Best New Songs (February 27, 2025)

At Paste Music, we’re listening to so many new tunes on any given day, we barely have any time to listen to each other. Nevertheless, every week we can swing it, we take stock of the previous seven days’ best new songs, delivering a weekly playlist of our favorites. Check out this week’s material, in alphabetical order. (You can check out an ongoing playlist of every best new songs pick of 2025 here.)

Backxwash: “9th Heaven”

It’s been a year since Montreal rapper Backxwash released “WAKE UP,” a song so great Paste contributor Elise Soutar called it “a scorched-earth rap-rock epic that shapeshifts into a stirring gospel outro.” We’ve been waiting on her follow-up to her incredible, trilogy-ending album His Happiness Shall Come First Even Though We Are Suffering, and now it’s time to rejoice: Only Dust Remains will be here on March 28. New single “9th Heaven” is an electric squash of anxiety, as Backxwash’s flow stretches around a crying vocal sample. She reckons with labor, drugs and purpose. Piano notes twirl like pirouettes, as she summons a “drummer coming,” programming beats into a Biblical ecstasy evoked through mentions of the archangel Gabriel and Adam eating the apple. The tempo grows. “I know where I’ve been, and I don’t know where the fuck I’m going,” Backxwash chants. “But I can tell you one motherfucking thing, i feel so motherfucking free!” I’m hesitant to call “9th Heaven” a rap song; I’m not so sure that could possibly categorize or encapsulate the magic and craft throbbing and shape-shifting within. Let’s call it like it is instead: “9th Heaven” is a museum. —Matt Mitchell

Colin Miller: “Cadillac”

Amidst the throes of heartbreak, there’s nothing quite as cathartic as a late-night sob session soundtracked by dramatic, soulful requiems that blow up your sorrow to epic proportions. Feeling a flood of tears rush down your cheek while wretchedly howling along to sappy, yearning laments—it almost feels good. Waking up in a half-empty bed with the realization that nothing has really changed pounding in your head like a migraine, however, does not. What is there to soothe this dull, starkly unromantic ache? At the head of his new alt-rock elegy, “Cadillac,” Colin Miller offers a list of potential balms: coffee, Pall Malls and oxygen, “sucked down” in that order. Like his Carolina peers and collaborators (Wednesday’s MJ Lenderman, Xandy Chelmis and Ethan Baechtold fill out the band on his upcoming album, Losin’, out April 25 via Mtn Laurel Recording Co.), Miller is a subtle, wryly-affecting lyricist with a knack for wringing potent emotion from even his most mundane surroundings. For example, a televised NASCAR crash transforms from a source of mind-numbing, background entertainment into a mirror to his own broken-down state: “I’m helpless, helpless, helpless,” he confesses, his slacker-ish delivery hardly belying the depth of his despondency. Sounding as charred as his cigarette breakfast, the track’s propulsive electric riff steadily churns along, driving Miller to a sucker-punch of a closing couplet that’s already in my running for the year’s most devastating lyrics: “It’s a good day at the wreck yard / It’s a bad day for my heart.” —Anna Pichler

Fontaines D.C.: “It’s Amazing to Be Young”

Maybe it’s too early to feel nostalgic for last fall, but I do. Days before my late-August birthday, Fontaines D.C. released their monumental fourth album, Romance, and being a record of transformation and reinvention, it made for a startlingly perfect soundtrack to a personally metamorphic, explosively joyful season that followed a brutal first-half of the year. Across the album’s 11 chapters, Grian Chatten, Conor Curley, Conor Deega III, Tom Coll and Carlos O’Connell stretched their sound to new extremes, grooving through a strobe-lit, nu-metal sonic panic attack one moment (“Starburster”) and soaring to euphoric dream-pop heavens (“In the Modern World”) just a few tracks later—and that’s not to mention the album’s forays into shoegaze, blistering hard-rock, orchestral balladry and nearly every other soundscape conceivable. Romance is decidedly the band’s most colorful record, but it never sacrifices their singular intensity. Its songs are musical portraits of what it means to love when loss is inevitable—to be acutely, achingly alive, reveling in both the terror and elation of that precious experience. I listen to Romance, and I feel the exhilaration of rebirth that it captured flood my body all over again—I feel that hunger to not only seize, but also create beauty ahead of me, even if I’d have to stumble on the way.

