The 10 best songs of June 2026

Out of the twenty songs we highlighted in our weekly Best New Songs column in June, we’ve picked our ten favorites. These are the heavy hitters—tracks that will undoubtedly be in serious contention once the year-end season arrives in December. While SML, Tasha, and Kelsey Lu’s new albums decorated our reviews section, June gave us brilliant singles: Mykki Blanco and Kelela kicked the month off with brilliant dance music, and The Tubs and Sam and Louise Sullivan capped it off with two feasts for the rock and roll senses. Check out our picks for the ten best songs of June 2026 in alphabetical order below, and see how July got started here.

heavensouls: “shipping times and quiet streets”

I hope Paste hasn’t become a broken record about heavensouls: his recent album westside trapped just landed in the top five of our mid-year list after earning a Paste Pick. But in my time working for this company, I’ve yet to discover an artist like Chidi Obialo, the Nigerian-born, Houston-based rapper and producer who made a digicore Fela Kuti album and knocked it out of every ballpark in earshot. His new single, “shipping times and quiet streets,” is a ceremonial collage tinted by fairy therapy’s agile jazz saxophone and Auto-Tuned purrs from his Sidepeices counterpart, Stickerbush. The track is seven minutes of spiraling detail—piano chords like blinking lights, ambient synth exhales, vocal samples in motion, each passage awakening into the next. This is a sound you spend your life searching for. —Matt Mitchell

Kelela: “point blank”

The soul of Cut 4 Me lingers in the snipped West London broken beat of “point blank.” Kelela’s spaciousness returns in delays and breakbeats. She’s processing the fantasy of helping men grow up emotionally by delivering lines like “the more I pour, the more you reap, and I’m too spent to weep” and “n****s refuse to read, somehow y’all got a lot to say” in a quiet storm while a chop of garage rattles beneath her. The vocal layering here feels intimate and immediate, and her syncopated, breathy expressions carry with them an urgency that previous singles “idea1” and “linknb” only hinted at. Can you hear that noise in the street? They’re building altars to “can you slut me out” out there. Kelela’s ties to Fade to Mind and Night Slugs vibrate throughout “point blank.” She and drum ‘n’ bass move like covalent bonds—like tangled infinities. —Matt Mitchell

L’Rain: “soulless cycle”

L’Rain’s forthcoming LP, Fata Morgana, is born in large part from contending with the work of making music amidst the nation’s descent into “fascism and trad culture.” Introducing this album rollout is “soulless cycle,” a lead single that sneaks up and crashes in with no warning—but looking back from its cacophonous climax, you realize you should’ve seen the signs of catastrophe coming all along. Her dissociative, looped vocals trudge through a left-right panned synth and a psych-hardcore breakdown all the same, heavy with the weight of countless to break free from “psycho cycles” only to end up more trapped than before. It’s an audio-sensory manifestation of what happens when crisis becomes routine—its quiet closing notes might be mistaken for reprieve, but more likely, they’re the prelude to even worse horrors to learn how to live with and hopefully, outlive. —Grace Robins-Somerville

Lily Seabird: “Election Day”

Lily Seabird is on a roll. Her third album in as many years, Lightspheres On Their Way, was just announced, and with it came “Election Day,” an ode to being trapped between a rock and a hard place that, pardon my French, simply fucking rips. As much as I loved last year’s Trash Mountain, I’m over the moon that “Election Day” finds the Vermont singer-songwriter in a mode she hasn’t occupied since 2024’s “Dirge”: riotous distortion, screeching guitars, downright wails. Seabird’s voice is as songbird-clear as ever, cutting into the chaos with the precision of a canary’s warble. But there’s an edge there, too—moments her vocals snag on the emotion of the words, ripping open ever so slightly, sharp and jagged. She’s long excelled at the art of the slow-burn, so it’s only fitting that she’s come to conquer the art of immediacy next. But don’t worry, this isn’t Seabird slotting herself into the rather redundant post-punk of the past few years; her own alt-country sensibilities are still on full display, the lilt in her voice and the twang of her sound palpable even through the din. It’s an Americana headbanger, a mosher’s gateway drug into folk—and it’s addictive. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Mykki Blanco: “Little Feet”

This month we’re hanging out, banging out, and “getting right underneath the street light.” With “Little Feet,” Mykki Blanco is leading me down the longest, hottest hallway on the block. His first preview from CAFE PARADISO is a full-on queer flâneur tease—knotted bodies rubbing together in the bleary oil slick of a room powered by dance and devotion. Three years after “Holidays in the Sun,” Blanco still believes in love and in going hard. This time, his desire makes the wood-paneled walls expand like body heat. Cloaked in their shared magpie funkedelia, he, Ian Isiah, and Breakaway slip out of falsettos and into baritones, vibrating between flirty and locked-in. “Little Feet” is so seductive it turns symphonic, covered in cum splatter and dotted with locks of hair coiled around wet fingers. There’s so much intimacy packed into these two minutes that Blanco’s hookup anthem for “the wayward metropolitan” lands like a psychic rush. —Matt Mitchell

