In these 100 songs, you’ll hear lusty dubstep, quietly subversive electronic pop, regional rap bangers, alt-country odysseys, ubiquitous chart-toppers, and much more. We were drawn to songs this year that expanded the toolkits of genres that we’ve covered for decades—all in service, quite often, of unspooling the mysteries of love and human connection.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2025 wrap-up coverage here, and listen to Pitchfork’s 100 Best Songs of 2025 on Spotify or Apple Music.
gyrofield: “Vegetation Grows Thick”
gyrofield started off making drum’n’bass, but on this year’s Suspension of Belief EP, the music comes unglued from those strict rhythms and forms into something stickier, more pliable. It’s right there in the title of the first track, “Vegetation Grows Thick,” whose textures feel like mutant organic tissue. With dusty hip-hop drums straightened out and sped up, it feels a bit like an old Mo' Wax record left in a damp attic until it grew mold in its grooves—humid, buzzed, and a little blissed-out in its spongy transformation. It’s a head rush grounded in the earth, electronics running through soil and sending messages to god knows where. –Andrew Ryce
Listen: gyrofield, “Vegetation Grows Thick”
Tortoise: “Oganesson”
Tortoise’s first new song in nine years slinked and shimmied into existence. With a bobbing and weaving bassline, watercolor guitar strums, and a 7/4 rhythm that stubbornly refuses to resolve, the song feels like it is tumbling forward in perpetual motion. Like its parent album Touch, the beauty of “Oganesson” is in its penumbral qualities: a spinning dream machine that flickers between light and shade. In time-honored Tortoise fashion, the band dropped “Oganesson” alongside a suite of remixes—mostly notably, one by Saul Williams that lent this instrumental band a new political voice, drawing lines between division at home and destruction abroad: “These bombs are welfare/Come collect your shrapnel.” –Louis Pattison
Listen: Tortoise, “Oganesson”
Morgan Wallen / Post Malone: “I Ain’t Comin’ Back”
Here is where “I Ain’t Comin’ Back,” Morgan Wallen and Post Malone’s second blame-shifting duet, goes from a perfectly serviceable country radio hit to a great song: “There’s a lotta reasons I ain’t Jesus, but the main one is that I ain’t comin’ back.” It’s a damn near perfect line, one that’s funny and sounds like it was written and sung with a big ol’ shit-eatin’ grin. And it’s just long and choppy enough to make you have to recite every single word, reminding you that this breezy single from the black sheep of mainstream country was ridiculously released on Good Friday. –Matthew Strauss
Listen: Morgan Wallen / Post Malone, “I Ain’t Comin’ Back”
Open Mike Eagle: “my coworker clark kent’s secret black box”
Open Mike Eagle knows better than most that being the hero of your own story is a double-edged sword. On “my co-worker clark kent’s secret black box,” Mike’s id becomes an embittered cubicle warmer nipping at his own figurative heels. First, he’s mad no one has sussed out Clark Kent being Superman; then he turns the lens on himself, wondering why a guy “who make some shit called ‘art rap’” can’t just grow up and abandon his dreams like everyone else in the office. Mike is, unquestionably, an indie rap hero because he’s unafraid to interrogate these banal insecurities with creative zeal. –Dylan Green
Listen: Open Mike Eagle, “my coworker clark kent’s secret black box”
Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force: “Lamp Fall”
Nothing in 2025 sounded like Khadim. The second album from Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force is not your typical mbalax, whether the bright and flashy pop iterations blasting throughout Senegal, or the whirlwind rap music circulating its underground. The secret is in stripping the genre’s polyrhythmic percussion down to elemental whispers, every pulse emanating some hypnotic, arcane energy. Opener “Lamp Fall” is suffused with this mystique, weaving Ernestus’ dubby synths amid sabar drums and Mbene Diatta Seck’s phantasmagoric vocals. It’s the Senegalese analogue to Rhythm & Sound’s vocal tracks, where everything is pared down to show how music’s building blocks—melody, texture, and rhythm—began as an incantation. –Joshua Minsoo Kim
Listen: Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force, “Lamp Fall”
Momma: “I Want You (Fever)”
Momma learned firsthand that being the cheater in the relationship is as cruel as it is perversely liberating. Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten—the alt-rock band’s primary songwriters—manipulate a clandestine hookup into something more, delivering their wishes as a breathy demand: “Pick up and leave her/I want you/Fever.” The thrill of deception heightens that desire, a flourishing queer love egged on by a fuzzy guitar riff and jittery shakers. Momma always courted the ’90s in sound, but “I Want You (Fever)” goes further to revive the decade’s tabloid infidelity, too. –Nina Corcoran
Listen: Momma, “I Want You (Fever)”
MexikoDro: “No Date”
