Best New Songs (June 20, 2025)
Don't miss out on these great new tracks.
Photo of Nourished by Time by Caroline Waxse
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.)
bar italia: “Cowbella”
Ignoring the judgmental snarls of passive aggression is easier said than done. While we could swallow the bitter pill, sometimes it feels better to bite back with something that satisfies the rising irritation. Often, some sarcastic hyperbole does the trick. The elusive London three-piece bar italia gives into that temptation in their grungy new single “Cowbella.” Their first release since a 2024 EP called The Tw*ts, “Cowbella” is another grimy guitar rock anthem that gnashes at your ears. (Rock freaks, rejoice.) The song’s tittering hi-hat and plucky guitars drive the track along, while members Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi, and Sam Fenton take turns spewing hot oil over the evolving screeched-out sound. “You’ve got a lot of friends, but how many like you?,” the band sings over a nasty whirlpool of drums and gritty strings. It’s a track I’ll be stewing on all summer. —Camryn Teder
Carson McHone: “Winter Breaking”
Austin singer-songwriter Carson McHone announced her third album, Pentimento (out September 12 via Merge), this week with lead single “Winter Breaking.” It’s a gentle, folky track that blends acoustic and electric textures in a slow back-and-forth that builds up, then peels away. The record follows 2022’s Still Life and was first imagined as poems exploring the tension between global unrest and personal evolution. “Winter Breaking” is dreamy, sneakily groovy, and heavy on the reverb, a choice which gives the whole thing a ripple effect. Keys give way to warbling synth arpeggios, close harmonies buzz with deep vibrato, and acoustic riffs dissolve into fuzzy electric passes. The chorus offers a moment of release before pulling it all back in the next verse. A mid-track interlude folds in bird chirps over a percussionless groove before kicking back into the chorus. The song ends on a meandering bass jam. Hollow acoustics return in aggressive repetition, eventually overtaking the bass until that’s all you hear, leaving behind only the buzzy tin of strings ringing in your ears. —Cassidy Sollazzo
Cory Hanson: “Lou Reed”
Cory Hanson wrote “Lou Reed” after reading Laurie Anderson’s obituary for the Velvet Underground founder in the Long Island East Hampton Star. “Lou was a prince and a fighter. Lou was a Tai Chi Master,” she wrote more than a decade ago; “You were a prince and a fighter, and you were a tai chi master,” Hanson sings in 2025. The second track from I Love People, arriving after the brilliant “Bird On a Swing,” is not just a verbatim rip-off of Anderson’s words pulled into a cosmic, elegiac piano ballad of pretty images, but an archetypical tribute of the least archetypical rock star of his generation. When the West Coast strings bleed into an East Coast woodwind, “Lou Reed” turns into Hanson’s greatest widescreen sprawl yet. The melancholy grows especially supernatural and epic when he cries out the line I’ve been humming all week: “All of the fairytales have fallen on bad times.” —Matt Mitchell
Dean Johnson: “Before You Hit the Ground”
Dean Johnson started writing “Before You Hit the Ground” in 2009, though he didn’t finish it until this decade. The song has a great trick to it, as Johnson sings about Buddy Holly but ends the song with a lyric from “That’ll Be the Day.” It feels dependable yet spectacular, Johnson’s ability to make timeless music a stepping stone for his own stories. But doing a folk interpolation wasn’t always the plan. Originally, “Before You Hit the Ground” was going to feature references to “all dead people,” namely Holly, John Lennon, and Sam Cooke. The outro, which finds Johnson imagining dying in a plane crash, closing his eyes, and praying he’ll wake from a dream, came to him recently, as did the “You sent me down with some fallen stars” lyric. After starting with some lo-fi antics at Mashed Potato in New Orleans on his debut album, Nothing For Me, Please, Johnson has taken a bigger, more widescreen approach on its follow-up, I Hope We Can Still Be Friends. “Before You Hit the Ground” employs the same absurd, lovesick poetry but in bright, full-band clothes. It’s an introduction in a life of greetings. —Matt Mitchell
Liquid Mike: “AT&T”
