Best New Songs (April 24, 2025)
Don't miss these great new tracks.
Photo of Greg Freeman by Steve Gullick
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: “Headphones On”
There’s nothing wrong with paying tribute to a good cigarette. In fact, I encourage it wholeheartedly. Two new pop songs this week do exactly that—Addison Rae’s “Headphones On” and Lorde’s “What Was That”—but it’s Rae’s latest that’s captured my heart. Co-written with Luka Closer and Elvira Anderfjärd, “Headphones On” is the fourth single from Rae’s upcoming debut album, Addison, and it keeps her streak of great pop hardware. “Diet Pepsi” was a life-affirming, say-you-love-me pop classic, while “Aquamarine” and “High Fashion” paid dividends to the Addison faithful who’ve been watching her cook since her AR days. A sugary, Y2K gloss burns at the heart of “Headphones On” but song is a shockingly full of hurt, as Rae reckons with her parents’ divorce (“Wish my mom and dad could’ve been in love, guess some things aren’t meant to last forever”) and imposter syndrome (“I compare my life to the new it girl, jealousy’s a riptide, it pulls me under”) without plodding in heavy-handed nostalgia. “Headphones On” should be in the conversation for Song of the Summer; the “You can’t fix what has already been broken, you just have to surrender to the moment” pre-chorus allows Rae’s R&B and electropop fascinations to perfectly collide. Her TikTok fame has proved fully illusory. This is well-done Madonna worship for the doom-scrolling generation. —Matt Mitchell
Greg Freeman: “Point and Shoot”
If you’re not yet familiar with Greg Freeman, it’s well past time to change that. The Vermont rocker released his debut album, I Looked Out, in 2022 to little fanfare, but it’s gained a nice bit of traction since then (last year, we included it on our list of the top 25 best debut albums of the 2020s so far). Freeman’s oblique, incisive lyricism, rib-cracking howl, and legendary electric guitar freakouts paint the numbers of his bummed-out road-trip ballads. Distortion-drenched barn-burners twist with divinity, and orchestral emotional expurgations are viscerally felt and full of impenetrable poetry worthy of intense scholarship. It’s truly a privilege to be witnessing Freeman’s newest era unfold in real time. This week, he announced his sophomore effort, Burnover (due August 22), and unveiled its lead single, “Point and Shoot.” The song stops the Earth in its orbit from the jump with insistent stabs of electric guitar framing Freeman’s characteristically esoteric, imagistic opening announcement (“Shot down in the shade of cardboard canyon / They cut the scene and soaked blood on the camera man”). Horns and drums lock into a melodic groove that could’ve been taken from Pavement’s pages. Relative to Freeman’s earlier compositions, the arrangement is deliciously pop-forward until it isn’t. After a blazing musical interlude colored with yowling harmonica and a piano run befitting for a honky-tonk, the instrumentation gradually recedes until it’s just Freeman looking you straight in the eye. From start to finish, “Point and Shoot” is a multi-movement musical narrative boasting some of Freeman’s most unforgettable turns of phrase to date—the words “Does passion feel stupid when there’s nothing left of me” immediately and indelibly carve themselves into the heart, like an ancient testament etching into stone. —Anna Pichler
HAIM: “Down to be wrong”
The build-up to HAIM’s Women In Music Pt. III follow-up has been a masterclass, as the sisters have been recreating infamous paparazzi photos (the latest being a shot of Jared Leto and Scarlett Johansson macking on an LA sidewalk in 2004) and dropping some of their best singles in years. “Relationships” still rummages through me a month after its release, and “Everybody’s trying to figure me out” is reliably fun upon every re-listen. But now that I quit is due out June 20 via Columbia, the band’s newest offering “Down to be wrong” is immediately great. It’s very Sheryl Crow-coded, but who says no to that? The melody is distinctly Top 40 down-tempo, vividly so in the afterglow of “Relationships,” and served equally well by Danielle’s lead vocal and co-production with Rostam Batmanglij, which gets Y2K-anthemic as she and her bandmates cut a hot country riff into chanting pop resilience. —Matt Mitchell
Lana Del Rey: “Bluebird”
If anyone can find the silver lining in moments of despair through songwriting, it’s Lana Del Rey. Following last week’s release of “Henry, come on”—the lead single from her forthcoming, still-untitled country album (which has already undergone two title changes)—Del Rey has gifted us another excellent track. While “Henry, come on” leaned into classic Lana territory with a country twist—featuring a confrontation with a former lover, nods to blue jeans, and her trademark wistful coos—“Bluebird” allows her voice to take the spotlight. Set against a tender, acoustic guitar-led melody, accented with harmonica, piano, and soaring synths, Del Rey pleads with the titular bird not to share her fate, urging it to “fly away for the both of us.” Much of Del Rey’s best songwriting is rooted in her real experiences, leaving fans breadcrumbs of her elusive personal life. “Bluebird” is no exception. On the day of the song’s release, she revealed on Instagram that she had written it “a long time ago,” inspired by a fateful moment. She was getting ready to reconnect with an old flame when a bird crashed into her bedroom window. To her, it was a sign—one that urged her to break free from the toxic cycle of that doomed romance. With two stunning singles back to back, Lana’s next record is shaping up to be as promising as her previous, critically-acclaimed LP, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. —Tatiana Tenreyro
