Best New Songs (May 15, 2025)
Don't miss out on these great new tracks.
Photo of Post Animal by CJ Harvey
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.)
Coach Party: “Girls!”
There are songs to sink into when you’re sad, and there are others to blast in your car when you feel like the luckiest person in the world. Coach Party’s new single is the latter. A grungy garage-rock track rife with driving rhythms, “GIRLS!” is an anthemic tribute to the people in our lives that lift us up. Buzzing guitars collide with driving drums to frame frontwoman Jess Eastwood’s searing vocals. “Where are fuck are my girls?” she sings, her voice ricocheting against a chaotic spider web of rhythms. For lovers of groups like Amyl and Sniffers or Lambrini Girls, this one’s for you, too. —Camryn Teder
Folk Bitch Trio: “Cathode Ray”
“Cathode Ray” comes alongside the announcement of Folk Bitch Trio’s debut full-length album, Now Would Be A Good Time (out July 25). The Australian three-piece recently signed to Jagjaguwar following a steady, three-year run of singles. I’ve been a big fan of the band since I heard “Analogue,” their close harmonies and blunt lyrics charming me in a witchy, whimsigoth kind of way. “Cathode Ray” continues these themes, with stacked harmonies even eerier and a beat all the more sauntering. Its accompanying video is a coven-coded fever dream, Lynchian in its dreamlike haze and ominous location (what very well might be a haunted house) and Andersonian (Wes and Paul Thomas, if I have to be specific) in its overwhelmingly pink lighting and voyeuristic camerawork. The vocals become more and more overmodulated as the song continues, releasing this tension and returning to those crisp harmonies on the closing hook: “Come undone.” —Cassidy Sollazzo
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard: “Grow Wings and Fly”
You never know what to expect in the Gizzverse. A new song can mean anything: a thrash-metal rocker, a 20-minute instrumental made exclusively from modular synths, a bootleg track from 10 years ago. On “Grow Wings and Fly,” the third single off Phantom Island, it’s more rock-band instrumentalism, this time with the twangy psychedelic jams that have long been synonymous with the King Gizzard name. Sweeping strings lay over a bare acoustic riff, with circling woodwinds and ripping percussion sending the song into a fiddle-forward country rock tear. Melodic vocal passages add an operatic glimmer, creating perfect opportunities to sneak in low-key, introspective verses, like “The distorted view from my misty window has a thin ray of light that’s got a peaking crescendo / The moon is a clock face that’s tick, tick, ticking with a crooked smile / We’re all in the rat race / Together we go the extra mile.” A mouthful, sure, but I’m right there with them. —Cassidy Sollazzo
Maruja: “Look Down On Us”
Last Friday, UK post-rock foursome Maruja unearthed the news of their long-awaited debut album, Pain to Power. I heard lead single “Look Down On Us” for the first time at SXSW in March, when the band turned its instruments up so loud that businesses at the end of the street could hear the four of them wail. “Look Down On Us” was a near-10-minute rapture of jazz, post-hardcore, rap, and spoken-word poetry; the Texas crowd ruptured into a mosh pit—parted down the middle by saxophonist Joe Carroll, who swung his saxophone at phone cameras and puffed ferocity into the mouthpiece. In the center of the chaos writhed a shirtless, sweaty Harry Wilkinson. It was so heavy, brought to life by Englishmen in board shorts and tennis shoes railing against late-stage capitalism and tapping into a provocative, society-questioning type of protest music that the world needs now. Wilkinson calls the song a “reflection of the times we live in.” It’s grotesque and visceral, vibrating between critique and solidarity. He shouts the song’s title through a head-splitting medley of sonic struggle, telling us to “Put faith in love, be firm and loyal. In yourself, put trust. Be twice the ocean, be twice the land. Be twice the water for your sons and daughters.” —Matt Mitchell
Midwife: “Signs”
Known for her dreamy slowcore discography, Midwife just shared a lost single from her acclaimed 2024 album No Depression in Heaven. Building on the project’s exploration of grief, “Signs” is just as lush as the rest of the record in all its expansive, shoegaze glory. In it, a grungy guitar rings out alongside singer Madeline Johnston’s vocals. Softly echoing, her voice is a lone mermaid’s call from the blackness of a dead sea. Johnston reflects on the people she’s lost in the lyrics, and how she still looks for connections to them in the present. The sparse alternative rock sound feels like something you’d find in ‘90s alternative groups like Nirvana or Mazzy Star. The result is a song that is simple yet enchanting. —Camryn Teder