Best New Songs (April 3, 2025)
Don't miss these great tracks.
Photo of Dylan Earl by Justin Cook
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.)
Bruce Springsteen: “Rain in the River”
Perhaps the greatest antidote to any indications of recession, Bruce Springsteen’s timelessness will grace us aplenty in 2025. The Boss has announced his plans to release Tracks II, an 83-song box set of unheard music recorded between 1983 and 2018. We’re going to get about seven albums’ worth of unreleased material, including a batch of lo-fi garage sessions recorded between Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. There’s gonna be a soundtrack for a movie that never got made, a collection of songs from the “Streets of Philadelphia” sessions, and a country record called Somewhere North of Nashville, among other unearthed artifacts. Needless to say, us Springsteen faithful are going to fall right into a spoil of riches in June. His new song is “Rain in the River,” which he made with the E Street Band for the lost album Perfect World 30 years ago, and, my goodness, does it sound brilliantly Bruce. The band sounds potent and in-sync, a special balance so rarely found on such a stadium-sized recording, and a revelation, considering their absence on most of Springsteen’s official releases from the ‘90s. “I often read about myself in the ’90s as having some lost period or something,” the Boss said in a press statement. “And really, I was working the whole time.” “Rain in the River,” a song as new at it is old, makes good on that confirmation. —Matt Mitchell
Car Seat Headrest: “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)”
How does a band follow up an 11-minute lead single? Well, if you’re Car Seat Headrest, an eight-minute single is a pretty good second act. The older I get, the more faithful I am to Will Toledo’s earliest work, like the sprawling efforts of “Boxing Day,” “Souls,” and “I Want You to Know That I’m Awake/I Hope That You’re Asleep.” In the six years after How to Leave Town, Toledo and his band retreated from those epic, skyscraping rock operettas. For their new album The Scholars, they’re not just returning to form, they’re blowing the form to smithereens. Toledo, ever one of our most ambitious and relatable songwriters, has fixed his gaze onto that of a conceptual tempest, forging a “rock opera” of sorts about a fictional college campus called Parnassus University. Each song on The Scholars will focus on a different student or staff member, and new single “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)” is about Beolco, a student “deeply fond of both the college and the Scop (a famed playwright), believing himself to be spiritually connected or reincarnated from the playwright.” As the band explains: “He yearns for confirmation of this secret belief.” The song sounds like the re-recordings of Twin Fantasy colliding head-on with the polarizing Making a Door Less Open. Toledo’s singing is excellent on this one, especially his interstitial coos and power-ballad-esque, Russell Mael-summoning vocal runs. The sonics are sweeping but not as chaotic as they were on “Gethsemane” (though they do interpolate the “And the waves roll on, and they carry it all away” lyric into “CCF”), as Car Seat Headrest aim for a more conventional rock pinnacle. As Beolco searches for confirmation on “CCF,” Toledo and his band reincarnate into a brighter, more complex version of themselves. —Matt Mitchell
Dylan Earl: “High on Ouachita”
I hold a lot of opinions, but few feel closer to fact than this one: Dylan Earl’s songwriting makes America a safer place. From his mom’s ‘89 Econoline to the shuffles of a line-dancing bar in South Austin, Texas, Earl has delivered his anti-fascist, pro-misconception country music to the hungry, happy, hopeless, and hopeful. His last album, I Saw the Arkansas, was my favorite country record from that year, and the one he’s gearing up to release in 2025 will surely be at the top of my list again. “High on Ouachita,” a honky tonk-hued rabble-rouser recorded in a snowstorm, arrives with a heart on every sleeve, as the Fayetteville troubadour sings sweetly about the mountain range in his backyard, one that touches Arkansas and Oklahoma. Meredith Kimbrough and the great Jude Brothers sing harmonies, while a band of Hamilton Belk, Chris Wood, Dick Darden, Lee Zodrow, and Grady Philip Drugg fall around Earl’s verses. “I’m used to livin’ on the edge of decisions,” he sings out. “I’m pretty good in poor conditions, where I don’t ever have to ask permission to be.” “High on Ouachita” is a blissed-out, levee-breaking, mountain-screaming afternoon ready to be wasted. Let Earl’s words be your compass: “The further I drift, the more frequent I dream.” I think we could all use a slice of that. —Matt Mitchell
Jack Van Cleaf: “Using You”
