Best New Songs (January 16, 2025)
Don't miss these great tracks.
Photo by Marion Aguas
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.)
A-Go-Go: “On & On”
Of the many Jason Molina lyrics etched into my heart, the one most deeply engraved there is piercingly straightforward: “No one has to be that strong.” It’s warbled at the head of “Hold on Magnolia”—a woozy ballad of wounded hope that closes out Molina’s Songs: Ohia opus, Magnolia Electric Co.—and there’s something profound to how simple those self-soothing words are, being on a record caught between impending doom and a primal determination to keep trying. Likening this hallowed epic to a new song by a scrappy, much lesser-known Ohio rock band might seem lofty. And yet, “On & On”—the latest single promoting young Columbus rock group A-Go-Go’s forthcoming debut album, Today, Today—evokes a similar sort of solace with its gentle, constant strumming and lackadaisical pedal-steel flourishes. Feeling like a deep exhale at the end of a long day, it is a gorgeous and ever-necessary call to slow down and heed the miniature miracles that make holding on at our weakest a little bit easier—the friends we rely on, the records we spin—in this ruthlessly-paced world. The song’s (most probable) allusion to “Hold on Magnolia”—“You said, ‘No one has to be that strong’”—is most appropriate. —Anna Pichler
Benjamin Booker: “SLOW DANCE IN A GAY BAR”
“Sometimes, you find yourself in a death hole, surrounded by bones and rotting flesh,” Benjamin Booker said about “SLOW DANCE IN A GAY BAR.” “It feels like every second is a shovel-full of dirt flung on your head—the worms are laughing at you, hungry, ready to eat. But then, out of nowhere, the impossible happens. A ladder appears. You climb up and the world you knew before is completely different. The colors are more saturated. The sun shines brighter and the air smells sweet like honey. This song is about that.” True to his word, “SLOW DANCE IN A GAY BAR,” the fourth single from Booker’s tour de force comeback album LOWER, is a beautiful and delicate ode to “hanging out in gay bars just to see another me.” “I could be a good man,” Booker croons in a twilight-dim hush. “I just want someone to see me.” LOWER finds many homes, in a Haitian Lwa, or in a revenge fantasy about the last senator who owned slaves—there is a push and pull of violence, fear and bliss. But the “I am beginning to see the beauty all around me” line in “SLOW DANCE IN A GAY BAR” is a swell of clarity on an otherwise wounded, aching record. Even at its most divine and sacred, a song like this is a challenge. A guitar string gets plucked through tender, Kenny Segal-made beats; a keyboard twinkles like a dainty sunrise. It’s all just so astounding to sit with. —Matt Mitchell
Florist: “Have Heaven”
Okay, this wasn’t how I was originally going to open this blurb, but I figure this is a better testimonial to the success of “Have Heaven” than anything I was going to say: My mother walked through the room as I was listening to it for this write-up, stopped in her tracks and quite literally teared up—after hearing just 10 seconds of it. I stared at her, baffled, but she just looked at me, eyes wide and dewy, and smiled. “It’s just so beautiful.” Look, I know this sounds like one of those bullshit “and then everybody clapped” stories, but I swear to you, this did seriously just happen. To be fair, the latest single from New York folk quartet Florist is absolutely gorgeous, even borderline hypnotic. Raw and vulnerable, all soft acoustics that brush against your consciousness like waves lapping at a shore, “Have Heaven” lets Emily Sprague’s soft, clear warble sit perfectly centerstage as she waxes poetic, singing lines that linger with you long after the song comes to its close: “It’s winter and the garden’s dying / But the light comes through the naked trees / Have you heard? / I want to be your fistful of the morning dirt.” The song has all the emotionality, charm, and beauty of those early Adrianne Lenker tracks off of a-sides and b-sides, but it’s also undeniably Florist’s own, augmented as it is by the feel of their full band, allowing Sprague’s mesmerizing vocals and bittersweet lyricism to lilt peacefully through a wholly fleshed out sonic dreamscape. Honestly, I can see why it made my mom cry a little. “Have Heaven” really is just that beautiful. —Casey Epstein-Gross
LAKE: “Wonderful Sunlight”
