Best New Songs (June 5, 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.)

Addison Rae, “Fame Is A Gun”

I saw someone on AOTY say that there hasn’t been a debut run of singles this successful since Lady Gaga’s The Fame. And I can’t help but agree with them. Addison Rae capped off her legendary rollout with “Fame is a Gun,” the fifth teaser from her debut album. Out tomorrow, Addison has shaped up to be one of the most anticipated releases of the year, with each single diving into its own world of sound. Addison hasn’t sat in one place for long, bouncing between the pop spectrum’s extremes. On “Fame is a Gun,” she leans into a future-coded sound, with a hypnotic synth loop that builds into a bombastic dance-pop track, flaunting a percussive 808 and stacked vocals that transport listeners to a technicolor dream world. Her vocals start fuzzy, opening up in the chorus, but Addison keeps her wispy delivery at the center. The song comes with an oddly nostalgic music video that feels part-“Thriller,” part-Suspiria, with Addison existing as both a doe-eyed up-and-comer and a longstanding A-lister. Her videos remain a point of emphasis in her rollout—intentional, curated, building the exact world she wants listeners to step into. My own personal hope is that Addison releases a video for every song on the tracklist, and I may get my wish: she’s already teased the video for the non-single “Times Like These.” —Cassidy Sollazzo

Cate Le Bon: “Heaven Is No Feeling”

Cate Le Bon’s beautiful, surreal songs often feature layered instrumentals obscured by a hazy mist of distortion. Framing her mystical lyrics sung in a washed-out tone, her songs are often so textured that they truly feel tangible. However impossible, I feel an urge to bite into them. I just can’t help but wonder how that would feel. There are few musicians like Le Bon, as she’s always stacked up to art pop pioneers like Björk and David Byrne in my mind. With an unbridled commitment to intriguing song structures, and a willingness to experiment with every part of the musical universe, her absurdist discography expands with her new searing guitar rock track “Heaven Is No Feeling.” Here, distorted guitars swirl around a mid-tempo drum beat, framing Le Bon’s sweeping, low vocals. A yearning line of saxophone soars around it all, a symbol for the elusive euphoria that Le Bon longs for. Exploring the feeling of being on the receiving end of unreciprocated love, it’s yet another magical, affecting masterpiece from Le Bon that I’ll be adding to my favorites list. —Camryn Teder

El Michels Affair ft. Clairo: “Anticipate”

If you loved Clairo’s last album, Charm, and have been wanting more of exactly that, then the newest El Michels Affair track will fill your heart right up. “Anticipate” is just as good as “Juna” or “Sexy to Someone,” pairing Clairo’s double-tracked, windswept vocal with Leon Michels’ knack for woozy, retro funk rhythms and knotty piano. The former Dap-Kings saxophonist and Arcs keyboardist (and Charm producer) creates a gooey palette of synthesizers and deep-pocket drumming for Clairo’s colorful, breathy delivery. The upcoming El Michels Affair album, 24 Hr Sports, is supposedly inspired by MF DOOM’s Special Herbs, will feature the likes of Norah Jones, Florence Adooni, and Dave Guy, and is meant to sound like 1980s issues of Sports Illustrated (Michels’ words, not mine). I am not an authority on whether or not the songs match up with the latter influence, but “Anticipate” confirms one very special thing: Clairo has found her best collaborator in Michels. —Matt Mitchell

Ethel Cain: “Nettles”

Historically, I have always played catch-up with Ethel Cain’s music. It took me a long time to “get” Preacher’s Daughter, and I am still coming around to the crunchy, horrific ambience of Perverts, Cain’s EP from January. And, true to form, it took me a few listens to really nestle in with her new single, “Nettles.” But if she was going to convert me with a song, it was always going to be this one—an 8-minute banjo ballad that never totally climaxes but rambles cosmically across what purgatory awaited Cain after the dark of Preacher’s Daughter. The pedal steel is pitched like a synthesizer, a medley of guitars collapses into itself, and Cain’s voice compresses to the serenade of Donny Carpenter’s wincing fiddle. It’s the first real preview of her new album, Willoughby Tucker—a chronicling of Cain’s romance with her first love. “Every once in a blue moon, it feels good to slough off the macabre and to simply let love be,” she said in a press release, and “Nettles” features some of her most intimate fiction yet. “I want to bleed, I want to hurt the way that boys do,” she sings. “Maybe you’re right and we should stop watching the news.” Cain imagines not only a wedding, but a surrender—a chance for two people to hold each other close and not worry about how they will destroy themselves: “To love me is to suffer me.” —Matt Mitchell

Hand Habits: “Wheel of Change”

Meg Duffy is incapable of standing still. When they’re not making Hand Habits records, they’re working with the likes of Trace Mountains, Matt Berninger, meija, and, most notably, Perfume Genius. And why wouldn’t they be in demand? Their musicality bursts with possibility always, a touch found on albums by other people but most beautifully peculiar under their own banner. A new Hand Habits project is coming, and it’s called Blue Reminder. Lead single “Wheel of Change” is delightfully heavy, featuring chunky guitar phrases that call to mind Neil Young’s Ditch Trilogy and abandon the synthy, song workshop experiments of Sugar the Bruise tracks like “The Bust of Nefertiti” and “Something Wrong.” Capitalizing on the strengths of the same Perfume Genius band they’ve been touring with for years now (especially the picking of their Doubles collaborator Greg Uhlmann), Duffy’s songwriting talent is fully in view. “Wheel of Change” juxtaposes desire and anxiety, desperation and request; its vocabulary holds “Oh beloved, my dear one: shape me with your sorrow” and “I used to think that time was just a vessel for pain, every second taken away from me” in equal light. —Matt Mitchell