Best New Songs (April 10, 2025)
Don't miss these great tracks.
Photo of Lifeguard by Grace Conrad
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.)
Florry: “First it was a movie, then it was a book”
The newest Florry single absolutely cooks. “First it was a movie, then it was a book” is a sentence-case dream of rollicking, country-fried rock gravitas. Francie Medosch and John Murray collide into each other, stretching two-ton riffs around organ, pedal steel, and homespun, jammy crescendos. Medosch sings about her life turning into a Hollywood picture that made her sad “‘cos I saw myself in everyone.” “How’d they make a movie like that?” she wails, her voice splitting in two. There’s a Holly Hunter mention in here, and there’s emptiness too. Caught someplace between the Stones’ honky-tonk crashouts, a migraine-addled Wilco, and Sonic Youth’s distorted debauchery, “First it was a movie, then it was a book” is a six-string car-crash heavy on the abandon. Florry become a paradox across seven minutes, twisting off the cliff like an avalanche in one ear yet skyscraping towards something far above sea level in the other. This is everything I want rock music to sound like in 2025. I think I’ll go watch Broadcast News today. —Matt Mitchell
Home Is Where: “migration patterns”
With a new album, Hunting Season, coming next month, Palm Coast emo quartet Home Is Where go fucking bananas on lead single “migration patterns,” a heavy, blistering anthem scored with notches of twang that’ll make your ancestors tap their feet. The song is “about grappling with a mundane destiny,” bandleader Bea MacDonald says, and the lyrics back that up, reckoning with a life unfurling beneath the boot of capitalism. “I’d never want to live forever,” she sings. “I’d still have to go to work.” In-between knocking, gashing riffs, animals crawl under the floorboards to die, bugs spill their guts across windshields. “I will go to follow them soon,” Bea declares, as a tuft of harmonica and pedal steel sweeps beneath her reddened wails and “migration patterns” bursts into view. —Matt Mitchell
Lifeguard: “It Will Get Worse”
Chicago trio Lifeguard—Asher Case, Isaac Lowenstein, and Kai Slater—will put out their debut album (Ripped and Torn) in June, and lead single “It Will Get Worse” has firmly cemented the arrival of a new musical vanguard in the city. Lifeguard have been together since pre-COVID, when they were teens transforming Chicago’s youth DIY scene. Their two previous EPs, Dressed in Trenches and Crowd Can Talk, quickly established them as torchbearers of a storied, multi-generational musical legacy. Inspired by Television and Dredd Foole, Ripped and Torn is renaissance post-punk with a twist of anthemic, post-Y2K bombast. Lead single “It Will Get Worse” ought to be everyone else’s wake-up moment. The song sounds like the Cleaners From Venus covering Pavement, as metallic, thrashing guitars vibrate through lo-fi, distorted hooks. And, truth be told, who wouldn’t want every song in existence to sound exactly like that? You better get hip to Lifeguard now; the moon is firmly in their sights. —Matt Mitchell
Lil Yachty & Veeze: “CAN’T BE CRETE BOY”
The Lil Yachty glow-up needs to be studied. Once upon a time, Yachty was all red braids and “One Night,” Sprite Cranberry ads and Everyday Struggle squabbles over mumble rap (baseless considering “Intro” on 2016’s Lil Boat is a straight lesson in bars), but that ship sailed nine years ago, and this is a different Lil Yachty. Now, he’s rapping over 5/4 beats (“A Cold Sunday”) and putting out electronic albums with James Blake (Bad Cameo), all while helming his own rap crew Concrete Boys. While not credited as a Concrete Boys song, Lil Yachty and Veeze just released “Can’t Be Crete Boy,” a speaker-shaker straight out of a 2010’s NYC radio freestyle. Ushered in by rattling 808s and a chopped, soulful vocal loop, the first half of “Can’t Be Crete Boy” plays out more like a cipher than a dedicated song—Veeze snaking through the production in his usual Detroit deadpan with casual, yet magnetic irreverence. Yachty takes a few shots at anyone filling out FAFSA (I took that personally) when the beat suddenly flips, rumbling along a darker kick pattern and a cabal of horns. The one-liners here are potent, sharp-eyed and nonchalantly cool with rhymes like, “My whole gang up / purple rain / no umbrella. / Glass pint slippin’ out the bottle / ooh, Cinderella.” The entire track is simply a mood piece—a vibe sketch and a flex so composed it sounds like anything but. —Gavyn Green
Man/Woman/Chainsaw: “Adam & Steve”
On “Adam & Steve,” London six-piece Man/Woman/Chainsaw trade their usual scorched-earth chaos for something gentler but just as affecting: a buzzy, melodic love song quietly tinged by the imminence of loss. It’s still got the band’s signature tension—sawtoothed guitars, eerie violin, grainy textures—but now they’re channeling it into longing instead of rage. Dual vocalists Billy Ward and Vera Leppänen pass the mic like a secret, their harmonies folding into one another with an ache that feels both theatrical and deeply personal. Strings swoop, a piano twinkles, and somewhere in the haze, a love story starts to slip away. The lyrics are plainspoken and punchy—“I’d be the Adam to your Steve / But now you’re going overseas”—but delivered with such wide-eyed sincerity that they land in the gut all the same. Upbeat and anthemic and downright bleeding with earnestness, “Adam & Steve” skews closer to conventional rock-pop than Man/Woman/Chainsaw’s typical fare, but loses none of their unique, off-kilter intimacy in the process. If this is their idea of a fairy tale, it’s one worth believing in. —Casey Epstein-Gross
