Best New Songs (January 9, 2025)

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.)

Bonnie “Prince” Billy: “Downstream”

Will Oldham’s next album as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, The Purple Bird, is proving to be a delightfully collaborative affair, with early singles calling upon artists like mandolinist Tim O’Brien and singer Brit Taylor. The record’s latest offering, “Downstream,” is a duet between Oldham and veteran country singer-songwriter John Anderson. The track is an environmental dirge peppered with anxious apprehensions and bleak concessions, somber but never floundering beneath its weighty lyrics. “Downstream” bears a waltzing cadence, soft acoustics and billows of—what sounds like—an Irish whistle that lends a soothing, lullaby-like quality. The pairing of Oldham’s smoky vocals and Anderson’s weathered croon resonates with poignant beauty, blanketing us in a comforting sense of companionship—when we feel helpless to depend on the earth’s future, we can at least depend on each other. —Anna Pichler

Cloakroom: “Bad Larry”

The titular subject of Indiana-based, genre-bending rock band Cloakroom’s latest song, “Bad Larry”—the lead single to their next album and first release via Closed Casket Activities, Last Leg of the Human Table—was inspired by the archetypical folkloric vagabond, according to lyricist and guitarist Doyle Martin. “‘Bad Larry’ roams free and wants for nothing; living a life of experience and lives by his own rules and dying on his own terms,” Martin explained in a press statement. Like its namesake, the song is meandering and unhurried, light and languorous even when a murky, shoegazey guitar riff bores through its sun-soaked acoustics. Martin’s voice remains airy as he narrates the perils of an outlaw lifestyle that the ol’ folktales don’t always teach you: “I can’t tell you the last time I’ve eaten, or how a bitter heart keeps beatin’,” he sighs. Even freewheelin’ outlaws shuffle through stretches of burnout from time to time. —Anna Pichler

Destroyer ft. Fiver: “Bologna”

It’s an exciting time for Dan Bejar and Destroyer. Next month, the band is heading out on tour with Father John Misty, and their new record Dan’s Boogie arrives not long after (March 28), with its lead single released just yesterday. “Bologna” sees Bejar work with Fiver’s Simone Schmidt in a haunting, pitch-perfect collaboration, bringing the grit underlying the gauze of the song to life. “There’s an outside chance,” Schmidt sings, lingering and arched, “you’ll never see me again.” And when their voices blend together in harmony on the chorus and outro, it feels almost spectral. “Bologna” grounds Destroyer’s typical dreamy atmosphere in something darker, heavier, turning the track into a near cinematic experience—a hazy noir dreamscape in sonic form. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Fust: “Spangled”

I have been listening to the new Fust album, Big Ugly, on repeat since it landed in my inbox in December. It’s a real-deal AOTY contender and my pick for the best thing that will come out this spring, as the songs gesture towards the Durham crew taking a major leap in their sound—crafting this dense, wayfaring ecosystem that brings Aaron Dowdy’s stories to life. Lead single “Spangled,” which Fust have been teasing live for more than a year now, is a whopping strain of mountain music that nurtures the very soil it eulogizes. It’s deeply textured, but it’s not collagy. Every piece of “Spangled,” from Libby Rodenbough’s crying fiddle to Frank Meadows’s keys plunking into the melody like tear drops, or the curls of Justin Morris’s pedal steel and Dowdy’s hushes exploding into the best pronunciation of “Shenandoah” ever put in a rock song, fits into the next. “I float on forever,” Dowdy lets out, adrift in the arms of his band. “Spangled” is a medley of some of this living world’s best players locking into themselves. If one song could be an entire pocket, it’s this one—a drunken trance of sentimental mystery, of friends coming and friends going, of a beauty you can drive past and remember. —Matt Mitchell

Japanese Breakfast: “Orlando in Love”

The new Japanese Breakfast album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), draws from European Romanticism and classical myths to explore how our own desires can trap us. Frontwoman Michelle Zauner knows this ironic truth firsthand. The impressive author, singer, songwriter and composer’s last record, Jubilee, earned her a Grammy nomination, and her hit memoir Crying in H Mart (which is being adapted into a film directed by Will Sharpe) means that even your mom’s heard of Zauner. Still, this heightened level of fame after years of being an indie darling was jarring for her. “I felt seduced by getting what I always wanted. I was flying too close to the sun, and I realized if I kept going I was going to die,” she says. “Orlando in Love” fleshes out this theme, following a poet who’s mesmerized by a siren’s song, until he ends up “breathless and then drowned.” The track begins with warm acoustic guitar, so close it’s like a seashell being held up to your ear, until a sweet swell of strings washes in after the first stanza. The titular Orlando is a reference to Renaissance author Matteo Maria Boiardo’s epic poem Orlando Innamorato (literally, “Orlando in Love”). It’s a sumptuous, cerebral peek into what we might expect from an album with a track title potentially referencing Zeus’s paramour Leda and another song featuring the one and only Jeff Bridges. —Clare Martin

Panchiko ft. billy woods: “Shandy in the Graveyard”

