Best New Songs (May 22, 2025)
Don't miss out on these great new tracks.
Photo of Wednesday by Graham Tolbert
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.)
Common Holly: “Terrible Hands”
There’s something eerily weightless about “Terrible Hands,” the latest single off Common Holly’s upcoming record Anything Glass, releasing on June 13. It seems to hover just above the ground, its bare feet never quite touching soil. The song doesn’t so much begin as it unfurls, like a feeling you can’t quite put language to but can’t shake either, its intangible heft swirling around in your mind for days. Over a trembling piano line and breath-on-glass harmonies, Brigitte Naggar constructs something deceptively fragile: a song about planetary decay, personal complicity, and the quiet, relentless shame of being a human with a footprint. “Are we made of plastic or of stone?” she repeats, the line looping like a prayer, or a bad memory. Naggar has said she thinks of Lady Macbeth’s bloodstained hands when she plays it. You can hear that ghost in the way the track circles itself, haunted by its own refrain: “I’ve got these terrible hands.” It’s plaintive, deliberate, almost childlike in its simplicity, but the emotional weight is geological. Guilt sedimented into song. The arrangement is so spare it nearly vanishes—guitar, flute, piano, each arriving like a breath, or like something you’re trying not to say out loud. By the time the harmonies bloom into full chorus, it feels like a benediction from a world that knows it’s already ending—a eulogy that takes the form of the lost beauty it’s here to mourn. —Casey Epstein-Gross
Hotline TNT: “Break Right”
Hotline TNT return with a strummy, emotive track that uses bright keys to pierce through walls of fuzzy guitars. “Break Right” is the third single from Raspberry Moon, out June 20, and highlights a live recording process the band used while recording the LP. The guitar and drums follow identical rhythmic patterns, adding a depth that’s countered by Will Anderson’s hazy vocals. Each verse ends with a vocal fall that feels like a sigh—of relief, or frustration. The lyrics are exasperated and splintered, pieced together sentence fragments with deceptively casual wordplay—“In spite / Your lies / In bed with your wife.” At one point in the song, the keys turn into marimbas, and the acoustic guitar turns electric. The instruments mimic Anderson’s vocals, noted in the accompanying lyric video as “cool bendy guitars,” which describes them better than I ever could. They are cool, and they are bendy. Raspberry Moon is shaping up to pack a punch while simultaneously being light as air. —Cassidy Sollazzo
Hunx and His Punx: “Alone in Hollywood on Acid”
When the short-lived indie sleaze revival craze came a couple of years ago, one act that was glaringly missing was Hunx and His Punx. The Seth Bogart-led band featured the frontman taking on a persona that was like a Tom of Finland painting come to life—a leather daddy who craved fun and romance, but also read men who didn’t measure up to his standards to filth. After Hunx and His Punx—which also includes Erin Emslie and Shannon & the Clams‘ Shannon Shaw—called it quits in 2014 to focus on other projects, the band decided to reunite in 2019 to make a new record. But the album was put on hold after the band faced some setbacks, including the tragic death of Shaw’s fiancé and collaborator John Haener in 2022, and the damage to Bogart’s home by the Eaton Fires this past January. The wait will soon be over, as now Hunx and His Punx have finally announced their comeback album Walk Out on This World, out on August 22 via Get Better Records. Its new single “Alone in Hollywood on Acid” is just as fun as its name suggests, while still hinting at the grief that shaped this record. Over a sticky-sweet jangle-pop melody, Shaw, who takes on vocals, sings about adjusting to her new life after relocating to Los Angeles to be with her bandmates. “What would I find in this heat? Would I be closer to you and you be closer to me?” she questions. —Tatiana Tenreyro
Laura Stevenson: “Honey”
“Honey,” the lead single off Laura Stevenson‘s upcoming album, Late Great, is my favorite song of hers in years. It’s as stunning as it is heartbreaking, as Stevenson, who went through a breakup shortly after becoming a mother, voices her invasive, self-deprecating thoughts as she contends with what went wrong in her relationship. “Tell your tale behind your beaded veil, I am escapable, I am unable not to fail / Fail anyone I ever met, I’m not еnough, I never am / An enеmy, a nobody, I’m not enough, I’ll never be it, honey,” Stevenson sings, with sweetened vocals against country-tinged instrumentals. She noted that, in her mix notes to producer John Agnello, she told him she wanted the track to “sound like a thousand angels screaming and crying.” It’s that kind of artistic vision that makes you become enamored with Laura Stevenson and her music, even as she swears she’s incapable of being loved. —Tatiana Tenreyro