Guys, this is not a drill: Stereolab are back, and on the brink of releasing their first album since 2010. (Cue the mandatory “Unfollow Me Now, This Is Gonna Be the Only Thing I Write About For The Next Week. I’ve Wanted This For Years Fuck. What The Fuck” reference). And leave it to the English/French art-pop group to turn existential dread into something that sounds like a cosmic daydream. “Aerial Troubles,” the band’s first new single in 15 (!!!) years, doesn’t so much announce itself as it glides in, all pillowy motorik groove and delicately fuzzed-out edges. Lætitia Sadier’s voice remains as calmly omniscient as ever, floating just above the mix a la a particularly benevolent satellite. But there’s a nervous energy rippling beneath the surface—something unstable twitching at the edges of the track’s pristine geometry. The lyrics address it point-blank, going full 2025 in their description of the modern zeitgeist of hopelessness: “The numbing is not working anymore / An unfillable hole / An insatiable state of consumption (systemic).” Rhythms loop and layer with mathematical precision, but despite the vacuum of despair alluded to in the lyrics, there’s no coldness in the sound, just warmth refracted through psych-rock circuitry. “Aerial Troubles” might gesture towards disconnection, but it’s tender enough to feel like a tether—between past and present, between thought and feeling, between the mechanical and the human. —Casey Epstein-Gross
The Convenience’s second album, Like Cartoon Vampires, arrives next Friday via Winspear, putting an end to the near four-year wait since their debut, Accelerator. In that time, Nick Corson and Duncan Troast veered from the glitzy funk-pop that first put them on the map and instead steered into a storm of avant noise-rock, post-punk and drone, making way for a batch of lead singles trodding entirely new and strange terrain. Since January, they’ve released “I Got Exactly What I Wanted,” “Dub Vultures” and “Opportunity,” and now they’re back with “Western Pepsi Cola Town.” The latest experimental offering is an itchy portion of avant-rock infected with themes of American decay, the duo dissecting cultural iconography and corrupt capitalism with a fine-pointed satirical scalpel. “A little western magic / Of dark persuasion / And when they make their promises / They’re promises they can deliver,” they sing, each line familiar yet eerily malevolent. The song swings between tenderness and disillusionment, dangling desire and peace overhead only for it to be cut by sections of unrelenting, angular guitars and post-punk rhythms. It’s a timely piece, for sure, reconstructing nostalgia into something cruel and corrupt as if viewing pop culture through a cracked side mirror. —Gavyn Green
Fans who got to see the Marías perform “Back to Me” last year during their stint opening for Billie Eilish had been waiting for the band to drop the track—and the single proves to be worth the wait. Their most recent LP, Submarine, was the Marías’ breakup album, with María Zardoya chronicling the dissolution of her relationship with the band’s drummer and producer Josh Conway, exposing the cracks in their longtime romance. But after finishing the record, Zardoya faced the emotional weight of knowing that her former flame was moving on, writing “Back to Me.” While penning the track, the symbolism of the submarine must have been on her mind, as the track sounds like being submerged in the water with hazy synths and guitar tones that mimic ocean sounds. With the promise of building “a house for us down across the sea,” Zardoya’s voice comes through as a seductive siren, wanting to pull Conway back in. —Tatiana Tenreyro
Cincinnati post-rock quartet Touchdown Jesus’s newly released sophomore EP, It’s All Feast Or Famine, opens like an apocalyptic horror movie with “I Love My Wife”: The first thing you hear is this nails-on-chalkboard glissando that abruptly lurches towards a headbanging thrash of militaristic percussion, screaming saxophone, and sludgy electric guitars. The prelude sounds like the musical precursor to an announcement that the end is nigh—but it isn’t. “When I get home, you’re the first I see! Come around for a kiss on the cheek!” co-lead vocalist Miller Kaye exclaims on the first verse in a manic, Isaac Brock-like sprechgesang. He’s no doomsday prophet—just a guy that’s really, really into his wife. The musical arrangement bears an erratic temper and a cocaine-shot heartbeat, but “I Love My Wife” lives up to its name as a refreshingly straightforward, and surprisingly sweet, love song (among the most romantic lines: “My evening commute ain’t got nothing on a face like yours!” It’s downright poetic, in a distinctly 21st-century sort of way). The ode isn’t exactly tender, but there’s no question of its sincerity: Kaye roars the titular words like they’re his last, pelting them over the stomping, punk-ish rhythm (laid down with his bandmates Ethan Kimberly, Jack DePrato, and Lee Sullivan) like nuclear bombs. You’ll be hard-pressed to come by a wife-guy anthem more fervent than this—nor one that rocks even half as hard. —Anna Pichler
On the title track of his acclaimed third album, Critterland (which landed at #39 on our year-end