At one point, MexikoDro was the future of Atlanta rap, but now, he’s content to just kick it. Nearing 30 and with his plugg innovator days largely behind him, so much of “No Date” is an ode to being stable, having a bed to lay your head and a kitchen to stack mils and make meals. The laidback hustler ethos is so strong, it can be easy to miss the quiet diss made toward Nine Vicious and rebuffs toward viral antics. “I be on my own grass, I ain’t got no rivalry,” he says in his gravelly deadpan, sounding more relieved than bothered. –Dylan Green
Listen: MexikoDro, “No Date”
Kelela: “Furry Sings the Blues (unplugged)”
Like Joni Mitchell, Kelela renders liminal emotions with lucid precision; it’s no surprise the R&B virtuoso is a Joni head. Her exquisite electric-jazz remake of this 1976 cut is a reminder that the ink of music history is rarely dry. Mitchell’s song about down-and-out bluesman Furry Lewis served as the Memphis stop on her landmark travelogue Hejira; her Beale Street drama was complicated by Lewis’s complaints that Mitchell’s song exploited him. Kelela’s nimble version—performed at Manhattan’s Blue Note club and released on the live album In the Blue Light—reclaims this piece of Black music history, extending the story with command, smoke, and groove until she whispers, in the end, “period.” –Jenn Pelly
Listen: Kelela, “Furry Sings the Blues (unplugged)”
509 BMG: “Special Request to All Nice and Decent Real Niggaz (Stop Hatin)”
The internet’s ephemeral phrase of the moment seems to be “flow state,” so lemme show you what that really looks like: Eleven-and-a-half minutes of Orlando trash-talker 509 BMG sliding through shape-shifting dancehall beats. Atop flowery marimbas and mesmeric rhythms, BMG lets plosives and punchlines detonate like molotovs. Yeah, maybe the breezy, carefree production invokes pool parties at golden hour and daiquiris on the beach, but BMG tackles each arrangement like he woke up pissed off: “These crackas act like I’m a dumbass, I’m a easy target,” he spits with vitriol. “Always tryna talk between the lines, hiding behind the jargon.” Last time a Zoe ran it up like this, he almost won the Heisman. –Olivier Lafontant
Listen: 509 BMG, “Special Request to All Nice and Decent Real Niggaz (Stop Hatin)”
Greg Freeman: “Gallic Shrug”
It’s one thing to get your heart broken; it’s another to have it happen accidentally. At least cruelty requires attention; apathy is another animal. A “Gallic Shrug” is a gesture used to signal indifference, fitting for a song about getting caught in the crosshairs of happenstance and heartbreak. In true slacker rock tradition, Greg Freeman’s nonchalance is a veneer shielding something more vulnerable. He treats the dull pain of a relationship in decay as an inevitable inconvenience. Each time the slide guitar careens from a gentle lilt to a wail, each time Freeman’s voice cracks ever so slightly, little by little, the facade crumbles. –Grace Robins-Somerville
Listen: Greg Freeman, “Gallic Shrug”
2hollis: “flash”
When 2hollis’ mother returned to the wreckage of his childhood home in Altadena after it was burned by a wildfire in early 2025, she sent him a photo of one of the items that survived: a tarot card, The Star. The songwriter and producer, who’d recorded the majority of his forthcoming album in that house, started to cry and took it as a sign that this was his moment—he named the record star. On “flash,” one of the record’s standout moments, 2hollis celebrates the late nights and high-speed living that now follow him as an underground artist on the cusp of, yes, stardom. Backlit by the blinding strobes of his blistering synthwork—think EBM, pushed to Adderall-addled extremes—he details a lifestyle teetering out of control, details blurred by white wine and the afterimage of all the spotlights in his eyes. The recurring refrain is that he wants to “be a star,” but on “flash,” he’s already there—you can feel the energy radiating off of him. –Colin Joyce
Listen: 2hollis, “flash”
Jason Isbell: “Good While It Lasted”
Jason Isbell knows that, at another time in his life, “Good While It Lasted” would have been an easier song to write. “I wish I still smoked cigarettes and acted tough,” he sings over the earnest strum of his acoustic guitar. To write a breakup song now, he chooses not to rely on the novelistic character studies that once brought him acclaim, and he’s uninterested in the tender, fatherly wisdom that blossomed across his past decade of solo work. “Last night I didn’t sleep at all,” he confesses. “I found another empty wall/And I couldn’t get past it.” His goal here is to let us in on the emptiness, with the hopes that one day he’ll grow from this perspective, too. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen: Jason Isbell, “Good While It Lasted”
Marie Davidson: “Demolition”
