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.)
Bill Callahan: “The Man I’m Supposed To Be”
Bill Callahan has a way of making a midlife inventory sound like he’s just talking to you across the table, and “The Man I’m Supposed to Be” hinges on that disarming plainness. The song drifts in like a slow confession—guitar moving with a kind of deliberate shuffle, sax tracing the edges, drums keeping things upright but unhurried—with the center of gravity being, as always, Callahan’s own deep baritone, as steady and unadorned as his early releases as Smog. “I’ve been living too long in my head / not loving you enough in our bed,” he admits, before deciding to live “as if the next day I’ll be dead,” not as a dare but as a reminder to stop drifting. Self-reckoning is framed here as a daily, almost domestic task; not fire and brimstone, but the quiet maintenance of sweeping the corners and tightening the loose screws. The intensity builds as the song goes on, the guitar growing fuzzed and gritty and the drums forcing the pulse forward. Callahan’s certainly no stranger to songs about mortality, but “The Man I’m Supposed To Be” handles it with an almost pragmatic tenderness: “My biggest fear is not the dying / my biggest fear is that I’ll stop trying / to be the man I’m supposed to be.” —Casey Epstein-Gross
Charli XCX: “House” / ”Chains of Love”
I’ll be honest—I hadn’t been looking forward to Emerald Fennel’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, as someone who hated Promising Young Woman and Saltburn (though I’ll admit the latter had a fantastic soundtrack). But hearing Charli XCX’s singles from the upcoming soundtrack album, I’m seated. Charli has been talking about wanting to do a Lou Reed-style album as her follow-up to Brat, so seeing her collaborate with John Cale for the sinister, string-heavy experimental track “House” is as close as we can get at the moment. It’s a different side to Charli —one that shows she can thrive outside the confines of her electro-pop domain. Her other Wuthering Heights single, “Chains of Love,” still carries a sinister touch, but it’s an alluring ballad that feels closer to those big pop moments we know and love from Charli, while taking more of a Roxy Music-type approach. —Tatiana Tenreyro
Dry Cleaning: “Cruise Ship Designer”
“Cruise Ship Designer” is, by vocalist Florence Shaw’s account, about “a cruise ship and hotel designer who’s skilled and paid well, but who doesn’t believe his role has real worth. He tries to enjoy it, and invests himself in meeting the challenges of the job.” The second Secret Love single doesn’t crawl like its predecessor, “Hit My Head All Day.” No, Tom Dowse’s Tom Verlaine riff splashes and struts. Shaw says, “I believe in design.” Her bandmates chant, “I am not an ambitious man” right back at her. But remember: This is a Dry Cleaning tune. Shaw’s slinky, humid pace is capstoned by Dowse’s restless eruption into this zagging, dissonant crescendo that reveals her collapsing, winking intent: “I make sure there are hidden messages in my work.” The “powerful boat for a powerful mind” saga of “Cruise Ship Designer” is decorative and immediate—a bottle half-buried in the sand but already uncorked. —Matt Mitchell
Grace Ives: “Dance With Me”
The three years that have separated the compiling of this week’s list and the release of Grace Ives’ last album, Janky Star, have felt like a hundred. There’s not a pop record from this decade that I care about more than Janky Star. “Shelly”! “On the Ground”!! “LULLABY”!!! Oh, my God. Thankfully, the check I sent in to renew my Grace Ives Fan Club membership has finally cashed and she’s spending it well in Los Angeles. Last Friday, she shared three new songs—“Avalanche,” “Dance With Me,” “My Mans”—and all of them are all fantastic. Like, alarmingly great. If I had to pick one? I mean, today I’ll go with “Dance With Me.” It’s dramatic crash-out music that Ives calls “a step outside of the house”—written in libraries across Los Angeles after she got the hell out of a suffocating, destructive Brooklyn: “I was drinking, lying, and hiding. I fell down stairs; I called out sick; I stole; I was a shitty girlfriend, a bad daughter; I abandoned the few friends I had; I cried and vomited beyond bile. Gross. When I finally stopped drinking, I stopped lying. I gave up trying to control everything and let life take over. I saw my life clearly.” On “Dance With Me,” Ariel Rechtshaid’s production serves as a great duet partner for Ives’ DIY pop mein. She’s not hiding away anymore but bursting with joy, letting sincerity color the confidence and chaos in this potpourri of synths, piano, pump organ, mellotron, strings, and guitar. “Dance With Me” is gonna be blowing out every speaker I can find. I quote a famous T-shirt: “Play Grace Ives.” Hearing a line like “I think I could be like the air” was worth the wait. —Matt Mitchell
Hayley Williams: “Showbiz”
Just when we thought Hayley Williams was done dropping more bonus tracks for Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, she puts out another banger. This one feels like Williams doing -era The Strokes as she contends with the end of her relationship with Paramore bandmate Taylor York and sits with how this might change the future of their career: “Exit stage left / What might be the end / Showbiz, showbiz.” In a year where seemingly every major pop star wants to sing about “showbiz,” Hayley Williams emerges with the best of the crop. —Tatiana Tenreyro
