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.)
Casey Dienel: “Seventeen”
Casey Dienel’s new single, “Seventeen,” bowls me over. Dienel, who once made music under the name White Hinterland, is slowly teasing their new record, My Heart Is an Outlaw, and the last single, “Your Girl’s Upstairs,” was very, very good (take our word for it). But “Seventeen” is a different bird—one warped by an epic yet patient sprawl. It’s emotional, it’s overjoyed. The great Adam Schatz, of Landlady, plays a synth that wobbles and sways against the current of a four-part string melody, performed by violinists Laurann Angel and Lily Honigberg, violist Marta Honer, and cellist Emily Elkin. But there are too many working parts and small details here that ought to be celebrated, like the harmonies provided by Starr Busby, Nina Moffitt, and Jachary, or the bass guitar played by Spencer Zahn. And Carly Bond’s guitar is faint but aflame in the vibrations of Max Jaffe’s four-on-the-floor percussion. “Seventeen” is seven minutes long and, rather than drop us into the middle of a conversation, Dienel regales its story from the beginning. “Carol was a barfly with a red face,” they sing. “Saw a smile like his once, carved in a Jack-o-Lantern. When he moved, the whole bar swayed with him, like all that could steady him was making conversation with strange girls.” Adapted from real “memories and revelations” and set at a pub in Galway, Dienel turns a dance song about a charming stranger into a braided essay about infatuation and brevity and boozy ephemera with too many tattooable lines. I especially can’t get this one out of my head: “Some people are like magnets, they really got a shine to them. I guess you had to be there.” Dienel delivers every word with a nonchalance. Yet, there’s an ecstatic hue to every verse. All synapses are firing in the company of captivation: “It’ll feel like when you’re seventeen, like right before it all fell into place. One more round before the night is over, one last dance before we fade away.” —Matt Mitchell
Dove Ellis: “To the Sandals”
A debut single hasn’t stuck with me like this since JADE’s “Angel of My Dreams” got dropped on my head last year. But Dove Ellis, who is scheduled to open Geese’s North American tour dates this fall, sounds like he’s been here forever as “To the Sandals” unravels. The song, which is about “reflections on a failing shotgun marriage in Cancún,” and was mixed by the great Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Dijon), summons the ghosts of Radiohead and Black Country, New Road without depending on their styles for relevancy. What I’m trying to say is: Dove Ellis copies the homework but changes the answers. He gravitates toward tonal contrasts; instruments collide until they coalesce. The guitar reminds me of David Gilmour’s on “Wot’s… Uh the Deal?” and Ellis’ vocal isn’t too far away from Thom Yorke’s, his decaying holler never raising itself above Fred Donlon-Mansbridge’s wilted saxophone. With 30 seconds left to spare, the song takes a strident plunge, piecing corroded fragments of woodwind, acoustic guitar, rattling percussion, and Ellis’ now-distant vocal together with scotch tape. In his conclusion, Ellis delivers either a list of destinations or a collapsing salutation: “To the back teeth, to the front teeth, to the split tyres, to the penthouse, to the milk deal, to the wax seal, to the cracked heel, to the sandals.” Every song could sound like this and I’d still beg for a thousand more. —Matt Mitchell
dust: “Alastair”
One night last year, a man twice my age collapsed onto my shoulder in a bar, sobbing about how his three-year-old daughter would grow up to hate him. If I wrote a song about that encounter, it might sound like dust’s “Alastair,” born when Justin Teale and Gabriel Stove met a similarly unburdening stranger at the Mullumbimby Motel. Within minutes, he’d poured out his life story, then vanished. That mix of intimacy, unease, and mild humor—being conscripted into someone else’s crisis, unsure whether to comfort, recoil, or laugh—sits at the song’s core. The instrumentation and production linger in that uneasy warmth too: guitars circle but don’t resolve, horns press down like weather, a refrain (“He walks so the other ones don’t”) looping like a monotone mantra. The punchline comes at the end: “To think of all what we’ve been through,” Teale sings, before muttering right as the song cuts off entirely, “It’s only been five minutes.” —Casey Epstein-Gross
h. pruz: “Arrival”
Whether it’s a song by h. pruz or Sister., I am a card-carrying fan of Hannah Pruzinsky’s music. Their debut album, No Glory, was a favorite of mine last year, as Pruzinsky established themselves as a bucolic, if not surreal, roving, and emphatic lyricist. See: the one-two of “Hurting” and “Return Retreat.” But Pruzinsky’s next LP, Red sky at morning, named after a 2,000-year-old proverb in the New Testament, grapples with “the calm after the torrent, the future it may represent, and the past it may unearth.” Lead single “Arrival” is gentle, in the way an h. pruz song often is, with lyrics that reveal a fear trespassing within domesticity. “Promises start in the house, board up the doors,” Pruzinsky sings. “Paradise is found. There is no point where we give out. Sure of arriving, sure to stay awhile.” Even in the song’s stillness, Pruzinsky is anything but. Elijah Wolf’s harmonies are rending, while Florist’s Emily Sprague patches of modulated synth murmurs buzz around Felix Walworth’s snare-drum scrim like a glaring and Pruzinsky’s finger-picked roulades bask in the calm. “Arrival” reckons with cycles of leaving yet exits without ever raising its voice, as two conversations orbit each other for five minutes. —Matt Mitchell
Kali Uchis ft. Ravyn Lenae: “Cry about it!”
In 2024, we named Ravyn Lenae’s “Love Me Not” one of the best songs of the year, and she’s been blowing up steadily since releasing Bird’s Eye last August. Lenae clearly has an affection for the high-class sugar-rush of Motown girl groups, and it’s at full volume on “Cry about it!,” her new collaboration with the ever-splendid Kali Uchis, who is clearly still buzzing after releasing Sincerely, in May. We loved that album and I love this song. Spencer Stewart, a frequent collaborator of Laufey, co-wrote “Cry about it!,” which makes sense. It’s silky and vintage, tapping into both Uchis’ bilingual singing and Lenae’s doo-wop fixations. “Too bad, so sad, you should cry about it,” Uchis sings, before flipping the track into Spanish: “Llora llora hasta que, ya te deje de doler.” Lenae swoops in on a crest of velvet, singing, “Baby girl, take it easy. Losing sleep over envy, through you I can see clearly and I know why you’re hurt.” This is my favorite duet of 2025 so far, a song so luxurious I’m vibrating just writing about it. —Matt Mitchell
