claire Cottrill returns with heavenly vocals and melodies that are very subtly, but very much, bops. With the addition of string orchestration alongside guitar plucking, I am reminded often on this album of Minnie Riperton’s Come to my Garden and even of Beth Orton’s classic Stolen Car record.

Lastly, we turn to “Hey Kekulé” by Texas’s own Font. This track, the second off of this month’s Strange Burden, is a fun, rampant song that takes me from a confused smirk to a serious head-bang, then back to a content groove in the span of three-and-a-half minutes. The Kekulé referenced is apparently Friedrich Kekulé, a nineteenth-century chemist who made his name studying benzene, a modern component of gasoline. Hence the line “I know that time is just a tool I use to fool/The twins that dance upon that dune/Firelit, fickle/They embrace me: I’m ready.”