Jana Horn: “Go on, move your body”
At face value, “Go on, move your body” sounds like the kind of sung command you’d hear in a mall Zumba class or a Reel 2 Real Madagascar soundtrack cue. But Jana Horn’s latest track is anything but a dance floor crowd-pleaser. Instead of a beat drop, you get a slow dissolve: her hushed voice, a shadowy drift of harmonies, the feeling of someone trying to talk themselves through a day they’re not convinced they can finish. “I heard an apocalypse stir and wait, and ask: Is this all there is?” she asks, and the question hangs there, mostly unanswered, staring you down. The arrangement never ramps up or resolves—it just keeps tracing the edges of dread and memory until all that’s left is the smallest, barest instruction, murmurs of the words folding into themselves: “What do you follow when there’s no scent of it? / You just go on moving your body.” Horn frames motion—and going through the motions—as the basest, barest sign of survival, and the result is a devastating expression of the quiet anhedonia of preserving a life rather than living it. —Casey Epstein-Gross
mercury: “Heaven”
mercury’s latest, Alex Farrar-produced single, “Heaven,” is a haunting and heavy meditation on the struggle of letting go. The band is the musical brainchild of Maddie Kerr, who wrote “Heaven” about the feeling of “trying to move on from a time in my life, then coming to the realization that I will never fully be able to.” The fuzzy guitar intro is cacophonous, bleeding into the verse with a harsh and hollow beat. Kerr’s voice is the driver behind the song’s devastation—a dizzying affirmation when she sings, “try to forget how it felt like Heaven.” The song hits its groove on the chorus with an ear worm riff, curating the mood while Kerr reaches to the ceiling of her own falsetto to cry, “something’s got a hold on me.” “Heaven” is a disaster-stricken song about acceptance—or really, accepting what you can’t accept. —Caroline Nieto
Robyn: “Dopamine”
At some point, somebody had a great idea: task the artists who made “Dynamite” and “Dancing My Own” with co-writing a song together. Well my queer ass has won the lotto, because Robyn just gave us “Dopamine” and Taio Cruz is right there in the credits. Considering this song was written ten years ago, the follow-up to 2018’s Honey may not be as imminent as we’d all hoped. But in the meantime these 303 notes are frying my brain like sugar in the pan. Robyn’s singing is draped in woozy vocoder, and the shiny, “I’m tripping on our chemistry, it’s firing up inside of me” chorus rummages through my bloodstream like the song’s titular shot of adrenaline. She edges us with a kick that takes two minutes to drop, finally unwrappng the heart-on-her-sleeve beat in this perfect, 50-second spoil of flash-bang pop euphoria. Even if “Dopamine” is just a one-off for Robyn, it confirms that her flavor of choice is consistency. Seven years of silence and her first note back rings like a damn siren. —Matt Mitchell
This Is Lorelei: “Holo Boy”
Nate Amos is a jack of all trades, master of all. Between his solo project as This is Lorelei and his rock band with Rachel Brown, Water From Your Eyes, he’s proven that gliding through genres without friction and coloring his take on slacker rock with an electronic hue is just second-nature. The latest effort from his forthcoming collection of re-recorded songs, “Holo Boy” is warmer than its undoubtedly jangly, even sour and dissonant 2020 counterpart, falling more in line with the grab-bag rock sound of last year’s Box For Buddy, Box For Star. Amos still sings the line “waiting ’til I get tall” like he hasn’t yet hit his growth spurt. He’ll probably record “Holo Boy” again in five years. And who knows? Maybe he’ll be tall by then. —Caroline Nieto
Wendy Eisenberg: “Will You Dare”
A year ago, Wendy Eisenberg made a record that I ached into. Viewfinder was beautiful at all of its angles, be it the flakes of piano decorated by strange and streaking jazz ideas in “Two Times Water,” or the inventive, guitar keepsakes filling “Lasik.” Eisenberg’s ideas are so often improvisational, and their guitar playing knows not boundaries but sensations. In more eaze’s Mari Rubio, Eisenberg has found a sublime dance partner, and Rubio’s pedal steel tone on “Will You Dare” scores a vastness of a hair-silvering love and the time passing through it: “It shapes you, and scrapes you, and makes you ask, ‘Why did I try? Did I try?’” The twang in Eisenberg’s voice snakes up the fretboard behind their fingers; Ryan Sawyer’s drumming grins in the delicate obviousness, where one stick brushes along the snare and the other taps the ride cymbal. I think music like this, the type that pulls you into its tangles and keeps you there beautifully, is worth sticking around to hear. “Will You Dare” is a question mark shaped like a ghost. —Matt Mitchell
Other Notable Songs This Week: cootie catcher: “Gingham dress”; Deep Bleak: “Dancing On Broken Bottles”; DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ: “Not There Yet”; FKA twigs: “Predictable Girl”; Glitterer: “Not Forever”; Jenny On Holiday: “Good Intentions”; Mandy, Indiana: “Magazine”; Marem Ladson: “Alone Forever”; Opal Mag: “Wasting”; PONY: “Middle of Summer”; Um, Jennifer?: “Stunning”; Valerie June: “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”
Check out a playlist of this week’s best new songs below.