The now storied return of ‘90’s lostwave band, Panchiko, is equal parts luck and talent. The Nottingham shoegazers released a demo CD called D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L in June 2000 before immediately breaking up and turning away from music, never to be heard from again. That was until 2016, when someone found a copy in a thrift shop, circulated the songs online, and got the attention of the original band, reuniting Panchiko after almost two decades apart. Since then, the band has consistently toured, reigniting their musical passions and proving to garage dads everywhere that it’s never too late to get the old band back together. Now, Panchiko is readying their debut album, Ginkgo (out April 4 via Nettwerk), and they just shared the second single, “Shandy in the Graveyard,” a collaboration with New York rapper billy woods. The track is melancholic yet emphatically catchy, propelled forward by deep bass grooves and a distinctly ‘90’s drumbeat. Owain Davies (vocals) and billy woods play off one another beautifully, yearning for resolution through each lyric but reluctant to confront the pain that comes with the acceptance of loss and of human fragility. —Gavyn Green

Sharp Pins: “I Can’t Stop”

If, like me, you’re one of the unlucky people who missed Chicagoan Kai Slater’s sophomore record as Sharp Pins when it came out last year, never fear: Radio DDR—which ranked in our top 25 albums of 2024—is being re-released via Perennial on March 21 with four new tracks, including the instantly endearing “I Can’t Stop.” With shimmy-worthy guitar riffs, lo-fi vocals and endless jangle-pop charm, Slater evokes the songs of yesteryear through his own fresh-faced sound. He cites Peter Jeffries, Cleaners from Venus and cult artist Laurice as influences on this sunny, fuzz-haloed track. And while conventional wisdom maintains that all good things take time, “I Can’t Stop” is proof to the contrary; Slater wrote and recorded the track in only 35 minutes before scooting off to band practice. The immediacy of that moment shines through on this lightning-in-a-bottle song. —Clare Martin

SPELLLING: “Portrait of My Heart”

Tia Cabral, the Bay Area performer known as SPELLLING, will return with her fourth studio album, Portrait of My Heart, in March. A first taste of the record arrived this week in the form of a title track, and “Portrait of My Heart” is startling in its catchiness, etched into existence by a throbbing drum beat, orchestral streaks and Cabral’s falsetto that, at once, is like an intimate flood and a far-away echo. Then, a mark of synth-driven, anthemic poppiness collapses into an immediate, zig-zagging ballast of many voices. Featuring her band (guitarist Wyatt Overson, drummer Patrick Shelley and bassist Giulio Xavier Cetto) in full view, “Portrait of My Heart” is SPELLLING taking a turn towards a more rock-favoring sound and, in Cabral’s own words, the song “withstood transformation.” You can hear all of it come alive in the anchoring “I don’t belong here” chorus. —Matt Mitchell

Throwing Muses: “Summer of Love”

There are few feelings worse than the sinking dread of hearing a new release from a long-beloved band and realizing they’ve changed their sound to align more with the polished sheen of today’s production and, in the process, lost the rawness and character that drew you to them in the first place. But I don’t think I’ll ever have to worry about that with Kristin Hersh or her band, Throwing Muses—even though the group first formed nearly 45 years ago, every new song they release somehow maintains the same eerie acoustic feel and visceral yet odd lyrics I fell in love with. The band’s latest single, “Summer of Love” arrives on the tails of the announcement of their upcoming record Moonlight Concessions, and it’s full of Hersh’s signature rasp, all humming violins and harshly strummed guitar and lines like “streak of yikes / lighting your saint candle.” The genesis of the track is as bizarre and excellent as I could hope for: According to a press release, it “began as a bet with a guy for a dollar that revolved around the idea that the seasons don’t change us.” At the chorus’s end, the outcome of that bet is revealed with Hersh’s resigned sigh of “Finally life as it should be / I owe you a buck.” Evolution is one thing—and a good one—but smoothing out all the edges until there’s no bite left is another, and “Summer of Love” is just another entry in a long string of evidence proving that Hersh has utterly perfected the art of growing her sound without ever losing its rugged charm. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Youth Lagoon: “Speed Freak”

If we needed any further proof that Trevor Powers has truly returned for good, look no further than his latest single “Speed Freak.” Since his eight-year hiatus from the Youth Lagoon moniker came to an end with 2023’s Heaven Is A Junkyard, an opus of distorted and distressed Americana that we named the 56th-best album of the 2020s so far, Powers has continued to push the boundaries of his unique noir-rock sound. On Wednesday, he announced his new album, Rarely Do I Dream (due out February 21 via Fat Possum) and shared the haunting, hard-hitting lead single “Speed Freak.” Powers’s ghostly vocals slink between the song’s blown out breakbeat and distorted synths, but who better to explain the track’s intent than Powers himself? In a recent press release he explained, “This song came from a thought I had of giving the angel of death a hug. We spend our whole lives running from this thing we can’t outrun. This body is temporary, but there is no death. Only transformation. A door opens when you learn to let go of the identity you’ve been building your whole life.” —Gavyn Green

Other Notable Songs This Week: Albertine Sarges: “Girl Missing”; Blondshell: “T&A”; clipping.: “Change the Channel”; Cootie Catcher: “Do Forever”; Darkside: “S.N.C”; Dean Wareham: “You Were the Ones I Had to Betray”; Deep Sea Diver: “Shovel”; Divorce: “Pill”; Great Grandpa: “Junior”; Heartworms: “Extraordinary Wings”; hey, nothing: “Barn Nursery”; Mogwai: “Fanzine Made of Flesh”; Morgan Nagler: “Cradle the Pain”; Panda Bear: “Ferry Lady”; PUP: “Paranoid”; Runnner: “Coinstar”; Sleeper’s Bell: “Room”

Check out a playlist of this week’s best new songs below.