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 tracks, delivering a weekly playlist of our favorites. Check out this week’s 11 best new songs, in alphabetical order. (You can check out the latest songs here.
Kassa Overall: “Ready To Ball”
Jazz has long been the playing field for artists with an interest in taking the raw material of genre and synthesizing it into novel and dynamic forms. Kassa Overall is one of the best exemplars of this practice. His two self-released albums — 2019’s Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz and 2020’s I Think I’m Good — and his series of mixtapes churn together hip-hop, experimental electronic music, post-bop and R&B with often explosive results. The Seattle-based artist is about to level up considerably. News broke today that he has signed with renowned UK label Warp Records, home of fellow audio revolutionaries like Battles, Autechre and Broadcast. Overall is celebrating this move with new track “Ready To Ball,” a head-nodder that bends and halts and jukes and shimmy-shakes with loopy abandon. —Robert Ham
Lori McKenna: “Girl Crush”
Lori McKenna has made plenty of fine albums of her own, but she’s also survived in the challenging world of modern country music by helping craft hits for stars like Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and Faith Hill. One of her biggest successes was “Girl Crush,” a tune written with collaborators Hillary Lindsay and Liz Rose that was taken to the top spot on the Country Radio charts by Little Big Town and netted the trio of co-writers a Grammy Award for Best Country Song in 2016. Today, the song is back in McKenna’s capable hands as she recorded a nicely stripped down rendition for the second volume of The Songwriter Tapes. This collection lets the names in the credits—in this case, McKenna, Luke Laird and Barry Dean—take turns in the spotlight playing some of the songs they’ve helped craft. “Girl Crush” may be about being jealous of the gal that stole the singer’s man, but McKenna’s voice further opens up the sexual gray area hinted at in the lyrics. —Robert Ham
Laith: “Texas Wind”
Singer-songwriter Laith has been everywhere, man. Of travel, he’s had his share. His itinerant existence has taken him from Texas to Colorado to Olympia, Washington to his current hometown of Portland, Oregon, with plenty of stops at dive bars and church picnics along the way. But of all the places he’s seen, it seems that his time in the Lone Star State has left the deepest impression on Laith, or at least gives him the greatest sense of peace. “Texas Wind” spells all that out in proper outlaw country fashion, rambling nicely along in a stoned reverie that brings out all manner of nostalgic feelings and giggly memories. —Robert Ham
Nation of Language: “Sole Obsession”
Nation of Language’s third album, Strange Disciple, is somewhere on the horizon, but, for now, we have “Sole Obsession” to gush over. As always, the synths are shimmering, the bass and drums waltz together in perfect harmony and frontman Ian Devaney’s vocals careen like the perfect amalgamation of Bernard Sumner and Andy McCluskey. It’s a perfect dancefloor number about devotion and human compulsions; delicate, soulful swagger ripe with post-punk undertones. Nation of Language remains an eternal synth-pop powerhouse. —Matt Mitchell
Indigo De Souza: “Smog”
To keep the momentum ahead of her forthcoming album, All of This Will End, immense, De Souza is back with “Smog,” a backbreaker indie track glossed over with delicious disco inflections. Where “Younger & Dumber” found her reflecting on the heartbreaking loss of her own youth, “Smog” is a story spun with doubt in the present. Here, she is restless, attempting to understand her own flaws, which include feeling most like herself at night, when everyone else is asleep. The arrangements are catchy and balanced and, in the verses, De Souza takes a monotone, patient approach, until she lets her vocals cascade perfectly into a sound wall packed with an atmospheric pastiche of drum machines and synths. “I come alive in the nighttime, when everybody else is done / I come alive, it’s the right time to really start having fun / I don’t know how to turn around if I’m not ready / I don’t know how to tell you that your jokes aren’t funny,” De Souza sings. —Matt Mitchell
Angel Olsen: “Nothing’s Free”
