Best New Songs (August 14, 2025)
Don't miss out on these great new tracks.
Photo of King Princess by Conor Cunningham
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.)
Hannah Frances: “Surviving You”
Not even a year after Keeper of the Shepherd made our best albums of the year list, the second single from Hannah Frances’ forthcoming LP, Nested in Tangles, is one of the most intricately disorienting songs of the year. Seriously, the things I would do to get a look at the sheet music for this one. Frances goes full avant-jazz, with gentle fingerpicking and atonal woodwinds giving way to blown-out guitars and shrieking saxophones before unraveling into a stirring, dissonant storm. Her vocals are doubled, one slightly lagging behind the other, making it sound like she’s chasing herself around the song. Frances dives deep into the grit of generational trauma, examining the inheritance that’s traveled through her family tree with equal parts rage and defiance. It’s an overwhelming listen, slowly overtaking you before burning out in the final seconds, leaving only a crinkly fuzz that burrows into your eardrum before petering out. —Cassidy Sollazzo
Jay Som ft. Mini Trees: “Cards On the Table”
It’s hard to believe it’s been six years since the release of Anak Ko. Melina Duterte put her solo project on hiatus after the pandemic, feeling like it was the perfect time for a reset. During those years, she doubled down on production, lending her talents to friends like Lucy Dacus, Troye Sivan, Chris Farren, and Palehound. Now, she’s back with another single ahead of her upcoming Jay Som record, Belong. “Cards On the Table” is a tender electro-pop track featuring textured synths, piano, and dreamy vocals. The evolving soundscape feels effortless and vibrant, as Duterte braces herself for another let down in the lyrics: “Lift you up and take me down / Rose-tinted glasses, 60 miles / Windows down, I take your hand. Not everyone is meant to stick around, but at least we learn something when they leave. That’s the ethos of “Cards On the Table,” a philosophy that Duterte says makes this her favorite song off of Belong. We concur. —Camryn Teder
Just Mustard: “WE WERE JUST HERE”
Coming from someone who lived through it, “WE WERE JUST HERE” sounds plucked from the early-2010s, M83-summoning, alt-indie heyday. It gives me the same kind of anthemic rush as something off Oracular Spectacular or Gossamer. The title track from Just Mustard’s third album bends optimism into a fuzzy pulse. Electric guitars are manipulated and warped to the point where they mimic synth tones, while resonant basslines add deep, ringing, and wrapping atmospherics. Katie Ball’s gentle falsettos soar through the melody in a way that’s oddly comforting, like I’ve heard it before, even if only briefly or subconsciusly. The lyrics are at once pointed and broad, sweeping statements like “Everything happens, all the time” landing with unexpected weight against the track’s driving, self-perpetuating momentum. Get this song on a coming-of-age movie soundtrack, stat. —Cassidy Sollazzo
King Princess: “Girls”
Two days ago, I told Mikaela Straus that “Girls” is the greatest King Princess song yet—and I meant it. At 26 years old, Straus is at her best yet just barely getting started. As she’s been rolling out the red carpet for Girl Violence, her wonderful third album and anticipated follow-up to the underloved Hold On Baby, every single has been a winner (see: “RIP KP” and “Cry Cry Cry”). But “Girls” is the one, the endgame for an album built on a “deeply emotional, spiritual, and spooky” curiosity about women. True to the carnal imagery that haunts it, “Girls” is a mirage of throat-shredding soul and twinkling vocal-pop. “To let you back in,” Straus sings, sauntering into the album’s gist, “that would be violence. That would be chaos and that would be fighting.” A promenade of pleasure awaits; “But girls bring me to my knees” is a heart-pounding chorus enraptured by Straus’ one-of-one rock-star posture and a swell of guitars that could fill an entire city. —Matt Mitchell
Lucy Dacus: “Bus Back to Richmond”
In 2021, I saw Lucy Dacus at Brooklyn Steel, where she played a song about the beginning of a romantic spark with a friend during a New Year’s Eve trip to New York City. It was one of the most vividly written songs by Dacus I’d heard and stuck with me all these years, waiting for it to come out. I’m so happy it wasn’t kept in the vaults. While Dacus’ latest LP, Forever Is a Feeling (which was her first major label release), was the first of hers that didn’t click for me, “Bus Back To Richmond” is what I needed from the boygenius member. With pared-down acoustic instrumentations and twinkling piano, it lets Dacus’ stunning voice shine, as she narrates the fateful night with such color that you feel like you’re there with her. —Tatiana Tenreyro
Light years aren’t just a measure of distance; they’re a strange liminal space, intangible, between what once burned and what remains now, cold and dim. In Marissa Nadler’s “Light Years,” that cosmic gap is the metaphor and the mood, a slow drift through the afterglow of a love gone unreachable. Her voice, doubled into a kind of phantom chorus, moves like a satellite signal fading in and out, tracing the outlines of what’s been lost. Fingerpicked acoustics and autoharp keep the tether steady while synth drones widen the frame into a starfield—expansive, lonesome, impossible to cross. “You used to see light years inside her,” she sings, the past tense doing most of the damage. “You used to be right there beside her.” Each repetition pulls the image further away, until it’s not a memory you can return to, but a glimmer receding into the deep, unbridgeable dark. An echo of an echo of an echo, beautiful and haunting and just beyond your grasp. —Casey Epstein-Gross
In the myth of the Winchester Mystery House, construction could never stop—because if it did, the widow inside would die. “Winchester Mansion of Sound” takes that superstition and makes it personal: here, music is the house, and stopping would mean losing the life and memory inside it. Neko Case builds her gorgeous elegy to her late friend Dexter Romweber (of the Flat Duo Jets) like an endless, looping architecture: bright, prismatic piano notes and spare chords opening into new rooms, each one holding a fragment of him. Her voice moves deliberately through them, sometimes steady, sometimes catching on the air, always finding another hallway. When, nearly four minutes in, she pivots into the sing-song “Down down, baby, down by the roller coaster,” it’s not a break but an extension; the house adding another wing overnight, ensuring the sound doesn’t stop so the loss doesn’t turn final. If you keep playing, the music says, you keep the person alive. As Case sings: “Only music is forever.” We might be mortal, but our songs are not—and perhaps, in the throes of grief, that realization can make all the difference. —Casey Epstein-Gross
In a year of so many exciting upcoming albums, shame has emerged as the dark horse of 2025 with Cutthroat, one of the best new post-punk LPs to come out of Britain. Having listened to the record many times for the past couple of months ahead of its release, “Spartak” is among my favorites. Continuing the Americana-inspired sound from previous single 
On the heels of singles “Jetplane” and “Waxwing,” off-kilter rock group Sorry just announced COSPLAY and shared another teaser, “Echoes.” The song sashays between a hazy collage of fuzzed-out vocals and rippling guitars before unveiling a nasty fusion of searing riffs and driving drums. These juxtapositions blend seamlessly under Asha Lorenz’s vocals, her lyrics reaching heights both love-struck and pleading. “I ain’t got no words, I think you’ve shut me up. Try and light a spark for the naked angel in my heart,” she sings. “Honey, what did you say? I said, ‘I love you.’” Inspired by a poem of a boy shouting “echo” into a tunnel, “Echoes” evolved into a tale of getting lost in the euphoria of love, a place where victims drift endlessly in a chamber of sweet nothings and ferocious emotion. —Camryn Teder
Third Man Records has been on an absolute tear. New titles from -
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