Every week, Consequence’s Songs of the Week column looks at great new tunes from the last seven days and analyzes notable releases. Find our new favorites and more on our Spotify Top Songs playlist, and for other great songs from emerging artists, check out our Spotify New Sounds playlist. This week, The Smile, Faye Webster, and Waxahatchee all return just months after dropping their respective albums.

Some artists are known for their prolific nature, like those Ohio rockers Guided by Voices or the BasedGod himself Lil B. Others are known for their elusiveness and increasingly empty release schedules, like Frank Ocean or (here’s the setup) Radiohead. Conventional wisdom, however, suggests a modest but consistent two-to-three-year album cycle, giving LPs enough time to settle in and allowing time for a support tour or two. Well, somebody tell that to Faye Webster, Waxahatchee, The Smile (and here’s the punchline), who are all back with new material just months after dropping their respective records.

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Out of the three, The Smile are perhaps the most noteworthy, as today marks the release of their second full-length album of 2024. Following the excellent Wall of Eyes, the band’s new effort, Cutouts, offers listeners a different side of the Radiohead offshoot. Whereas the former found the band taking influences from jazz, post-rock, and avant-garde/contemporary classical, Cutouts presents an icier, more electronically-bent sonic world — just take single “Don’t Get Me Started” or “Bodies Laughing.” Put together, the records are a one-two punch from a trio that’s as eclectic as they are bursting with ideas.

Webster and Waxahatchee, for their part, aren’t so crazy, merely returning with brand new singles rather than a whole-mother-effing-album. Webster, who was the subject of a Consequence cover story in February, is still touring off the back of her most recent release, Underdressed at the Symphony, but that hasn’t stopped her from pulling together a new lush, love-sick little ditty. “She got me callin’ her wife after the first kiss,” she sings as strings glisten around her. It’s as Websteronian as it comes.

Similarly, Waxahatchee is back with a new cut, “Much Ado About Nothing,” less than seven months after dropping our favorite album of the first half of the year, Tigers Blood. Though not a leftover from the Tigers Blood sessions, the tune is just as piercing, well-constructed, and wonderfully twangy as any track from the album. There are soaring but understated melodies, tasteful banjo licks, and the type of harmonies that make you believe in a higher power. Speaking of higher powers, with her consistently quality output, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that songwriter Katie Crutchfield has sold her soul to some sort of countrified, indie rock devil. Nothing else explains her 2020s run.

Multiple releases in a year can sometimes result in diminishing returns, as it did last year with The National’s First Two Pages of Frankenstein and Laugh Track. On the other hand, if you have the material and are proud of it, why the hell wouldn’t you put it out? As far as more music from The Smile, Faye Webster, and Waxahatchee, we’re certainly not complaining. If anything, we’re turning into spoiled brats, hoping for even more before the year wraps up.

— Jonah Krueger
Editorial Coordinator