Open Mike Eagle & Kenny Segal feat. Hemlock Ernst: “Unfinished Concrete Initials”

Open Mike Eagle is on a tear. This is the L.A. rapper’s fourth year in a row to release an LP, and they’re all good, too—I really enjoyed last year’s Neighborhood Gods Unlimited. DOOMED!, to be released on Backwoodz, will be OME’s first full-length with producer Kenny Segal, and we already have Hemlock Ernst (Future Islands’ Samuel T. Herring) guesting on the lead single. As a longtime Hellfyre Club devotee, I genuinely don’t know if I could be more excited. “Unfinished Concrete Initials” is relatively sparse but gorgeously rendered, from the hypnotic vocal sample to the steady drum fill to Ernst’s excellent verse (he never misses when it comes to features; just look at Milo’s “Souvenir”). The track opens with a softer, half-sung refrain from Mike, lyricism as stellar as ever with lines like “Hair down like the goose feathers stuck into a winter cold,” before he swaggers into the first verse and starts recounting the album’s central failed relationship: “In my day dreams your name’s a cursed word so I bleeped it.” Ernst hops on the same train of thought, regaling us with tales of post-breakup couch-hopping and misery: “She even took the space heaters, I’m a mouth breather, so my fear is that nothing remains.” Sure, everything from Mike and Ernst’s relationships to the world writ large might be doomed, but DOOMED! itself surely isn’t. —Casey Epstein-Gross

PJ Harvey: “Voyager”

Ladies and gentlemen, Polly Jean Harvey is floating in space. For her first release since the earthy, dredged-up I Inside The Old Year Dying, Harvey has sent us a transmission from the cosmos: a new single, sung from the perspective of NASA’s Voyager 2. A synth flickers alongside her soft, pooling vocals, the echo of each line filling in the space between each minimalistic phrase. An orchestral assist from arranger Dario Marianelli tethers Harvey to terra firma as she drifts through the Milky Way, her voice dissolving into stardust. —Grace Robins-Somerville

Sam and Louise Sullivan: “Down On Love”

As a Tusk evangelist, I like every second of Sam and Louise Sullivan’s new song “Down On Love.” Recorded in the same house as Star Moles’ Highway to Hell and more Rubber Band Gun albums than any two-armed fool could carry, the Love & Devotion lead single is a perfectly shaggy and splashy “manic, chromatic, folk-rock thing” that landed after the Sullivan siblings drew a blank on a 2012 rap beat but reconfigured it into a moody riff anyway. The snare splatters, Sam and Louise’s voices play off each other, and the guitar spills all over the place. “Down On Love” is, as Louise expertly puts it, “wonky pop music” with a family band’s ramshackle flavor, well-earned after years spent making percussion out of coffee cans and exercise-ball drops. And, with Star Moles singing backup, Jem Seidel behind the kit, and Rubber Band Gun’s Kevin Basko’s fingers on just about everything else, the song sounds as peerless and strange as it does damp and muscular. —Matt Mitchell

Sha Ray / DJ Haram: “Champagne and Bouquets”

I can’t be the only one who heard last year’s Beside Myself standout “Fishnets” and instantly wanted more, so the announcement of a full collab album between Brooklyn producer DJ Haram and Bay Area rapper Sha Ray was huge news. On “Champagne and Bouquets,” the latest single off Critical Thot (out this Friday), Sha Ray’s flows over a rattling snare beat play between hard and soft textures, turning consonants kaleidoscopic as she wields femininity and sexuality like a handcrafted, diamond-encrusted weapon. Silken strings that materialize halfway through the track and warp at Haram’s hand just as quickly as they arose lift “Champagne and Bouquets” to even more decadent, indulgent heights. —Grace Robins-Somerville

The Tubs: “Who’s Gonna Love You Now?”

I’m a bit of a latecomer to The Tubs, discovering them for the first time when they played possibly my favorite set at last year’s Pop Montreal. It was riotous and absurd and downright fun, a crowd of lifers crammed into a shoebox basement; I’ve never seen so many men in their forties crowdsurf. That was eight months ago, and I’ve had “Chain Reaction” perpetually stuck in my head ever since. But, at long last, the Cardiff foursome has given me something new to chew on. “Who’s Gonna Love You Now?” is all wild guitars and twinkling organ, smashing through propriety with anthemic zeal. Frontman Owen Williams is singing straight from his gut, shouting each line with the kind of belt you can only do with your eyes screwed closed. He skewers the romanticized fantasy of escaping to a new city for a fresh start, leaving your old life behind in the process: “Well, who’s gonna pay the rent?” he scoffs, as if mocking himself for having the audacity to consider it at all. “Baby, it’s your life / But who’s gonna be there waiting when it falls down?” The Tubs have always been stellar at earworms, and—to quote a fantastically apt comment on Reddit—this one is ”a perfect slice of 60s sunshine pop ran over by a beer truck.” —Casey Epstein-Gross

Keep scrolling for more great stories.