Best New Songs (April 17, 2025)
Don't miss these great new tracks.
Photo of Billie Marten by Frances Carter
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.)
Adrianne Lenker: “happiness”
My biggest regret of 2024 was not seeing Adrianne Lenker live on her Bright Future Tour. Whether it was an issue of time, money, or something else entirely, it’s only now that I’m fully grasping how special of a moment I missed—and the FOMO is unbearable. “happiness” is the first single off Lenker’s upcoming Live at Revolution Hall album, set for release April 24. It’s one of a colossal 43 tracks on the record, which was recorded over three nights along the Bright Future Tour, yet it finds its own special corner within Lenker’s discography. While the new album features live takes of both solo material and songs from her band Big Thief, “happiness” has no studio counterpart. It’s an unearthed, previously unreleased gem—unvarnished and haunting in its wisdom. The song is stripped down to the essentials, a classic Lenker combo of hushed acoustic guitar and trembling lyrics. She’s suspended between the seasons, moving between fall, winter, and the clover of spring, ending on a note of hope, growth, and, aptly, happiness. In their review of Bright Future last year, Eric Bennett wrote, “[Lenker is] able to imbue even our most mundane feelings and experiences with a renewed allure just by taking them seriously. Sometimes, it feels like she’s creating these beautiful, lived-in worlds that exist only while the song is playing. The beautiful truth of it, though, is that the only magical world Adrianne Lenker writes about is the one we all live in together.” Their words describe this latest cut perfectly—sacred, yet applicable to all— imperfect, yet softly enchanting. At the very least, Live at Revolution Hall will be a consolation for what I missed on tour, but I won’t make the same mistake twice. —Gavyn Green
Asher White: “Kratom Headache Girls Night”
In the past year, I’ve gone from not having heard of Asher White to hearing her name everywhere. When an emerging artist puts out a critically acclaimed record like White’s Home Constellation Study and generates tons of buzz, you wonder whether they’ll be able to keep the momentum going with their new releases. Thankfully, White delivers with her single “Kratom Headache Girls Night.” It’s a bright, summery ode to friendship that instantly lifts your spirits. With the kaleidoscope of glockenspiel, digital mellotron, beads and rice shakers, and even samples of YouTube videos, White creates a genre-defying sound that sparks the perfect symphony. After listening, I found myself repeatedly returning to it, craving more. It’s only mid-April but it’s a strong contender for the indie song of the summer. —Tatiana Tenreyro
Billie Marten: “Leap Year”
The latest track from Billie Marten’s fifth album, Dog Eared, is the UK singer-songwriter at her all-time best. Arriving in the wake of the very good “Feeling” and the even better “Crown,” “Leap Year” is, by Marten’s own admission, the first fictional love song she’s ever penned. She turns her focus towards a couple who can only see each other every four years, on February 29th. It’s a unique and heartbreaking circumstance, built upon a generous consideration for what barriers of love can’t be broken. On the track, Marten balances traditional folk structure and abstract poetry: “I could’ve loved you, but the day’s already gone. I could’ve held you, but the sun’s already shone” fades into “I carve the time away in my ivory hall, I sing my songs and I climb the walls. The clock is ticking murder at me now, a solitude, insufferable.” I’m ready to make an argument for the two-minute guitar solo from Sam Evian in “Leap Year”’s coda being the best musical moment of 2025 thus far. The language in his instrument is one we’d be lucky to learn. —Matt Mitchell
Folk Bitch Trio: “The Actor”
The Naarm-based, Jagjaguwar-signed Folk Bitch Trio were called “boygenius if it was from the ‘40s” by Phoebe Bridgers, but the combo of Gracie Sinclair, Jeanie Pilkington, and Heide Peverelle aren’t just some retro get-up. Formed pre-COVID and finally stretching their legs, the band are the latest treasure in a long ancestry of folk ministers. Last August, they released “God’s a Different Sword,” a song so astral that Sinclair, Pilkington, and Peverelle’s humming sounds like pedal steel. But on the band’s new single “The Actor,” they channel the likes of First Aid Kit and the Wild Reeds via a three-part harmony and the flowery yet tactile acoustic arrangement that gambols with enchanting, heart-heavy storytelling. “Elastic lover, you’re holding me so tight, just like a savior until it doesn’t feel too right,” Folk Bitch Trio sing, through the woven entanglement of sex and doubt. Stiching afternoon fucks, one-woman shows, and a man crying in virtue into a balm, Folk Bitch Trio flourish sentimentally. —Matt Mitchell
Fontaines D.C.: “Before You I Just Forget”
