Best New Songs (May 8, 2025)
Don't miss out on these great new tracks.
Photo of Cory Hanson by Asal Shahindoust
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.)
Cory Hanson: “Bird On a Swing”
Most of the new music I seek out is inherently good. At worst, some of it is above-average but not exciting enough to get a replay out of me. It’s all just in one ear, out the other. But I am pleased to report that Cory Hanson remains far above-average. In fact, the Los Angeles guitarist-vocalist has been socking no-doubt-about-it dingers to left-center for some time now. And Hanson, the guy who made one of my favorite albums of 2023 and the guy who fronts the very good band Wand, will put out another solo album in 2025—I Love People, a far more easy-on-the-ears title than Western Cum was for some two years ago. On lead single “Bird On a Swing,” Hanson steps away from the shredding that defined his last release under his own name. This isn’t an immediate continuation of “Wings” or “Horsebait Sabotage.” It’s less Thin Lizzy and more 400 Unit. Seriously: Hanson is conjuring some major Jason Isbell vibes on these choruses, but with a sun-dappled, SoCal charm. But make no mistake about it, Hanson is still flirting with cowboy idyllics just as sweetly, this time with a hint of commentary on the bitter state of our Union. “I’ve rode on the darkest range, I’ve worked a thousand graveyard hours,” he sings, through a menagerie of fiddle, piano, and country chords. “I have no blood left in my veins, I gave it all up to the empire.” A song like this is a line drawn in the sand—about the “sadness in my skull,” about a kindness shown toward strangers. How much are you willing to pay to be free? How much will you sacrifice just to have your music remembered? “You may break your heart,” Hanson argues, “but you’ll still be alive.” —Matt Mitchell
DJ Haram: “Voyeur”
Zubeyda Muzeyyen has been putting out music under the DJ Haram moniker since 2016, finding fans in the ranks of billy woods and YHWH Nailgun. She has finally announced her awaited debut album, Beside Myself, out July 18 on Hyperdub. While she has some major features on the album, including Armand Hammer, Palestinian rapper Dakn, and her reunion with 700 Bliss partner Moor Mother, the lead single “Voyeur” is all DJ Haram. With darbuka drum blended with electronic drums and kamancheh, she creates an intense beat rooted in her Middle Eastern roots but combined with her love of punk and dance music, which she describes as “the voices in my head screaming wordlessly while I’m at the center of a mosh pit on research chemicals.” —Tatiana Tenreyro
Florry: “Pretty Eyes Lorraine”
“Pretty Eyes Lorraine” begins with genealogy and ends in revelation—or perhaps vice versa. Released ahead of their upcoming album Sounds Like…, “Pretty Eyes” sees Florry at their most raw, cracked, mythic, and personal. Over the band’s familiar lattice of fiddle, pedal steel, and sunburnt guitar, Francie Medosch sings with that delightfully rusted edge, channeling heartbreak through the lens of a lost homeland, existential yearning through the experience of discovering during your fourth year studying German that you’ve been Irish the whole time. The “Lorraine” at the song’s center is a person, place, and thing all at once—Alsace-Lorraine, or the personified dream of it, or maybe just a stray entry in a German textbook. What emerges is part-John Berger reverie, part-East Coast road song, part-late-night dig through the family tree (Medosch off-handedly drops some insane lore in the press release about being related to serial killer H.H. Holmes?? It’s honestly kind of a fierce sidebar). As with the all the best Florry material, the beauty isn’t polished but jagged, lived-in—what you get when you raise your Aimee Mann records on a diet of truck stop tea, Philly basements, and the burgeoning Burlington indie scene (see: Lily Seabird, Greg Freeman, and so on). And all the while, Medosch’s voice remains the song’s beating heart, cracked and present, dragging every lyric across the gravel of a long and confusing personal mythology: “Ooh baby on our trip down the Rhine / You showed me that life’s all about how you ride.” —Casey Epstein-Gross
Frankie Cosmos: “Bitch Heart”
This feels like the exact kind of song I’d listen to while dissociating in my childhood bedroom—or while staring at old photos until I forget who I am. On “Bitch Heart,” the second single off Different Talking, Frankie Cosmos use a scattered song structure, double-tracked vocals, bright guitar riffs, and a snappy, snare-heavy backbeat to take listeners through what feels like all the stages of grieving a former self. There’s wallowing (“I miss my desk with all my stuff on it”), an attempt to come back into your body (“I’m watching the goosebumps retract, watch the hair fall flat against my skin”), and the self-judgement of pining for what no longer exists (“My bitch heart is aflutter”). The song’s anomalous structure—opening verse, refrain, two-line chorus—mirrors the frantic energy that comes with any good existential spiral. And, for what it’s worth, rhyming “aflutter” with “a fucker” is absolutely a power move. —Cassidy Sollazzo
