10 Songs You Need to Hear This Week (October 9, 2025)
Don't miss out on these great new tracks.
Photo of Oklou & FKA twigs by Grace Pickering
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.)
Hatchie: “Only One Laughing”
“Only One Laughing” is a gratifying return to form for Australian artist Hatchie, who debuted with 2019’s Keepsake, a collection of exciting psych-pop tunes. Her newest single features layers of the dreamy guitars Harriette Pilbeam has established as her signature sound, yet they feel as fresh as they did six years ago. Hatchie has come into her own not only sonically, but her lyricism shows a broadened sense of maturity—in the second verse of “Only One Laughing,” she sings, “What once excited me wasn’t meant to be,” a realization that can only come from trial and error. While “Only One Laughing” parses through the discomfort of social alienation, it’s also a call to action to let go of the idea of what’s “meant to be” and giggle through it anyway. —Caroline Nieto
Hilary Woods: “Taper”
A lot of good records are getting released on Halloween this year. Hilary Taper’s Night CRIÚ is shaping up to be the best out of all of them. The Irish musician sings like Trish Keenan, from poppy vantages dimmed by spine-numbing, off-kilter folk-pop. “Taper,” her newest single, is captivating yet ominous. The song begins with Woods performing a folky séance. “In the great unknown, leave the light on,” she beckons in the first verse, before a tangled synth-guitar hums and “Taper” turns into this fucked-up outtake from the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. A children’s choir, provided by the Hangleton Brass Band, sings as much as Woods does, filling out a love song “braided in the wake of what has flown.” Gabriel Ferrandini’s percussion clanks like a metronome or a household trinket; the kids sing: “In the blue wide, wide open, summer moves the frozen air. I can see the paths unchosen moving through your golden hair.” “Taper” recedes instead of capstoning, leaving nothing behind but this mist of unusual wonder. —Matt Mitchell
Jay Som ft. Hayley Williams: “Past Lives”
Jay Som is joined by Paramore vocalist Hayley Williams on her new single, “Past Lives,” a moody indie-rock track exploring the process of “spiraling” and “falling apart.” The song is the fourth single from Jay Som’s upcoming album, Belong, which will come out this Friday. Each single thus far has marked the growth of Melina Duterte’s artistry since she debuted in 2016, and “Past Lives” refuses the bells and whistles of overwrought lyricism and champions simple, clean songwriting. The song is carried by the wispy vocals shared between Duterte and Williams; “Past Lives” proves to be an anthem for those who find solace in dwelling on the past. It’s also one of Jay Som’s strongest works of late. —Caroline Nieto
Oklou ft. FKA twigs: “viscus”
When FKA twigs, the queen of avant-R&B interviewed Oklou, France’s rising artist in the genre, for her Highsnobiety cover story, she teased that Oklou, whose album choke enough is still among our favorites of the year, had sent her a song to sing on and asked the musician what the song was about to her. The answer was “tummy aches” (specifically the kind that come with anxiety), which they bonded over sharing the misfortune of having. The result is “viscus,” with Oklou’s breathy, dulcet vocals and twig’s whispery, nymph-like voice filtered over vocoders, that act as centering breaths in the aftermath of a panic attack. It’s everything you’d want from one of the best music team-ups of the year. —Tatiana Tenreyro
Ragana & Drowse: “Ash Souvenir”
I really dug the last Ragana album, Desolation’s Flower. Those songs—sludgy, fever-dream masses—still rock two years later. Now, Maria and N.D.K.G. are teaming up with noise-pop and drone connoisseur Drowse on Ash Souvenir. The title track does not sound like a Ragana song—not at the beginning, at least. The two artists toy with a slowcore build-up, letting cymbal rolls and drowsy guitar plucks ache into this colossal, towering acme of feedback and mutilated vocals. But Maria turns the swell into a meditation, repeating “there is nothing to lose” again and again until it’s written within her. I’ve never heard Ragana make music like this, but now I can’t imagine hearing them in any context but. Each second is a blister; every note a gathering. The only flaw in “Ash Souvenir” is that it doesn’t go on forever. —Matt Mitchell