I’m never quite sure when a wave of homesickness for the fecund landscape of the Pacific Northwest will hit me; sometimes it’s the scent of rain in the air or a stray pine tree on the horizon. Most recently, though, I was overwhelmed by nostalgia for the upper left-hand corner of the United States while watching the music video for LAKE’s new release “Wonderful Sunlight,” the lead single off their album Bucolic Gone, which is out on March 7 via Don Giovanni Records. Ashley Eriksson, Eli Moore and Andrew Dorsett of LAKE have been making music together for nearly 20 years, and “Wonderful Sunlight” showcases their music’s enduring dreaminess and lucidity—an alluring combination that keeps the listener coming back for more. The music video for the song was recorded on Super-8 by director Clyde Petersen and features the band playing against the dramatic backdrop of the PNW. Undulating hills dip down to the rolling sea, mimicking the way Moore and Eriksson’s voices harmonize so effortlessly. With its buzzing, distorted synths and shimmering melody, “Wonderful Sunlight” is a welcome harbinger of spring. —Clare Martin
Lucy Dacus: “Ankles”
Although my personal favorite Lucy Dacus era remains her phase from 2016’s underrated No Burden to her big break, the fantastic Historian in 2018, there’s no question that Dacus can conquer any genre she sets her mind to—and with “Ankles,” the lead single off her upcoming record, Forever Is a Feeling, it seems she has her gaze locked on baroque pop. “Ankles” feels a little like a poppier version of Ezra Furman’s already excellent “Love You So Bad” (the strings are uncannily similar), but with an extra dash of 18th-century-style horniness. The song reeks of suppressed desire; specifically, the kind of desire I’d imagine gay Victorian women felt upon, fittingly, seeing their secret lover’s ankles for the first time (gasp!). Seriously, I can already see all the Bridgerton fan edits that’ll be set to it. Everything comes together wonderfully: the heavy orchestral strings driving the song, the yearning that bleeds through the restraint in Dacus’ clear tone, the quietly desperate bargaining of the lyrics (“What if we don’t touch? / What if we only talk / About what we want and cannot have?”). Sweet and sexy, yet whimsical and sentimental, “Ankles” takes the secret fantasies and small moments that make up a modern relationship and grants them all the poignant weight of a full-length historical romance. —Casey Epstein-Gross
Mac Miller: “5 Dollar Pony Rides”
I’ve been listening to a lot of Mac Miller recently, in anticipation for Balloonerism, the Pittsburgh rapper’s second posthumous album following his passing in 2018. Partly still grieving his loss, and partly because of the beef-ridden year hip-hop had in 2024, I can’t help but feel as though Mac manifested a gentler, more light-hearted hopefulness in the genre that has been absent since his passing. In 2020, Mac’s estate released Circles, a companion album to his 2018 swan song Swimming, that was meant to complete his yin-yang concept of “swimming in circles.” Praised by fans and critics alike, it was a painfully bittersweet moment, as we feared those songs were the last we’d ever hear from “The Spins” M.C., but with the announcement of Balloonerism and now its lead single “5 Dollar Pony Rides,” we can rejoice in our misjudgement. The track is a laid-back, boom-bap style jam, produced by Mac’s longtime friend and collaborator Thundercat, and its composition dates back as far as 2013 during the sessions for Watching Movies with the Sound Off and Faces. Balloonerism arrives this Friday, two days before what would have been his 33rd birthday. —Gavyn Green
OHYUNG: “no good”
The new single from OHYUNG, the alter-ego of Lia Ouyang Rusli, is not just a detour from their recent CV of film scores (notably Julio Torres’ Problemista and Neo Sora’s Happyend), but a total 180 from their two-hour, ambient masterclass imagine naked! two years ago. But don’t let that stop you from cherishing the awe-striking decadence of a track like “no good.” It’s the first chapter of a new album, You Are Always On My Mind, and it’s a doozy-and-a-half—an experimental, rave-influenced pop reinvention that, rather than fully climax, sits in its own well-paced, blown-out rapture of color. The album is OHYUNG’s “trans self and [their] former self in conversation, from both perspectives,” and the way “no good” oscillate between ecstatic, bantam gestures of synthesizer collages and these loping, symphonic torrents sounds like an exchange. I quote the poem OHYUNG cites in the description of the song’s music video: “[ / I trust these stars I do ] / there before I was there.” An avant collision of phasings and light shifts, “no good” sounds as if it’s always been alive in me. —Matt Mitchell