Guerilla Toss: “Psychosis is Just a Number”
“Psychosis is Just a Number” is a carnival ride in reverse, all jerking rhythms, fried horns, and existential one-liners screamed through a glitch in the mainframe—it’s like being chased by a demented clown through a house of mirrors but finding it, like, kind of really fun and exhilarating, actually. It’s Guerilla Toss at their most unhinged yet disciplined, their tightest chaos and most cleanly choreographed disorder, now sharpened under the sly supervision of Stephen Malkmus whose production leaves the edges jagged but legible. The horns are insane. The catchiness is off the charts. The mix is bright and hot, like someone smashed a lightbulb and left the filaments glowing. Vocalist Kassie Carlson delivers lines like “cut my happiness, it’s bleeding” with an uncannily peppy snarl that lands somewhere between cyberpunk Beat poetry, a spirit week chant turned into an exorcism, and the counting part of the Mob Psycho 100 theme song (which I mean as a very high compliment, because that song fucking bangs). It’s like if the B-52s ran a cheerleading squad while high on post-punk, no-wave, and also probably DMT. Guerilla Toss isn’t asking you to understand—they’re asking you to keep up. For 3.5 minutes, you probably can. After that, it’s anyone’s guess. —Casey Epstein-Gross
There must be something in the Midwest water, because what the young Chicago scene has tapped into is unparalleled anywhere else—even, dare I say, rivaling New York City. After putting out lead single 
In one of the least surprising moves of his career, Neil Young dropped a new song in which he not only calls out Big Auto for ruining our planet and not building “somethin’ useful people need” or a “safe way to be” or “somethin’ [that] won’t kill our kids,” but he also takes the time to call Tesla owners fascists. It’s very “fork found in the kitchen” of him, but even so, it still hits. On “Lets Roll Again,” Young touts his frustrations around what companies like Ford, Chrysler, and GM are doing to the environment, set to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” It’s the second offering from his upcoming debut with the chrome hearts, Talkin to the Trees, which he co-produced with canyon legend Lou Adler, signaling a potential return to his West Coast rock glory days. The song is tongue-in-cheek by design, with refrains like “China’s way ahead / They’re building clean cars” poking the right-wing bear with various buzzwords. Sonically, it feels like a live barn session: gritty, fuzzy, hazy, but emotive all the same. By the end, the backing vocals, harmonica, and guitars are so blown out that they turn into a whirlpool of noise and feedback, giving the “If you’re a fascist, then get a Tesla” demand a heavier punch. —Cassidy Sollazzo
Like many others, I jumped on the Nourished by Time bandwagon after the release of his 2024 EP Catching Chickens, which also made Paste’s list of 
My first thought upon listening to “New Threats From the Soul”: There’s signs of Silver Jews all over this. My second thought upon listening to “New Threats From the Soul”: What the fuck? Lovingly, Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band’s latest single, which is also the title track from their upcoming second album, is a deranged piece of music. Forget about how great this song sounds for a moment. Can we talk about Davis’ writing? You’d be foolish to do anything but hold every sentence in the light of your closeness. There’s an education to be had here, as the Louisville-bred lyrical marksman takes the loudmouth tempo of Jerry Jeff Walker, the literary devastation of David Berman, and the oddball charm of a John Prine verse and blends them all into a potent, drunken recital of strangeness. The devil is in the details too, of course—in languages unexpectedly woven into each other. “I was a cactus flower, I had Heisman buzz,” Davis sings. “Now it’s a pissing competition between the man I am and the guy I was.” Sweet nothings taste bitter, hell or high water is rising, and mismeasurements are six in one, half-dozen in the other. With Freakwater’s Catherine Irwin singing harmony, “New Threats From the Soul” is chicken soup for the rambling, anointed soul. Dare I say this is the best 9-minute clip of 2025 thus far? The “I thought that I could make a better life with bubblegum and driftwood” refrain and those licks of saxophone and flute all point me in the only direction I wanna go. —Matt Mitchell
As someone who’s constantly drifting between the tender dispositions in singer-songwriter tracks and the cathartic rock intensity of big bands, my dive into the slowcore genre has been inevitable and overdue. It was only last year that I started to slip into the discographies of bands like Duster, Cryogeyser, and Mazzy Star. Now, it’s all about Teethe. This Texas-based four piece crafts immersive ballads rife with lyrical introspection and compelling rock textures. They’re the perfect songs to sink into on a rainy day, a cup of something comforting in hand. The songs greatly reflect that delicate balance between melancholy and warmth. Their newest track, “Magic of the Sale,” was just released in anticipation of the band’s