Less than a year after releasing her honky-tonk opus Big Time, Olsen is back with Forever Means, an EP of songs she wrote and recorded during those same sessions. Lead single “Nothing’s Free” makes sense as a post-Big Time release. Sonically, it wouldn’t have fit within the architecture of the record. It is its own elegant and strange cosmos. “Here it comes / No way to stop it now / I’m broken / Down for you like no one else / No one else,” Olsen sings in a trembling, haunting octave glazed atop a jazz lounge-style piano with horns and organs surrounding her. It’s eerie, queer, gothic and perfect; the ultimate cocktail of grandeur from one of our greatest living songwriters. —Matt Mitchell
Manchester Orchestra: “The Way”
“The Way,” the second—and last—single from their forthcoming record The Valley of Vision, finds Manchester Orchestra at their very best. With a ticking drum machine humming under pianos and instrumental fragments, vocalist Andy Hull dips in and out of octaves, singing of religious motifs and rebirth. “Do you wanna find the antidote? / Driving with the Holy Ghost / Holy death, the holy smoke / And does it start again? / I’ve been drinking from a periscope / Trying to watch my obstacles / See how fully I’ve been broke,” he sings in an echo. “The Way” sees Hull expanding how far he can stretch his voice, as he welcomes a beautiful, glitching falsetto onto the track. Manchester Orchestra has never sounded this delicate in their own reflections. —Matt Mitchell
McKinley Dixon: “Run, Run, Run”
Brilliant Chicago rapper McKinley Dixon has a new record, Beloved! Paradise! Jazz?!, coming in June. He named it after three of Toni Morrison’s novels—and even has Columbus, Ohio poet Hanif Abdurraqib on to read some of Morrison’s work. Lead single “Run, Run, Run” sees Dixon rapping about gun violence, especially how it affects the lives of children. The story is immense—filled with imagery of cautionary tales, like Icarus and canaries—and tackles the life-cycle of cruelty spurred by inequity. “Whole block gone cheer when he makes it home / Holding heavy heart really makes it worse / ‘Til we found the only way for us to lift that curse / If we run to a place where they know our worth,” Dixon raps in the second verse. “Run, Run, Run” is honest, painful; Dixon is a wordsmith whose pen is unyielding. —Matt Mitchell
Ratboys: “Black Earth, Wi”
Chicago indie band Ratboys haven’t put out a new full-length LP since 2020’s Printer’s Devil, though it seems that something big is creeping along the horizon. In the band’s first single since 2021, “Black Earth, Wi” is an electric and ambitious eight-minute cut of heartland rock and roll. With an explosive solo, a saucy bassline and vocalist Julia Steiner’s perfect twang, Ratboys couldn’t have picked a cooler way to re-emerge. It’s not a stretch to call it the band’s best song yet; their 2017 breakthrough album GN feels like a lifetime of sounds ago. What Steiner and company have assembled is hypnotizing. When the quartet collapses into a sing-along harmony with the guitars around the six-minute mark, it’s ecstasy. “And if that mockingbird don’t sing / Watch her do the twist again / Does that Black Earth freak you out? / And if she’s twisted up too tight / Let the dawn cut through the night / Taken back, don’t leave me out,” Steiner sings, while the band takes us home. —Matt Mitchell
Róisín Murphy: “CooCool”
Her second collaboration with DJ Koze in as many months, Irish electro-pop linchpin Róisín Murphy follows up their vinyl-only single “Can’t Replicate” with an even more delicious, lowkey disco tune. “CooCool” is not just an energetic stroke of confident jazz guitars and soulful piano; it’s an ode to sex in the prettiest way. “An incandescent joy / There’s good reason why it / Defies reason, let it / Be silly season, darling / All year ‘round,” Murphy sings. She elects to not saturate herself beneath too many instrumental excentricities, thus fully allowing her voice to shine as the track’s centerpiece atop Koze’s arrangements—which add incomparable finesse and flair. For some of us, spring is still a ways away. On “CooCool,” Murphy builds a castle where everything always goes out like a lamb. —Matt Mitchell
Strange Ranger: “Rain So Hard”
New York electronic quartet Strange Ranger return with their first new single of 2023, “Rain So Hard.” Clocking in at a hair under five minutes, the track is a beautiful depiction of relationship fallout and loneliness. Written as bandmates Isaac Eiger and Fiona Woodman were breaking up, “Rain So Hard” is a document of two people with immense chemistry falling out of each other’s orbit. “Any day there will be no more stars,” Eiger sings. “How do I get out of this movie now?” Woodman chimes in through a harmony. There are elements of vocal distortion, atmospheric shoegaze and grieving electronica bubbling into a sea of loss. But, most immensely, “Rain So Hard” is a striking, synthy haven. —Matt Mitchell