Best New Songs (July 17, 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.)

Alex G: “Oranges”

Pressing play on a new Alex G song is like a game of Russian Roulette. Will this one be a cacophony of noise and high-pitched vocal lines? A driving rock track framed by distorted guitars? Or something else entirely? His latest song “Oranges” is the latter. The last single ahead of his 10th album, Headlights, “Oranges” is a soft singer-songwriter track. Framed by a satisfying combination of bright piano lines, spoons, twangy guitar, and vibrant lyrics, Giannascoli sings of his innate fearlessness, sacred time spent with loved ones, and the valiant act of rescuing oneself. It’s all freeing imagery, and combined with an old-country sound, it’s a pastoral listen that’s just as comforting to the soul as the ears. —Camryn Teder

Blood Orange ft. Caroline Polachek, Lorde, & Mustafa: “Mind Loaded”

Last month, Blood Orange returned not with a bang, but a gorgeous murmur. “The Field,” which featured Caroline Polachek, Daniel Caesar, Tariq Al-Sabir, and a sample of the Durutti Column, reintroduced Dev Hynes’ curatorial, virtuosic project with a tapestry of string tangents, vocal shifts, and piano injections. Now, Hynes is prepping the first Blood Orange full-length since 2018’s Negro Swan. Due out in late August, Essex Honey very well could be Hynes’ most-expansive effort yet. He’s packed the tracklist with guests like Turnstile’s Brendan Yates, Wet’s Kelly Zutrau, and Ian Isiah, Liam Benzvi, and Eva Tolkin. On new single “Mind Loaded,” he calls upon Polachek, Mustafa, and Lorde. It’s one of the prettiest songs I’ve heard this year, with the four voices blending into a woozy strata of buzzing, understated synth-pop and choppy, angular piano soul. “Everything means nothing to me,” Lorde sings, before Mustafa finishes her sentence: “And it all falls before you retreat.” When Hynes’ outro arrives, it’s like a phantom splayed and muted across a burial ground: “I keep getting closer to your loss.” —Matt Mitchell

FLO & Kaytranada: “The Mood”

FLO’s first non-remix 2025 drop finds the London trio joining forces with electro-house-R&B producer/DJ/songwriter powerhouse Kaytranada. “The Mood” follows 2024’s Access All Areas, with Kaytranada’s lush, low-end-heavy production elevating the group’s signature silky harmonies. The track’s groove wouldn’t hit as hard without his signature finesse (though it’s difficult for anything Kaytra touches not to sound good), and it makes for a steamy, mid-summer slowburn, with all the makings of a dancefloor come-on—the best kind of easy listening. But for all its seduction, the lyrics are unexpectedly cool-headed, declining rather than welcoming a late-night invite. Sometimes you’re just not DTF! But somehow, FLO and Kaytranada still manage to make that concept sound sexy in itself. “It’s not that I don’t wanna chill tonight / It’s not that I don’t wanna feel tonight / It’s just that I ain’t in a freaky vibe / It’s just that I ain’t in the mood tonight” channels the spirit of keeping someone on their toes, walking the line between intimacy and independence. —Cassidy Sollazzo

Flyte ft. Aimee Mann: “Alabaster”

You’d think a song about a clandestine end-times affair would lean big and bombastic, but Flyte and Aimee Mann understand something more unsettling: apocalypse is rarely that cinematic. On “Alabaster”, a standout from Flyte’s upcoming Between You and Me, the London duo and the LA legend weave a quiet disaster of their own, one whispered harmony at a time. The track drifts along on brutal fuzzed guitar and a trembling fault-line of rhythm, its chorus sighing: “It’s a natural disaster / And we can fix it after / Won’t you hold me, Alabaster?” Mann’s dry, intimate presence makes the fantasy feel lived-in—not two lovers saving the world, just two people clinging to each other while it burns, wishing desperately they had found each other at any other time. “Alabaster” is as much about the ruin as the romance, a slow, resigned waltz into collapse that feels all the more tender for it. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Jeff Tweedy: “Out in the Dark”

If you’ve ever wanted to feel productive in your entire life, maybe avoid hearing news of Jeff Tweedy—the Wilco frontman has always been terrifyingly prolific, but his newly announced triple album, Twilight Override, is just salt in the wound at this point. Don’t get me wrong, this is great news for the music world (and for me, as a member of it); I just wish I had his work ethic. On Twilight Override, Tweedy stares into what he calls a “bottomless basket of rock bottom,” and crucially, tries to overwhelm it right back—and with a whopping 30 song tracklist (four of which were released alongside the album announcement), I think he might just succeed. All the singles in this first batch are excellent, but it’s “Out in the Dark” that stood out to me most on first listen. Tweedy has always been a master of masking pessimism in brightness, and here he sets an existential shrug—”There is no point / Definitively / Where do we stop? / Where do we start?”—to breezy major chords and warm percussion, with only the occasional electronic gurgles in the background giving sound to the nostalgic melancholy beneath. The track’s nervous, circling progression and its empty-night lyrics (“no houses, no cars… out in the dark”) are classic Tweedy: quietly eerie but strangely comforting, a flickering torch in the stillness of a blackout. If Twilight Override is his way of pushing back against decline, then “Out in the Dark” is the sound of one man carrying his little spark through a starless night and refusing to let it go out. —Casey Epstein-Gross