Best New Songs (August 28, 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.)

Amanda Shires: “Piece of Mind”

There are few genres more tailor-made for angry breakup songs than woman-led country rock (“Before He Cheats,” anyone?), so when the news broke last year that Amanda Shires’ 12-year marriage to Jason Isbell had come to an end, it was clear we were going to be in for a doozy of a post-divorce record. And based on “Piece of Mind”—the video for which opens on Shires dressed to kill in a rose-colored silk slip as she growls, “If you think I could ever hate you, you’re wrong / But that was a real fucked up way to leave”—it seems that estimation was not at all far off. But despite the anger in Shires’ crisp, rasping vocals, this is no song about keying cars or slashing tires. On the contrary, it’s a refreshingly well-measured breakup anthem that’s less about sending a house up in flames than chronicling its lonely aftermath and trying to build something from the ashes. “Got a new dining room table / Re-painted the walls, got rid of any evidence / That you were ever here,” Shires sings, rapidly, atop grinding guitar. “Now I can finally eat and breathe again.” Yet the song never stifles its fury in favor of moving on, either; that anger is very much intact, but kept at a simmer, the fire of it licking at the seams. You can’t heal from rage alone, nor can you heal by repressing it. After all, the moment you watch your fist break the glass of your ex’s headlights has got to be satisfying. But then comes the moment after—the moment ”Before He Cheats” ends, and you’re left standing in all that shattered glass, dreading the return to your newly empty home. That’s where “Piece of Mind” comes in: to accompany you as you pick up the pieces. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Bright Eyes ft. Hurray for the Riff Raff: “Dyslexic Palindrome”

Finding out that Bright Eyes and Hurray for the Riff Raff—two bands I’ve loved for over a decade now—have teamed up in the former’s upcoming EP Kids Table is one of the best surprises of the week for me. It was an even better discovery that it’s the best track Bright Eyes has put out since their 2020 album, Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was. From the moment “Dyslexic Palindrome” opens with dreamy pedal steel, you’re enthralled. Conor Oberst and Alynda Segarra‘s vocals blend stunningly together for a duet that carries the duality of melancholy and beauty of I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. Considering how Bright Eyes’ other single, “1st World Blues,” for Kids Table is a ska-inspired track (essentially the polar opposite sound of “Dyslexic Palindrome”), this makes me even more excited to see what the rest of the EP sounds like. —Tatiana Tenreyro

Chat Pile & Hayden Pedigo: “Radioactive Dreams”

After months of teasing a mysterious collab album with Chat Pile, Hayden Pedigo and the noise-doctors have finally let us in on it all the way. In the Earth Again will be out, fittingly, on Halloween, and it finds two Oklahoma-based artists relishing each other’s company—almost to a scary degree. On paper, Chat Pile’s rancid, pressure-cooker sound and Pedigo’s fingerstyle guitar playing don’t gel so immediately. In practice, their sojourn on “Radioactive Dreams” is one of the most moving, environmental blends I’ve heard all year. Perhaps I’m biased, because I am a longtime enjoyer of Pedigo’s work, but I have never been quite sold on Chat Pile’s music, so maybe that will even out my expectations on In the Earth Again as a whole. But, “Radioactive Dreams,” which I hope is inspired by Albert Pyun’s 1985 film of the same name, sounds like a band and a picker at the top of their respective games. The lush prism of Pedigo’s phrases often skyscrape into Chat Pile’s distinctively woozy and harsh equations of atonal, crunch-rock. It’s sobering how paranormal the song gets, as electric guitar phrases provide brief, gentle shelter amidst the doomy tar. —Matt Mitchell

Die Spitz: “Punishers”

If you told me “Punishrs” was a deep-cut from the mid-’90s Olympia, WA scene, I wouldn’t question it. Die Spitz’s latest single rips with Cobain-esque guitar riffs, cymbal-splintering breaks reminiscent of Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff, and faraway, indifferent vocals akin to Babes In Toyland’s Kat Bjelland. The Austin quartet leans hard into its influences on the third track from their forthcoming debut album, fusing the rawest edges of punk with a psychedelic haze. That foundation of reverence collides with blistering emotion on “Punishers,” a song that channels the volatility of toxic relationships into combustion. The opening verses bristle with contradiction: “Sky is clear, but I still hear the sound of rain / Talk is cheap, but I’ll keep spending all my money.” It’s the kind of track you can imagine spinning into a distorted free-fall in a live setting, Eleanor Livingston swinging from the rafters as the instrumentation spirals out with equal force. Flanging guitars lay a queasy foundation before being swallowed by blown-out riffs and thick basslines. Pulsing echoes crawl through your chest until the mantra-like repetition of “I know” pushes the song to the brink. By the time the chorus finally erupts, it’s nothing but feedback and the pure rush of internal anarchy. —Cassidy Sollazzo

Elias Rønnenfelt: “USA Baby”

It’s shaping up to be a massive year for Iceage frontman Elias Rønnenfelt. From his collaborations with Dean Blunt and Yung Lean, to his single from May, “Carry-On Bag,” we’re seeing a new side of him, one that has the same reverence for SoundCloud rap and experimental music as he does for the country sound he explored in last year’s debut solo album, Heavy Glory. His latest single, a preview of his upcoming sophomore solo album, Speak Daggers, feels like a continuation of lucre, his collaborative LP with Blunt. Over a hypnotic beat heavy on auxiliary percussion, Rønnenfelt comments on the country’s political state, explicitly calling out how his “baby” is being screwed over: “Oh my baby’s known better days / They cut her off, that’s how they play / Oh my baby she doesn’t care / In the USA they rip and tear / Hold for famine, gotta get a grip on my soul / There I’ll open damn near every open-able hole.” —Tatiana Tenreyro