Pulp: “Got to Have Love”
If you thought “Spike Island,” the lead single from Pulp’s first album of new material in 24 years, was great, then you’re going to love “Got to Have Love.” This is where Pulp goes full disco, ditching the Britpop hangups (almost) completely for a dizzying, melodramatic performance of bursting grooves, heavy synths, and machine-gun drums. Jarvis Cocker says “Got to Have Love” is a “slightly hysterical song that tries to talk about love as I see it now.” He admits that he couldn’t say the word “love” until he was nearly 40 years old. He’s 61 now, obviously still in the honeymoon of language on More, calling love “the one thing that could save you, the one thing that scares you to death, the one thing that can bring you back to life.” The climax of “Got to Have Love” is impossibly heady, featuring a surge of guitar solo, deluge of vocals, saga of strings, and a near-20-piece orchestra of violas, violins, and cellos rupturing from all sugary angles. It’s rare to see a band go nearly three decades without new music and return with such potent results, but Pulp has only gotten bolder with age. —Matt Mitchell
For those who love the intentional sound of singer-songwriters like Adrianne Lenker and Lucy Dacus, you’ll love Sister. We’ve been highlighting them for a minute now, with singles like “Colorado” and “Blood in the Vines,” but there’s no better time than now to ease into their discography (if you haven’t already). Their latest song, “Two Birds,” is a work that reaches straight into the heart. An ode to grief amidst changing circumstances, the song explores the evolving relationship between bandmates 
“Touch & Go” finds Smut doing what they do best: rendering emotional messiness with clarity—and vice versa. The latest single off the Chicago band’s sophomore record, Tomorrow Comes Crashing (out June 27), “Touch & Go” moves with a sense of sentimental velocity; it’s guitar-forward and propulsive, but undercut with a softness that keeps it tethered to earth. Built on a foundation of chiming guitars and Tay Roebuck’s airy, unhurried vocals, the track walks the tightrope between youthful idealism and the slow-motion realization that dreams don’t scale. Inspired by MGMT’s “Time to Pretend,” “Touch & Go” reimagines the fantasy of “making it” through a cracked windshield—what happens when the glitter falls off, the van breaks down, and you’re still chasing it because what else would you do? It’s a rock song, sure, but one suffused with that peculiar kind of longing that feels inseparable from coming of age inside the DIY world: idealism fraying into affection, the myth falling apart in your hands, and finding, somehow, that what’s left is enough. “The basement flooded / The coffee burned / The van is broken down,” Roebuck sings near the end, her voice a little scorched, a little soft, a little like she’s narrating a private photo album aloud. “Touch & Go” doesn’t offer resolution so much as recognition. You lose the fantasy, and gain something messier and more lasting. The best part of music, Roebuck reminds us, is the community that survives it. —Casey Epstein-Gross 
The second single from 
Their first new piece of music since their 2023 album 
Done with the restraint of “Taps” and the emotion of “Amazing Grace,” Zoh Amba’s new single “Fruit Gathering” is a rich but brief instrumental. Derived from Amba “trying to mentally take notes of what naturally wanted to exist” in her band with Caroline Morton, Lex Korton, and Miguel Marcel Russel, the New York-based woodwindist continues her busy, populated mid-decade, after collaborating with the likes of Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt and forming the group Beings with Jim White, Steve Gunn, and Shahzad. Now, with her new solo album Sun on the way, lead track “Fruit Gathering” paces itself with Amba’s tenor saxophone playing short bursts while the droning strings buzz and Russel’s percussion shivers in the background. A brief gust of shaker provides a nervous contrast to an already anxious, weathered lead from Amba. Wandering in the bardo between Korton’s piano and a twinkle of triangle and bells, “Fruit Gathering” is trying to get to someplace by bringing you there. It’s a song full of process yet quickly spiritual. —Matt Mitchell