Matt Berninger ft. Hand Habits: “Breaking into Acting”
The National’s Matt Berninger has always seemed most at home in the margins—between lines, between selves, between knowing and not knowing. From a career in advertising to editing fiction for The New Yorker to founding the beloved indie-rock group the National, Berninger has never been rooted in a single notion of identity, something that was surely only exacerbated after being launched into the role of a lifetime: critically acclaimed rockstar. Now, on “Breaking Into Acting,” the second single from his upcoming solo album Get Sunk (following the phenomenal, more rollicking “Bonnet of Pins”), he invites Meg Duffy of Hand Habits into the frame, and the result is a strangely tender, quietly devastating duet about the artifice of feeling. It’s not a dramatic song, but it is full of drama—worn lightly, like a thrifted coat that still smells like someone else. “Your mouth is always full of blood packets / You’re breaking into acting,” they sing, not accusing so much as noting. There’s something in that delivery, half-amused and half-exhausted, that hints at a deeper discomfort—the way we all, at some point, end up performing sincerity just to get through the day. Duffy’s voice sidles up next to his without ceremony, adding weight by staying light, the track lingering in a soft hum long after its quiet conclusion. This isn’t a song about fame—it’s about the little betrayals required just to be seen. And Berninger, who has long made a career out of the beauty of performing vulnerability in plain view, might understand that more than anyone. —Casey Epstein-Gross
You know how some music always fits the vibe no matter the time or place? Those songs that work equally at a house party, picking up groceries, or watching rain fall outside your window, yet still have you nodding along every time? This is the ongoing speciality of record label 100% Electronica: modern, fashionable tunes that can mingle regardless of where they are. Neggy Gemmy (real name Lindsey French and fka Negative Gemini) co-founded the label alongside George Clanton in 2015, and they now host a range of EM stars as well as frequent collaborator TV Girl. Adding to 100% Electronica’s vibrant vaporwave discography comes “Mysterious Girl,” the first look at Neggy Gemmy’s new album, She Comes From Nowhere, which is due out sometime in June. “Mysterious Girl” is a bedazzled piece of house-adjacent electro-pop adorned with all the accouterments it can carry. Rubbery basslines, cloudy flute loops, and glittering arps give the track its signature Gemmy sparkle as her vocals allure from afar, “She turns around / But when she looks, its right through you / She’s wearing Mary Janes / She’s always on the avenue / Mysterious girl.” —Gavyn Green
There’s a particular kind of reverence among musicians that doesn’t always translate to press cycles or playlists. It’s quieter, more instinctive; less about clout, more about a kind of shared fluency. That’s what comes through on Snail Mail’s new cover of “Two Legs,” a song by This Is Lorelei’s Nate Amos. The original version is twitchy, endearing, and faintly self-sabotaging: part electro-folk, part mid-2000s college-radio static, like a folk song filtered through a broken laptop fan. Lindsey Jordan, instead of ironing it out, leans into the song’s nervous system. She’s always had a gift for sounding slightly inconvenienced by her own emotions, and on “Two Legs” she turns that skill into something closer to alchemy. Her voice—cool, precise, and just a little bruised around the edges—slips into the song like it’s always lived there. She pulls the melody into focus without sanding down its strangeness, a sort of reverse-remastering that retains the feel of the original while adding Jordan’s own personality to the mix. Amos has said that Jordan was the first person he thought of when the idea of a deluxe edition came up, and you can hear why. They’re operating on similar frequencies: allergic to over-polish, fluent in the performance of awkwardness, and devastating when they decide to commit to a melody—and commit they do. —Casey Epstein-Gross
Wisp debuted “Get back to me” a few weeks back during her first-ever Coachella performance, and I’ve been impatiently waiting for the song to officially release since. Thankfully, that wait took barely a week, and the track finds Natalie Lu stretching the boundaries of her go-to quiet-loud dynamics, whispering over orbits of guitars bathed in chorus and reverb. The sonics drown in lingering vocal reflections until the drums finally break their taut groove and explode in the final breath of the song. “Get back to me” is a much slower burn compared to many of Lu’s previous tracks, but it’s that weightless, unwavering pulse that sets it apart, both more streamlined in execution and grander in narrative. Here, Lu is longing over a faltering connection. She’s returning to the chaos out of comfort and habit—themes only intensified by the walls of distortion around her. It’s still hard to believe that less than two years ago Wisp released their debut single, and now she’s standing next to 2hollis at Coachella. It’s a meteoric rise, no doubt, but at least I’m not alone in my weakness for a good shoegaze track. —Gavyn Green