I felt that magic anew upon first listening to “It’s Amazing to Be Young,” released last Friday. Its overture—a delicate dance between fluttering, candy-coated electric guitar notes and xylophonic twinkles set to a soft buzz of strings—bursts into a million tiny stars when jangly strumming and vibrant percussion kick in, announcing Chatten’s entrance. “It’s the cost that brings you down,” he sings, never one to bullshit—“but it’s amazing to be young,” he continues in a dreamy sigh, his breathy head voice sparkling with wonder. Deegan shared that the band wrote the track soon after the birth of O’Connell’s baby, which inspired them to capture a sense of hope for the younger generation—it became a declaration of which side they’re on. Fontaines D.C. absolutely succeed, and to breathtaking effect: “It’s Amazing to Be Young” is an irresistible wash of pure nostalgia. —Anna Pichler

Free Range: “Storm”

Free Range is a band we need now more than ever. If music is a salve, then I am grateful for the way Sofia Jensen, Bailey Minzenberger, Jack Henry and Red PK can soothe even the heaviest of hurt. “Storm” is the kind of song I wish I’d had when I was in my early twenties; “Storm” is the kind of song I’m privileged to know in my mid-twenties. “I stayed with my past as long as it took me to let go,” Jensen sings, in-between the cursive of a pedal steel and grins of acoustic guitar. “There’s no sense in trying to protect me from my ghosts.” “Storm” is forthright and deeply human, aglow with a clarity both well-worn and hard-earned. I think of the confusion and loneliness that colored Free Range’s first album, Practice, and how you can hear Jensen’s posture get straighter during the cowboy cries of “Storm.” This song is a miracle of honesty, if only because it does not turn its back towards the uneasiness of memory. You can hear what love binds every instrument, every breath. —Matt Mitchell

Jenny Hval: “To Be A Rose”

I had never listened to Norwegian artist Jenny Hval until I moved into my new apartment and a friend of mine asked what I’d like as a housewarming gift. I requested an album that would make me think of her every time I listened to it, and in return I received Hval’s elusive, haunting concept album Blood Bitch. I’ve been a fervent fan of Hval’s ever since, and her new single (from her upcoming album, Iris Silver Mist, due out May 2 via 4AD) “To be a rose” proves to me once again that she is the type of artist who is as surprising as she is cool. Over bouncy drum machine and rattling percussion, she sings lackadaisically of cigarettes, roses and her mother. Brass comes in every now and then, faraway like a siren, and tinny synth twirls in the background. The experimental, spoken-word vibe is distinctly reminiscent of “Launderette”-era Vivien Goldman, before careening back towards a more traditional melodic build on the soaring chorus. “‘To be a rose’ was written as a restless pop structure,” Hval explains. “It has a chorus, with chords and a melody, but each chorus sounds slightly different, like we are experiencing the melody from different seasons, decades or even different bodies. The clichéd rose metaphor in the song is equally restless. It can change shape into a cigarette, and then evaporate to smoke.” —Clare Martin

Lily Seabird: “It was like you were coming to wake us back up”

There are songs you can physically feel the hurt in, and from the very first moment of Lily Seabird’s “It was like you were coming to wake us back up” (which, coincidentally, doubles as the first line), you can already tell that it is going to crack you open from the inside. Whisper-delicate, heart-rending and insistent all at once, “It was like…” traps you within a moment barely the length of a breath—that split-second pulse skip of seeing a long-gone loved one across the way before the yearning desperation fades away and reality takes its place, leaving behind only a stranger. Seabird is at her most Adrianne Lenker-esque here, that gorgeous, raw, nasally croon splitting at the ends with the enormity of her own emotion. “All the silvery stuff was floating around your beautiful head,” she murmurs, aching with it. “It was like we’d forgotten that you had been dead.” As the song goes on, it becomes increasingly evident that Seabird is putting everything on the line here, every ounce of her spilling into and bleeding out of the softness of her tone. There is restraint, but there’s something beyond it, too; it’s almost like Seabird is attempting to keep her voice taut on a leash while simultaneously buckling beneath the exertion of the act. “It was like you were here,” she sings over and over again, guitars churning below. It’s brutal, and it’s beautiful. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Model/Actriz: “Cinderella”

I was late to the party on Model/Actriz, but I eventually figured it out, and we named their debut album Dogsbody one of the best of 2023. Songs like “Donkey Show” and “Mosquito” were full of noise and charisma, turning Biblical plagues into high body counts and messy, hilarious plagues of provocation—all thanks to frontman Cole Haden’s, as our writer Madelyn Dawson so perfectly framed it, “sinister eroticism.” I’ve been waiting on the Brooklyn band’s second album, Pirouette, ever since, and Haden returned this week with a vocal pulling from the same queer, strobing physique that Dogbody made fucked-up, widescreen and divine. I can hear his body roll and contort through every note of “Cinderella,” a feat rarely achieved by anyone, let alone 1/4th of a post-punk band from New York City. The track is industrial, clubby and sensationally hedonistic, reeking of sex and bumps while building towards a climax like a hydrogen bomb slowly leaking. Desire is its own beast on “Cinderella,” and Haden’s words cut into me—lines like “I notice you are gentle by the way your posture is so elegant,” “In your eyes, I am naked, screaming like a tornado in the dark” and “You make me want to be ready” drip off of his tongue and onto mine. Pleasure sounds ugly in the company of “Cinderella”; it’s a song that demands something more alive than that. —Matt Mitchell

