The best new rock songs you need to hear right now

Roll up, roll up, it’s the 533rd edition of our Tracks Of The Week affair, and we have more music for you. This week’s selection comes from places as geographically distant as Togo, Brazil and Leicester, but the whole world loves to rock, so why not?

Last week, Massive Wagons’ Night Skies topped the poll, with Rich Ragany’s Sierra Bonita and Joanne Shaw Taylor’s Hold Of My Heart appearing in what sports commentators cruelly called the “minor medal” positions. Congratulations to all of them, and here’s your winner again.

Here’s this week’s selection. Good, aren’t they? 

SKAM – Fate Of The Souls

Having released some straight-ahead bangers over the last couple of years, the Leicester power trio might be leaning into the sort of territory that reaped 2017’s The Amazing Memoirs Of Geoffrey Goddard (their admirably ambitious concept LP about a time-travelling WW2 pilot), if this song and certainly this video is anything to go by. Part mythical Iron Maiden-style saga, part Alter Bridge-esque marriage of big moody melody and deft, pummelling rhythm section, it opens the case for their next album From The Depths – which promises forays into metal, prog and acoustic balladry, among other things. Intriguing…

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Giant Walker – Time To Waste

Built on down-tuned, densely fuzzy riffage, Geordie rockers Giant Walker revel in the introspective yet heavy vibe of the grunge greats, then mix it up with a soaring, expansive chorus and some gnarly little twists. Think Soundgarden meets Rage Against The Machine, with a prog-metal aftertaste. “The initial idea came from writing a bluesy riff in the lowest tuning I could get from my baritone guitar,” says guitarist Jamie Southern of the song, which also drew from 90s hip hop. “From there, the vibe was so strong that the rest of the song essentially wrote itself.”

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Nightwish – The Day Of…

Finland’s symphonic maestros open on a dark, almost 80s synth-pop note before delving into a blistering world of heavy theatre (guitars, strings, choral blasts, huge drums…), all of it rooted in the hopes and fears of the human experience. “The Day Of… delivers a message of hope and deliverance from the deluge of fear and misery we are subjected to on a daily basis,” band mastermind Tuomas Holopainen explains. “And even though it’s a long road to a dreamworld, there are no monsters under the bed; as the children in the song joyously remind us.”

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Texas Hippie Coalition – Gunsmoke

The Lone Star State’s gun-toting, weed-smoking cowboys are back with a heavy, sludgy southern rocker that made us smile for the rhyming of ‘cocktails’ with ‘hay bales’. If Black Label Society and ZZ Top hooked up, it might sound like this. “We definitely went home on this album,” says singer Big Dad Ritch. “It represents the wild west Texas-Oklahoma area. You’ve got a little red dirt country spilling over into the storytelling and metal. It’s a return to the dirt where we came from.”

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Violet Orlandi – Dead Men Walk Alone

Violet Orlandi is a Brazilian musician with over a million followers on YouTube. She gained her following by covering the likes of the Cranberries, Nirvana and Disturbed, but these days she’s releasing originals, and Dead Men Walk Alone is the latest. It starts off slowly, with a creaking, trip-hop vibe, then launches into a giant of a song, with Orlandi’s operative voice sending the song off in the direction of Pink Floyd’s Great Gig In The Sky. And from there it only gets more epic. 

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Devon Allman – You

This week’s most chilled song comes from Devon Allman. You is a track from his new album Miami Moon. In keeping with the album title, the song drifts along, with the kind of deft but relaxed instrumental backing only the best players can provide. With the cast including George Porter JR. (The Meters) on bass, Ivan Neville (Keith Richards, Dumpstaphunk) on keyboards, Adam Deitch (Lettuce) on drums and Karl Denson (The Rolling Stones) on saxophone, we shouldn’t be surprised it all sounds so effortless. “Making the Miami Moon record with these legendary musicians has been a high point of my career,” says Allman. “They brought these songs to life with their masterful playing and timeless feels.” 

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Drug Church – Chow

Conversely, this week’s rowdiest contender comes from Albany, NY punk troublemakers Drug Church. Chow is a spiky beast of a tune, with a riff that sounds kinda like Killing Joke crossed with someone else that also kinda sounds like Killing Joke but isn’t, and a chorus that soars high up into the punk-o-sphere. New album Prude arrives in October, and it’s only 28 minutes long, which, as any fule kno, is the ultimate length for an album. Just ask Slayer. Or the Descendents.    

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Alain Apaloo – Nothing to Lose (feat. Marcus King)

Alain Apaloo was born in Togo, Africa, but these days you’ll mainly find him in Copenhagen, Denmark, busy fusing West African music with jazz and blues. In the case of Nothing to Lose (which also features rising star Marcus King) this results in a bare-boned blues where acoustic and electric guitars entwine, and the end result is rather atmospheric and rather lovely. New album Naked will be released on September 13, and is, we’re told, “a stark and striking transference of magic and connection through the timeless medium of the blues, performed by a musician of great magnetism and irresistible joy.”  

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Polly is deputy editor at Classic Rock magazine, where she writes and commissions regular pieces and longer reads (including new band coverage), and has interviewed rock’s biggest and newest names. She also contributes to Louder, Prog and Metal Hammer and talks about songs on the 20 Minute Club podcast. Elsewhere she’s had work published in The Musician, delicious. magazine and others, and written biographies for various album campaigns. In a previous life as a women’s magazine junior she interviewed Tracey Emin and Lily James – and wangled Rival Sons into the arts pages. In her spare time she writes fiction and cooks.