Every Thursday, the Paste staff and contributors will choose their five favorite songs of the week, awarding one entry a “Song of the Week” designation. You can hear these songs in our ongoing Best New Songs of 2025 playlist, which gets updated weekly.
Song of the Week: Ratboys, “What’s Right?”
As usual, Ratboys aim straight for the soft spot and hit it dead center. “What’s Right?” moves like a late-night drive that keeps switching highways: verses idling on jangly guitars and a steady groove, three stitched-together drum tracks drifting the song into the next lane over. Julia Steiner sounds both haunted and lucid, tracing the edges of self-doubt until it starts to glow: “My subconscious is a man / He softly says to me / I’ll vanish when you need me to,” she sings, and there’s an honesty to it that lingers. The band lets her wander: drums blooming and receding like weather fronts, guitars flickering between shimmer and static. It unspools until there’s nothing left to hold onto, just the afterimage of a feeling too familiar to name and a guitar line that stays stuck in your head long after the song tapers out. Evidently, the Chicago band doesn’t need volume to feel immense. —Casey Epstein-Gross
Fust & Merce Lemon: “Choices”
This ain’t the first time Fust and Merce Lemon have worked together. The Durham rockers called upon the Pittsburgh songwriter to sing harmonies on “What’s His Name,” an understated ballad from their March record Big Ugly. I’m a card-carrying booster for both artists—they’re like family to me, because they bring the poetry of Appalachia to life from each end of it—and I could go on and on about why Genevieve and Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild are two of the most-essential country releases of this decade, if not this century. But Fust and Merce can just show you themselves, on the country-spanning tour they’re doing together next spring and on the two ecstatic George Jones covers they’ve shared to commemorate the occasion: “Cup of Loneliness” and “Choices.” Both songs make me upset, but in a necessary, holistic way. The B-side “Choices” is where my heart’s been returning to, to hear Aaron Dowdy and Merce’s voices fall into each other as beautifully as they do. “There were loved ones, but I turned them all away,” the song goes, and the band stretches out into a barroom singalong. “Now I’m living and dying with the choices I made.” Before I go, I must give praise to the great Libby Rodenbough, whose fiddle weeps and stings like a brokenhearted songbird. My lonesome, aching cup runneth over. —Matt Mitchell
Lex Walton: “I Wish I Was An M80”
Fresh off a handful of dates supporting John Maus and Ezra Furman, prolific and idiosyncratic New York-based singer-songwriter Lex Walton is back with three new singles. While B-sides, the bite-sized earworm “HOLY WATER” and the Silver Jews-title-rhyming indietronica tune “DRUNKS IN THE DEERLIGHT” are triumphs in themselves, the centerpiece is “I WISH I WAS AN M80.” The brainrotted daughter of Jonathan Richman and Richard Hell, Walton’s wiggly, anxious power pop wades through pages of dead links and forum threads to get to its incendiary hooks. “I WISH I WAS AN M80”’s anachronistic collage of Edwardian portrait artists, country greats, and noise rock heroes like Death Grips and Devi McCallion is a roadside altar at which to pray to “renaissance women of concept rock.” With its lo-fi hissing and tongue-twisting one-liners, Walton’s latest single provides momentary solace without shying away from ugly realities, offers spiritual catharsis without the empty promise of salvation, and resists definition at every turn. —Grace Robins-Somerville
Victoryland: “Fits”
Strident guitars and skronky synthesizers wash over Victoryland’s new artifact, “Fits.” I love it when a song makes me scream “I LOVE MUSIC” so loud my yells bounce off the walls. That’s “Fits,” 2025’s best hypnosis tape. I wish these six minutes could just go on forever. Ex-Blood member Julian McCamman is like Robert Smith channeling Dean Wareham, or Dean Wareham channeling Robert Smith, arriving at the mix by falling straight into its bursting contrasts of acoustic guitar, glitchy electronics, and brushed, scratchy drumming. McCamman calls “Fits” a “song about the ultimate search for love in the face of all of my childish demands,” but there’s nothing childish about the way his ideas ignite into such catchy, lovesick tumult. I swear the instruments go ten different ways and his voice tries to follow each of them, revealing this messy, squirming pop song that grows and grows and grows until its muscles have no choice but to contract. The outro alone—a 1-minute balm of sugary, winking modulation—will put you in a coma. —Matt Mitchell
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Water From Your Eyes: “Driving Classics, Playing Cars”
Time works weirdly on Water From Your Eyes songs. The avant-pop duo have an odd knack for stretching, compressing, and otherwise distorting temporalities in their music, their non-narratives playing out in multiple tenses at once. A new remix speeds up their catchiest song “Playing Classics” while extending its runtime to a rubber-burning 10.5 minutes. Tire screech sound effects skid through periodically, as the pliable melodies warp and melt like hot, slow-drying tar. Equally mutable, Rachel Brown’s vocals twist into chipmunked babbling and molasses-y pitched-down muck, assembling and disassembling with the squishy ease of a lump of play-doh. Water From Your Eyes are masters of movement, and their latest remix shows that they’re not finished finding shapes to shift into. —Grace Robins-Somerville