Sharp Pins: “With a Girl Like Mine”

Sharp Pins, the side/solo project of Lifeguard’s Kai Slater, has no bad songs. This is objectively correct. Slater is one of Chicago’s most interesting musicians, in that his sound lands someplace between mersey beat and Guided By Voices. It’s not quite hypnagogic, but it’s certainly lo-fi. He’s got the shaggy hair and the penchant for black-and-white, magazine-collage visuals, and his voice reminds me of Norman Blake’s on “Sparky’s Dream,” but with a bit more of a forced (but not distracting) British affectation. Sharp Pins is gearing up to release a deluxe-edition of Radio DDR, Slater’s 2024 full-length that wound up at #24 on our best albums of the year list. He’s already shared the new singles “I Can’t Stop” and “Storma Lee,” and this week he unveiled “With a Girl Like Mine,” a majorly sweet and plucky folk-pop track that barely hits the 2-minute mark. But it doesn’t need to. “With a Girl Like Mine” is as grainy as the music video accompanying it, but Slater makes this home recording livable and wonderfully melodic, even in its brevity. “All I ever do is cry,” he sings, letting his voice warble through a few decades. The best way to enjoy a Sharp Pins song is to just fall into it and let the sentimentality wash over you. —Matt Mitchell

Smut: “Dead Air”

What’s the best way to welcome new band members? Well, if you answered “record a band break up song,” then you and Chicago five-piece Smut are on the same page. “Dead Air” is the first song vocalist Tay Roebuck, guitarist Andie Min and guitarist/keyboardist Sam Ruschman have made with Smut’s newest official members, drummer Aidan O’Connor and bassist John Steiner. Big, crunchy guitars march on from the very start, their rough edges softened by Roebuck’s angelic voice. “I heard you said forever,” she pleads on the anthemic chorus, which brings to mind the stadium-sized sound of Smut’s favorite bands growing up, like My Chemical Romance, Green Day and Metric. The group have teased further music to be released later this year, and considering how much we enjoyed their 2022 album How the Light Felt, it’s safe to say we’re excited. —Clare Martin

The Bug Club: “Have U Ever Been 2 Wales”

The highest compliment I have ever been paid on my writing was from a comment on a Paste article last year: “I like this writer. They give a very convincing impression of idiocy.” This was underneath a semi-joke list from a few months back that ranked city songs by how much the song in question made me think I should avoid their titular city, and it was written in a very particular faux-naive, overly literal tone I have grown quite fond of over the years—I think of it a little as my “Matt Farley voice,” as his 25,000+ hyper-specific, hyper-simplistic songs serve as an inspiration and source of humor for me on the daily. And not only does the Bug Club’s “Have U Ever Been 2 Wales” feel like a shoo-in contender for a new country-based ranking (although it is very pro-Wales, so it would not rank very high), it feels like an embodiment of the list itself, sung with that same cheeky, silly-yet-ostensibly-dead-serious tone I wrote it in. “Have you ever been to Wales?” Sam Willmett sings, flat and blunt. Tilly Harris hops onto the next line, harmonizing: “It’s good.” A beat. “It’s go-oo-oo-ood.” Even though I have never been 2 Wales, I can’t help but feeling like this song was written for me specifically—it’s like the Unicorns got back together to cover a Matt Farley song (specifically, of course, from his Guy Who Sings Songs About Cities & Towns side project) after listening to a lot of Guided By Voices, which is a combination I desperately needed in my life yet didn’t realize until this very moment. Although the Bug Club have been around since 2016, they’ve clearly hit their stride recently, signing with Sub Pop last year and putting out the uncompromisingly enjoyable On the Intricate Inner Workings of the System not long afterwards. “Have U Ever Been 2 Wales” is evidence the duo has no intention of slowing down—the track is pure fun and whimsy, but it’s also a banger to boot, and a fuzzed-up earworm powered by sheer enthusiasm. I want to go 2 Wales now! —Casey Epstein-Gross

Other Notable Songs This Week: By Storm (fka Injury Reserve): “Zig Zag”; Cactus Lee: “Rabbit”; Deafheaven: “Heathen”; Deerhoof: “Sparrow Sparrow”; Great Grandpa: “Ladybug”; Jane Remover: “Dancing with your eyes closed”; Jeffrey Lewis: “Just Fun”; Julien Baker & TORRES: “Tuesday”; Little Simz: “Flood”; Marlon Williams ft. Lorde: “Kāhore He Manu E”; Momma: “Bottle Blonde”; more eaze & claire rousay: “lowcountry”; No Windows: “Return”; SACRED PAWS: “Fall for You”; Shura ft. Cassandra Jenkins: “Richardson”; Sparks: “JanSport Backpack”; Um, Jennifer?: “Delancey”; Viagra Boys: “Uno II”; Yung Lean: “Forever Yung”

Check out a playlist of this week’s best new songs below.