Whoever said to quit while you’re ahead has surely never met Fontaines D.C. Despite their latest release, 2024’s Romance, arriving to widespread critical acclaim—it even ranked #13 on our top albums of the year list—the Irish post-punk outfit simply wasn’t content to let even their best sleeping dogs lie. Earlier this week they released a deluxe-edition of Romance, complete with a brand new track, the brooding, industrial “Before You I Just Forget,” which intentionally chugs along like the dry, subconscious repetition of a mantra you have to force yourself to believe. The sense of disconnect pervading modern life is made manifest, Grian Chatten’s repeated drawls of “Decapitate the shine, ‘cause people like that / Pretending I’m fine, ‘cause people like that” punctuating the chorus again and again. The five-piece makes the detachment and monotony of 2025 feel wholly visceral, an evident vulnerability and desperation seeping through the hypnotizing, gauzy production and deliberate, even-keeled bassline—it feels manic but faded, the brightness of chaos eroded by exhaustion. But that’s not to say the song itself is monotonous; new details weave into the sonic tapestry throughout, but rather than feeling like jarring shifts, they effortlessly merge into the soundscape already there. Remnants of sweetness linger, peeking through the jaded atmosphere. The song flirts with amnesia, emotional and otherwise—“I used to think that I could take all I could get,” Chatten sings at the end of the first verse, “But I must admit now that before you / I just forget.” By the track’s conclusion, swelling with warped strings that bleed into the mix like watercolors, something becomes evident: this is a love song—or, rather, the echo of one, heard long after the light’s gone out. —Casey Epstein-Gross
Under the 
We’ve been waiting a long time for this one. Last February, Lana Del Rey announced that she’d follow up her acclaimed 2023 effort, Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd, with a country music album. Originally called Lasso and due out last fall, but now titled The Right Person Will Stay and due out in May, Del Rey announced last Friday that we’ll have to wait even longer for the album (which will have undergone another name change by the time it’s out), but, thankfully, she also dropped a new “Henry, come on”—first teased last year—to tide us over while we itch for more. While awash with Lana’s distinctive, film noir-befitting glamor, there’s also a real lived-in feel to the musical arrangement. Its western trimmings are spare—a hand-plucked acoustic melody preludes our cowgirl crooner’s emergence; burnt Southern rock electric guitar bends and wafts of pedal steel drift through the ethereal, string-forward chorus—but Del Rey’s language is classic country: “Last call / Hey, y’all / Hang his hat up on the wall,” she exhales in a breathy falsetto on what might be among the catchiest and most quotable choruses of the year so far. “Tell him that his cowgirl is gone / Go on and giddy up.” A chronicle of tragic divine, enamored intervention told through memories of soft leather and blue jeans, untethered troubadours and a ne’er-to-be mother-in-law, “Henry, come on” affirms that Del Rey remains among pop music’s strongest contemporary surveyors of American iconography, blowing off the dust of tried-and-true tropes to reveal unexpected divinity beneath their familiar surfaces. I listen to the sunset ballad, and I want to drape myself in white lace; slip into my scuffed-up, velvet-lined cowgirl boots; and coalesce with the ghosts of lost loves lingering in the depths of my weary soul. Get yourself a cowboy and get your heart broken; Southern Gothic Summer is impending. —Anna Pichler
The fourth single from New York singer-songwriter (and member of Dirty Projectors and Coco) Maia Friedman’s forthcoming album, Goodbye Long Winter Shadow, “In A Dream It Could Happen” clocks in at less than two minutes, but every second of the baroque ode’s lush arrangement insists upon luxuriation. While writing the song’s lyrics, Friedman intended for the imagery “to sweep you away into an otherworldly voyage,” and she certainly succeeds at that, capturing the magic of a romantic escapade with a cosmic eye: “No weight to burden our minds / We float away with our limbs entwined,” she sings, her sublime self-harmonies uplifted by fluttering woodwinds and delicate strings. “Our car is pulled like on a conveyor / The highway flows toward rings of Saturn.” It’s nearly impossible not to float away with Friedman as she delivers the twilit serenade—an enchanting chanteuse, her croon is timeless and time-stopping. —Anna Pichler
There’s a dusky elegance to “The Culprit,” the new acoustic and string-heavy single from California singer-songwriter Sedona; it doesn’t arrive so much as it glides in, like the late afternoon sun slipping through gauze curtains. A softly flickering b-side to the gleaming “Every Once In A While,” this track leans inward, full of breath and tension, like a confessional stretched out across intertwining guitars and a voice that feels both featherlight and ironclad. “Forgetting all my lighters at the bar / But did I leave them last night in your car?,” Sedona sings, hushed and earnest. “High speeds chasing what we lost / Hands tied but even preachers break the laws.” “The Culprit” feels like it was born of that same instinct: to chase the tug in your ribs when something is off, to translate intuition into melody. It’s less a song about heartbreak than it is about the quiet study of instinct in the aftermath: what you knew, what you ignored, what you carry. The song gently swings between folk-rock restraint and soft electric undercurrent as Sedona invites you into her own mirage—half Brooklyn streetlamp, half Chatsworth hilltop—and hands you a compass carved out of feeling. In her universe, the gut is gospel, and the softest truths echo the loudest. —Casey Epstein-Gross
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