Michigan rock group Liquid Mike is set to release their sixth album, Hell Is An Airport, on September 12. It arrives just over a year after 2024’s Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot, a riff-heavy meditation on suburban monotony. Where singles “Groucho Marx” and “Selling Swords” leaned experimental (acoustics, swing, horns, etc.), “AT&T” channels the nostalgic, late-2000s rock music of our yesteryouth with a crunchy punk pop twist. The track shares the same existentialist outlook as much of Slingshot, opening with Beastie Boys-adjacent trip-hop record scratches that lead into the first line: “Every day collides with itself / What’s the difference when you’re / Just another jerk / In a phone store / Punching digits.” It’s a return to themes of dead-end jobs, loneliness, and indifference, with “What’s the difference” acting as a kind of thesis. Scuzzy guitar mingle with whiny synths and electric keys, while a relentless drum pattern churns underneath. The synths double the yell-sung vocal melody, mirroring the addictive falls on words like “want” and “argue” in the chorus. The song’s lyric video matches the song’s deadpan normcore with a banal midwestern dreamscape—clips of an AT&T storefront, faraway cell towers, and strolls through a nondescript small town. —Cassidy Sollazzo
Somewhere between press junkets (including but not limited to a Therapuss session with Jake Shane that toed the line of cringe), Lorde found time to give us one last single off Virgin, her more-than-highly anticipated fourth studio album. “Hammer,” the album’s opening track, carries a similar tension as “Man of the Year,” opening with a pulsing, modulating synth that rises and falls throughout the song. That sonic strain only gets close to breaking open at the bridge, when a Melodrama-coded 808 beat kicks in to let it all combust. Lorde calls the track an “ode to city life,” name-dropping Canal Street and narrating an afternoon of getting your ears pierced, then your aura read (“Tell me who I am,” she asks the psychic). The lyrics hit on some of the buzziest themes teased during her original rollout—“Don’t know if it’s love or if it’s ovulation” and “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man,” specifically—setting up the album’s overall themes of self-reinvention, gender, the body, and pre-clarity discomfort. Her “ah ah ahs” leading into each “Hammer” chorus mimic someone approaching a climax, emphasizing her position as a person on the brink (“I’ve sent you a postcard from the edge”). —Cassidy Sollazzo
In the daily slog of the 9 to 5, it can be easy to get lost in the moment and lose sight of your dreams. It’s a deep hole, and too easy to fall into. Still, there is always the choice to double down on optimism and refocus your view to the light at the end of the tunnel. Marcus Brown captures these battling feelings while choosing the latter in his lively new Nourished by Time single, “9 2 5.” The second release from his upcoming album The Passionate Ones, the song’s effortless groove is marked by bubbly piano lines, driving drum beats, and samples of Brown’s own lively vocals. The lyrics tell an exhausting tale of what it means to be a starving artist. “Working restaurants every day, writing love songs every night,” Brown sings, the sound drifting between sparse melancholia and looped infectious dance beats. Among the changes, Brown says, you must hold onto your beliefs. One day, you will make it out of the monotony, and into the light that waits for those who believed in it all along. —Camryn Teder
In 2023, the first album from Titanic, Vidrio, landed on our 
The most meaningful endeavors in life often begin with a dream. However visceral the vision may be, you can’t become the picture you’ve created for yourself overnight. Like anything, it takes time. Wednesday have been playing the waiting game for a while, one that has led to glowing reviews for their raw, bootgaze sound and the accumulation of a devoted fanbase. Still, frontwoman Karly Hartzman says that it isn’t until now, with the upcoming release of their fifth album 
I feel a closeness to any band from a neighboring state, and Wombo (Sydney Chadwick, Cameron Low, and Joel Taylor) is the hottest Louisville export right now—just listen to their song “Danger in Fives” and you’ll get it. But also, listen to “Neon Bog,” their latest effort en route to releasing an album titled after that other track I mentioned. “Neon Bog” is warped and woozy, with Chadwick’s vocals simmering above metallic percussion, thrumming synths, and a bruising bass that recoils into raw-hemmed, unsettled guitar notes. Chadwick sings a quick story—”Up inside a loft, took me there to draw with our fingers and shoes. Pink and muddy marks, like a neon bog, with whatever she could use”—while she and her bandmates lock into one another, zigging and zagging through an undertow of panging beats and angular riffs. Post-punk music’s stock is booming right now, and a thousand bands are trying to get in on it, but Wombo sound impossibly fresh in their out-of-body, deadpan ephemera. —Matt Mitchell