For her latest Love and Fortune single, “Year of Trouble,” Aussie musician Stella Donnelly set out to write a “dance-floor heartbreak” track. Instead, what she accomplished is a piano ballad that feels like an Adele song with an indie approach. It’s stripped back, with Donnelly baring her all into the devastating track, where she gets candid about the aftermath of a breakup, racking her brain trying to figure out what she did to cause the relationship’s demise, yearning to reconnect with her past lover while knowing it’s not possible. “It’s all been my fault / A year of trouble / I can’t let it go / No mystery solved,” Donnelly sings, accepting defeat. She proves that sometimes you don’t have to put your pain through an upbeat filter in order to make things better; sometimes the way out is sitting with the heartache. —Tatiana Tenreyro 
Alex Edkins has always written like someone trying to hold joy steady before it bolts. On “Forever Elsewhere,” he finally stops chasing it and just lets it run. The song bursts open in a rush of fuzzed-out guitar and unselfconscious brightness—fuzz crackling like static around a radio hit from a parallel 1994. The drums tumble forward, half-loose and half-locked, as if the whole thing might skid off the rails but never does. Edkins’ voice is earnest, almost boyish, caught somewhere between pep talk and plea: “Love, it will come.” It’s the sound of optimism done the hard way—not naïve, just stubborn. Coming from the frontman of the now-on-indefinite-hiatus Canadian punk rock group METZ, a band known for punishing precision, “Forever Elsewhere” feels like a deep exhale: a power-pop song that remembers noise can be a form of affection, that sometimes the messiest delivery lands the truest message. —Casey Epstein-Gross 
Last Friday, we got the second-ever Weirs record, Diamond Grove, and it floated under everyone’s radar, even mine. But I’ve caught up now and I can’t stop returning to these songs. There are a couple that would work here, like “Edward” and “I Want to Die Easy,” but I’m going to stump for “Lord Bateman,” the 21-minute, penultimate saga. If you’re not totally familiar with Weirs, you likely know a little bit about its leader, Oliver Child-Lanning, who plays bass and dulcimer in 
There’s a kind of polite panic running through “Don’t Throw Rocks,” the latest single from Manchester’s Westside Cowboy. It’s a song that feels like it’s trying to outrun its own good manners: the vocals are dry and unaffected, self-control clipping each word, but the drums beneath don’t so much keep time as argue with it, all floor-tom thud and nervous syncopation, while guitars flicker between shimmer and scrape. Jimmy Bradbury and Aoife Anson O’Connell’s harmonies carry that kind of soft exhaustion that only comes from understanding someone too well—tired, sure, but still reaching for the same note. What starts like a neatly wound indie song gradually begins to fray; the tempo leaning forward and the edges coming loose until everything starts to glow with a kind of exhausted joy. For a band that built its reputation in a flurry of immediacy—DIY gigs, fast songs, no fuss, a rapid rise through the Manchester scene in the course of a year—“Don’t Throw Rocks” shows how much tension you can wring from restraint. It’s the rare indie anthem that remembers how much noise you can make by holding back, and how good it feels when you finally stop. —Casey Epstein-Gross 
There’s something so kick-ass about a well-done tempo change, especially when a 3-minute song spends its second half just absolutely wailing through a full-band eruption. That’s the new Whitney single “Damage,” the fourth bit from their upcoming record Small Talk. Max Kakacek steals the show, with his piano lead scaling into a two-part guitar splash shared between him and sideman Colin Croom, the Twin Peaks multi-instrumentalist who’s recently spent time in Waxahatchee’s live band but gets to really stretch out here. I think this is the best pocket Whitney’s ever wound up in, thanks to Julien Ehrlich, who sings about dancing through storms of violin, and Macie Stewart and Whitney Johnson, whose violins wander into the blast and, beautifully, collapse into J.J. Kirkpatrick’s trumpet. I’ve been supporting this band since Light Upon the Lake, which turns ten next summer, and I’ll meet them wherever they need me to on whatever record they make. Small Talk, by my approximation, is going to be their greatest destination yet. —Matt Mitchell -
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