Patterson Hood: “The Pool House”
Drive-By Truckers’ frontman Patterson Hood described “The Pool House”—the second single released in support of his forthcoming sophomore solo album, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams—as “one of the weirdest and most twisted tracks I have ever recorded.” His self-assessment is absolutely on-the-nose. Close your eyes, and you can feel its opening strings twist themselves inside-out, as though they were lurching from within your very gut. “The Pool House” is a swampy, alt-Americana elegy submerged in thick, heavy shadows. But, for the muted drama of its eerie arrangement and Hood’s haunted self-harmonies, the song’s inspiration was rather mundane: “‘The Pool House’” was originally inspired by a night I spent at a creepy rental,” Hood explained in a press statement. “A literal pool house for an apartment complex that I rented cheap for the night during a solo tour. It was off-season and the pool was dark green and filled with algae. The whole thing was creepy and as I’d had a couple of drinks, my mind was definitely wandering, conjuring up some macabre shit.” Put an alcohol-fogged brain in a grimy hotel pool, and you do end up with some pretty macabre shit: “Sometimes there’s no coming back from your own fears realized” is a stomach-punch of a line I won’t soon forget. —Anna Pichler
Samia: “Bovine Excision”
To accompany the announcement of her new album Bloodless, singer-songwriter Samia shared the track “Bovine Excision,” named for unexplained cattle mutilations that have baffled people for centuries, but particularly since the 1960s. And although I’d qualify these strange deaths as overstated urban legends (Sarah Marshall’s You’re Wrong About episode is very enlightening on the subject), the nonetheless fascinating phenomenon takes on a symbolic significance on the lead single from Bloodless. Samia finds a strange kinship with these exsanguinated animals on the country-rock tune, whether it’s because she herself is losing blood (“Picking leeches off white underwear”) or wants to be just as anomalous as them (“I want to be untouchable” and later, “I want to be impossible”). “I was drawn to the phenomenon of bloodless cattle mutilation as a metaphor for self-extraction—this clinical pursuit of emptiness,” Samia says. The music video (dir. Sarah Ritter) itself transforms from a bucolic getaway at a remote backwoods cabin to something far eerier, invoking Blair Witch-esque imagery. —Clare Martin
The Weather Station: “Mirror”
I was sitting outside my apartment in West Philadelphia when I listened to “Mirror” for the first time the other day. See, I’m usually in hibernation by now, waiting out the snow along with Pennsylvania’s favorite groundhog. Yet somehow, in the middle of January, it’s still breaking 50 degrees. The timing must have been kismet, because as I watched the snow melt before my eyes, Tamara Lindeman’s lyrics began to ring in my ears, singing about climate change, chemical rain and how the world is quite literally engulfed in flames. Musically, “Mirror” is laid out upon a straightforward drum groove and subtle piano washes that I can only liken to a Radiohead instrumental circa In Rainbows, but Lindeman’s words are distinctly OK Computer coded: vague, beautiful and unintentionally prophetic. Lindeman elaborated on this message in a recent press statement, saying, “The confrontation is gentle, because I’ve been there too. But life and nature is a giant biofeedback machine. What you put out there responds. And you respond; you can’t help it. That’s what is always happening. That’s one of the many things I meant when I said ‘God is a Mirror.’” —Gavyn Green
Other Notable Songs This Week: Butcher Brown: “Ibiza”; Dead Gowns: “Swimmer”; Ela Minus: “QQQQ”; Frog Eyes: “I See the Same Things”; Grumpy, Sidney Gish & Precious Human: “Lonesome Ride”; Horsegirl: “Switch Over”; JADE: “IT Girl”; Jason Isbell: “Bury Me”; Masma Dream World: “Pordeno Me”; Perfume Genius: “It’s a Mirror”; Porridge Radio: “Don’t Want to Dance”; Rose Hotel: “cool”; Rusty Williams: “Knocking (At Your Door)”; Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory: “Trouble”; (T-T)b: “Hey, Creepshow”; The Bird Calls: “Ordinary Silence”; The Convenience: “I got exactly what I wanted”; The Tubs: “Narcissist”; The Velveteers: “Bound in Leather”; ZORA: “sick sex”
Check out a playlist of this week’s best new songs below.