Week of February 13, 2026

Credit: Vevo, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG1HKY6Jwas

Welcome back and Happy Valentine’s Day! This week’s commentary on New Music Friday is my first in a while, and I’m excited to be able to finally continue reporting on each week’s freshest new music. This week’s lineup of songs included many references to the big V-Day, with tracks like “More Than A Lover” from Mary J. Blige and an EP from Eem Triplin, a love song for you. But, from the grand perspective, this week’s overall songs were regularly lacking in uniqueness. Many songs sounded like carbon copies of an artist’s existing brand and those of other musicians. For example, while Victoria Monet’s “Let Me” was a beautiful R&B piece, it felt easily paraphrasable. Overall, the lack of standouts made it easier to weed out the unique pieces of art. A lot of boundary pushing this week came from Charli XCX, who just released her seventh studio album, and more underground artists like Lykke Li, who gifted the music industry with a fun yet haunting song, “Lucky Again.” Featured below, though, are the most-qualifying songs I’ve managed to discover this week.

1. Most Streamed Song of the Week & Lyrical Standout – “Always Everywhere” by Charli Xcx (10/10)

While atypical for this column, Charli XCX’s “Always Everywhere” is a musical masterpiece that should be recognized in more than just one category, in this case, Most Streamed Song and Lyrical Standout of the week. This week’s selection is a track that comes off of XCX’s newest album, Wuthering Heights, which serves as Charli’s first full soundtrack album. The album was curated for Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, the classic 19th-century novel written by Emily Brontë. The film features star-actors Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, and has been one of the anticipated films of 2026, being released to theatres just on Valentine’s Day. 

While the context of the song and the album’s creation are already unique in themselves, it doesn’t hinder the artist’s visionary talent in any way. In fact, it might have even provided the Essex-born artist with the ability to explore a more instrumental sound that proves as a stark contrast to her former ‘BRAT-era,' and further diversifies her discography. Oftentimes, people fall into the trap of thinking that more equals better. But with this track, Charli XCX shows how this belief is often a misconception; she shows that stripping away the noise and quantity can actually be more powerful than stacking up line on line. In the song’s climax, Charlotte allows just two words to linger in silence: “always everywhere.” The words are accompanied by an ensemble of 13-string players painting the saddest arrangement of sustained strings, and emphasize a feeling of giving up. 

While it can be common to hear songs about melancholic emotions, this one is different from the typical track. XCX portrays a picture where the audience watches her embodied character slowly drift away from a special person or place in her heart, while still being ‘everywhere’ near it ‘always’. The painful part of the song is that its narrator doesn’t have an awareness that she’s lost the entity she feels so gravitated towards, and, in the ability to become an omnipotent listener who understands something the song’s character doesn’t realize, comes a refreshing and heart-shattering type of pain that can’t be easily reciprocated. Through the lyrics, Charli does this, showing that she not only deserves her placement as the artist with the most-streamed song of the week, but also as a revolutionary lyricist and thinker.

2. Sonic Standout – “butterflies.” by Brent Faiyaz (8.75/10)

Contemporary R&B artist, Brent Faiyaz, has kick-started this week with his fifth studio album, Icon, and truly decides to lean into a sonically unique method of his artistry. His first album in about two and a half years, one of the album’s standout pieces is, without a doubt, “butterflies.” It merges a recognizable sense of retro “Silk Sonic” style of funk music, but combines it with Frank Ocean-style soul and electronic-style instrumentals that give the song a familiar but unique perspective. Particularly brilliant about the song is how it starts mellow and rational, but slowly builds towards an escalation of feelings–like when you get ‘butterflies’–that captures how sometimes love can make one feel irrational and driven by emotions, rather than logical thinking. Its looped beats in the initial part of the song make the listener feel like they get to listen to Faiyaz’s pulse, slowly levitating through emotions of happiness and fear when confronting a romantic inkling. It’s truly a cool song and gives flavor to the modern R&B space.

3. Hidden Gem – “Truth of Pursuit” by Sarah Kinsley (8.75/10)

If you like Chappell Roan, Mitski, Olivia Rodrigo, and somehow Lorde as well, Sarah Kinsley is somehow able to create a captivating palette of all the best parts of the inspirational artists. The song is truly underrated, only standing at around 100,000 streams, despite a dreamy alternative well-produced sound. The song sounds like walking through a cloud yet feeling energetically fun at the same time. And, it questions about what love really means if there is no act of pursuit. In other words, if there are no actions that are done by a partner to show on a technical and non-passion level that they love you, what’s even the point? The song’s energy feels desperate and is exactly the formula that Kinsley captures to show the need for logistical attention from her lover. Featured on her EP, Fleeting, the entire project feels effortlessly cool and flawless in its ability to move from one kind of maximalist sound to another minimalist sound within just a heartbeat.