Admittedly, Nashvillian singer-songwriter Jack Van Cleaf hasn’t been on my radar for long, but the singles he’s released over the last few months in advance of his forthcoming sophomore album, JVC, have made lasting impressions. Like Zach Bryan (with whom he duetted on a re-recording of Van Cleaf’s 2022 release “Rattlesnake”), Van Cleaf is a master of crafting no-frills, Americana-filtered pop earworms that are radio-friendly but filled to the brim with big, undiluted emotions. Case in point: his new single “Using You,” a lovelorn honky-tonk whose playful shimmy undercuts the brutal, bruising honesty of Van Cleaf’s lyrics. You’ll be hard-pressed to come by an opening couplet as squirm-inducing as “Give me the hard drugs / You never think you’ll be a junkie ’til you are one.” The love-as-a-drug analogy has become so hackneyed in pop music, you’d think the cure for a broken heart is something as commonplace as cough medicine. Van Cleaf’s story comes without shame, as his narrator begs on his knees for something far more potent than anything you could purchase over the counter: “C’mon, baby, you can be the lighter to my spoon,” he croons in a winking sing-song cadence, the cracks in his twangy warble revealing a more feverish desperation. The musical and lyrical dichotomy is as humorous as it is unsettling; the whole package is refreshingly sincere and utterly irresistible. —Anna Pichler
Lily Seabird: “Arrow”
Throughout her watershed third album, Trash Mountain, Lily Seabird untangles all her knotty feelings about the ephemerality of everything, from the land around her to life itself. On “Arrow,” Seabird acknowledges the ultimate transience of love (“I don’t wanna go, but I know by now / The best things never stay”), but fights tooth and nail to hold onto it, nevertheless: “Stay, please, stay,” she implores on the explosive final chorus, her voice catching on desperation as a full-band crescendo holds together her fraying yowl. This devastating, slow-burn, alt-country ballad features some of Seabird’s most incisive and intensely imagistic lyrics to-date—lines like “I gave myself this black eye / Loving you didn’t make me do that” and “There exists this fine line / On either side of it, pain and beauty” lodge into your skin like bits of glass—and marks one of her most poignant vocal performances. Her twangy, jagged whine cuts straight to the core, an undeniable force that’s endlessly evocative: tragic yet self-assured, blood-curdling and beautiful, resounding with hard-earned wisdom and urgency. —Anna Pichler
Little Simz: “Free”
It’s a special level of rap when you can take the lyrics, omit the music, and be left with just a beautiful piece of writing. Furthermore, it takes a special caliber of rapper to construct these phrases and rhyme schemes into reflections of human emotion that are both digestible and entertaining for audiences. I think of generational talents like Black Thought, Rakim, Ms. Lauryn Hill and, in recent years, Little Simz. The London rapper has more than earned her place in any “best lyricists” conversation, repeatedly proving why she is one of the most compelling voices contributing to modern hip-hop. Since her 2021 record Sometimes I Might Be Introvert won both the Mercury Prize and a BRIT Award, Simz hasn’t had to prove anything, but she has continued to air her voice, calling out the whole of the music industry on 2022’s NO THANK YOU for its hypocrisy, greed, and inequality. Now, she’s readying her sixth LP, Lotus (due out May 9), with the new single “Free.”
Back in January, I shouted out “Who Laughs Last,” Lord Huron’s surprise team-up with actor Kristen Stewart and the band’s first new single in over two years. I wrote about how the song played like a callback to their 2018 album Vide Noir, even referring to “Who Laughs Last” as an unofficial “Ancient Names (Part III)” for its potent, fast-paced atmosphere. I was delighted that Ben Schneider was once again embracing his darker side—distorted vocal production and all—so when “Nothing I Need” came out last Friday, I was fully prepared for another ripping outtake. In a great bit of irony though, “Nothing I Need” was a left turn in every possible sense. Where I expected a driving drum beat, I was met with a relaxed, locomotive groove of acoustic riffs and banjo plucks. But I wasn’t disappointed, just momentarily taken aback. In fact, “Nothing I Need” grounded me in why I’ve loved Lord Huron since the days of Lonesome Dreams (2012) and Strange Trails (2015): It has that ineffable Lord Huron ghostliness; Schneider’s voice floats above gentle beds of glassy guitars and calm, reverberating bass, singing, “I fell in deep when you fell out of love with me / Now I got everything I want / And I got nothing that I need.” His lyrics are classic Lord Huron—another tale of a rejected drifter whose love slips through the cracks of time. I can just see Schneider trying to chase shadows in the dead of night, meandering down a misty street or gracefully falling through the empty cosmos—cinematic and effortlessly cool in every note and moment. —Gavyn Green
