Add to playlist: the 70s-inspired avant-pop of actor-academic Paul Grimstad and the week’s best new tracks

<p>The writer, lecturer and all-round culture maven’s restless creativity ranges from prog to pop to psych and boogie rock in a catchy, sometimes alarming mix</p><p><strong>From</strong> New York<br><strong>Recommended if you like</strong> Todd Rundgren, Congratulations-era MGMT, Connan Mockasin<br><strong>Up next</strong> Songs and Music for Film released 30 September; forthcoming acting roles in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/sep/17/one-battle-after-another-review-paul-thomas-andersons-thrillingly-helter-skelter-counter-culture-caper">out on Friday,</a> and Marty Supreme (January 2026)</p><p>New York’s Paul Grimstad has the kind of strange bio that befits his clowny, 70s-inspired avant-pop. Born in the midwest and based in New York since the 90s, Grimstad is a literature professor at Yale, has written essays on Jimi Hendrix and Alan Turing for the New Yorker, and has composed music for a number of films, including last year’s The Sweet East, to which he contributed Evening Mirror, a charming hypno-folk track featuring lead actor Talia Ryder. He’s also an actor, and has small parts in Paul Thomas Anderson’s new Thomas Pynchon adaptation One Battle After Another, as well as Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie’s ping pong biopic starring Timothée Chalamet and Gwyneth Paltrow.<br><br>
And then there’s Songs, his debut album, released this month alongside Music for Film, a compilation of his scores. A maniacal odyssey of prog, jazz, boogie rock, psych and pop, Songs pays homage to the hi-fi chaos of 70s art-rock classics such as Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, a True Star, rarely staying in one lane for more than a couple of minutes across its breakneck 16-track, 40-minute runtime. Performed, produced and engineered entirely by Grimstad, Songs is catchy, hilarious and terrifying in equal measure: passages of