On the doorstep of summer, Miley Cyrus will release her new, The Wall– and Mandy-inspired (yes, that Nicolas Cage film) visual album Something Beautiful. This week, she unveiled the title track and “Prelude,” the latter being this droney, spoken-word introduction to a new era. But “Something Beautiful” is pretty striking, at least considering that Miley’s last big fuss was “Flowers,” the Grammy-winning, bubble-funk pop single that spent eight weeks at #1 in 2023. Considering that Miley has made her bed in country, rock, pop, and R&B, this turn towards a harsher, operatic sound feels properly in her wheelhouse of self-reinvention. The personnel list for this track is pretty bonkers too, as it pulls names out of the room where Miley’s collaboration with Beyoncé, “II MOST WANTED,” was made—featuring production from Shawn Everett and Michael Pollack, the War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel on guitar, Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado on keys, producer Kenny Segal on Omnichord, and Landlady’s Adam Schatz on saxophone. What?? “Something Beautiful” begins familiarly, with Miley coiling herself around the microphone like Amy, only for the soundscape to erupt into this massive, angular blast of distortion and thrash of sax. Miley’s croon warps into total drama; parts of her vocal performance remind me of Beth Gibbons running loose on an old Portishead joint, while other parts sound like a pop star doing Trent Reznor cosplay. Luckily, both parts sound pretty great here. —Matt Mitchell
I’m gonna be real with you all: I could listen to this song for the rest of my life. Before I check into the Hotel Paradiso, the titular fictional resort in Moon Mullins’ upcoming solo album, I’m gonna stay in “Sandpearl” for a while. The song, the follow-up single to Mullins’ equally great “Lobby Music,” dares to enchant with its dapper, string-wielding, cowboy-calling, out-of-time fantasy. And who better to call upon for such a delightfully heroic and sun-dappled soundtrack than Molly Lewis, the Australian whistler whose debut album On the Lips was so good it landed on our year-end list in 2024, alongside the likes of Kim Deal, Friko, and English Teacher? Lewis’ talents are apt for the very same noir lounges and smokey casino rooms that linger in the backdrop of Hotel Paradiso. What falls from her lips during “Sandpearl” curls like a theremin. It’s been a minute since instrumental music sounded this slick. You can practically taste the gin. —Matt Mitchell
The New Pornographers have always had a knack for making nostalgia feel electric, but “Ballad of the Last Payphone” hits a different kind of nerve. Less giddy power-pop, more slow-burn meditation, the track leans into melancholy with acoustic strums, ghostly pedal steel, and vocals that swirl like a memory you can’t quite shake. A.C. Newman takes us to the Museum of the City of New York, where the last payphone in NYC sits behind glass—an object so ordinary yet now extinct, like a relic from some lost civilization (or, you know, the early 2000s). “Nothing major, man / It’s just the last payphone,” he sings, but you can hear the weight behind it, the way time collapses in on itself when you realize something you once took for granted is gone. Inspired by Raymond Carver’s short story “Fat,” Newman builds the song around a narrator who can’t quite explain their fascination with the payphone—except, of course, that’s the whole point. It’s a stand-in for every small loss we don’t have the language for, every mundane thing that quietly vanishes before we realize we miss it. The track itself is deceptively simple, driven by a steady bassline and that signature New Pornographers style of layered vocal magic, but there’s an undertow effect here, a sense of something bigger lurking just beneath the surface. And when Neko Case’s voice slides in, it’s like a flash of color in an old sepia-toned photograph—brief, but breathtaking. Newman might shrug off the significance, but the song knows better: sometimes, it’s the things we think shouldn’t matter that stick with us the longest. —Casey Epstein-Gross
Wet Leg are back, and they’re ready to throw hands. “catch these fists” is a punch-drunk, bass-throbbing, bratty little brawler of a track that feels like the spiritual successor to arguably the best Victorious song of all time, “Take a Hint.” (I mean, look at Wet Leg’s second verse: “Some guy comes up and says I’m his type / I just threw up in my mouth / When he just tried to ask me out / Yeah, don’t approach me / I just wanna dance with my friends.” And the band is a duo, too! Wait, then who’s Jade and who’s Tori?) Over a groove that stomps and sneers in equal measure and a low-end thump that wouldn’t be out of place on a Viagra Boys track, Rhian Teasdale delivers every line like she’s side-eyeing you from across the room, drawling, “I know all too well just what you’re like” with the kind of weary exasperation that only comes from years of putting up with belligerent men. The song itself is a natural evolution from the hooks and deadpan humor of “Angelica” and “Chaise Longue”—it’s poppier than their previous work in some ways, a little more in line with Olivia Rodrigo than Courtney Barnett, but never sacrifices the grime and bite that drew fans to them in the first place. —Casey Epstein-Gross