On “Demolition,” Marie Davidson is a dominatrix. But the way she wants to humiliate her subjects, her pathetic listeners, disciples, and zombified club kids nodding their heads to the beat, is to seize their data and also the means of production. “I don’t want your cash now,” she sings, “I want your data!” “Demolition” is Davidson at her most devious, her most diabolically funny. She sing-speaks all of this over darkwave synths and dentist-drill drum machines. She’s laying out commands and she is taking pleasure in your pain. It is sexy as hell, and in a world of voluntary surveillance by way of our myriad electronic devices, all too real. –Sophie Kemp
Listen: Marie Davidson, “Demolition”
DJ Koze: “Buschtaxi”
“Buschtaxi” strikes like a lightning bolt in the languorous fields of Music Can Hear Us. Landing near the album’s end, it’s the disc’s first four-on-the-floor beat. And yet the song still soars in the high end, built around a flute phrase that drags along near-ultrasonic harmonies and squawking, rhythmic vocalese. In the eight-minute track’s final quarter, DJ Koze lets these quirky details take over, immersing us in a lush, playful, and surprisingly pacifying environment; it feels like we’ve fled the storm, laughing, and found ourselves under the canopy of a teeming jungle. –Daniel Felsenthal
Listen: DJ Koze, “Buschtaxi”
Greet Death: “Country Girl”
It begins at a dumpy casino and ends at a KFC. The same riff plays for nearly six minutes. And yet, Greet Death are a completely altered beast by the end of “Country Girl,” a band that once exclusively spoke in monolithic self-loathing, now building a monument to self-acceptance. Though written prior to Harper Boyhtari’s gender transition, the lyrics defy the temptation for a strictly autobiographical read, instead painting an abstract portrait of personal transformation where every horror movie marathon and liquor store run contains just a glimmer of hope that anything can happen against a lifetime of evidence where nothing ever does. –Ian Cohen
Listen: Greet Death, “Country Girl”
CMAT: “EURO-COUNTRY”
On the strident title track of her third album, the Irish singer-songwriter fragments herself, linguistically and musically. First, there’s a 45-second intro sung in the Irish language (controversially edited out of BBC radio play of the song), before she transitions to English; then, as she belts her bittersweet lament to her “Euro-Country,” a pitch-shifted, childlike voice chips in with reminders like: “The present is past.” This uncanny self-duet represents the push-pull of a fractured identity: CMAT grapples with pride, alienation, and loss, contrasting Ireland’s romanticized mystique in pop culture with her own mundane, occasionally painful memories of growing up in an ordinary Irish town amid the 2000s financial crisis, globalization, and the legacy of English colonization.
A master of surreality, she tells this story through a cut-and-paste collage that includes a namecheck of former girlband-member-turned-reality TV star Kerry Katona with a devastating bridge that notes the surge in male suicides in Ireland since 2008. The result evades any easy takeaways or answers about how to reconcile an identity in pieces—but in the surge of CMAT’s rallying voice is a note of catharsis and hope. –Aimee Cliff
Listen: CMAT, “EURO-COUNTRY”
No Joy: “Bugland”
Shoegaze has long been a means to make the real sound unreal. But on the title track to No Joy’s mind-bending masterwork, Bugland, Jasamine White-Gluz plugs into the noises and rhythms of her natural surroundings. Inspired by her retreat from her native Montreal into small-town Quebec life, “Bugland” renders the great outdoors as an equally manic and bucolic fantasia of buzzing insect activity and sprouting Technicolor flora. The result isn’t so much shoegaze as shoegeyser, an eruption of dream-pop melodies and hyperpop hysterics that conjures nature at its most untamed. –Stuart Berman
Listen: No Joy, “Bugland”
Lorde: “David”
“Was I just someone to dominate?” Lorde wails on “David,” a gutting thesis for an album consumed with agency. The track is sparse, translucent—“playing with shadows,” as Lorde sings, Jim-E Stack’s synths only grazing the song’s gaps. After interrogating her own desires, she turns the gaze on her ex: Did he think she was weak? Did he just want “young blood?” So much of Virgin focuses on the power struggle baked into every compulsion—the urge to sleep with a man just to prove she can, to purge and punish herself, to swallow someone’s spit. On “David,” she finally asks the question she’s strived for throughout the album: “Why do we run to the ones we do?” –Dani Blum
Listen: Lorde, “David”
Anthony Naples: “Scanners”
“Scanners” glistens like an oil slick on the dancefloor, chords spreading out like blackened rainbows. The New York DJ-producer has typically written his albums with downtime in mind, couching ambient repose in faded funk and homebrewed post-rock, but on the title track to his sixth LP, he ups the tempo and flexes his dub-techno muscle memory. The vibe’s still chill, but the beats have real oomph, and even the slapback delay on those flickering chord stabs packs a punch. It’s a wake-up call for lapsed clubbers rediscovering the elemental pleasures of house and techno. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Anthony Naples, “Scanners”
Yaya Bey: “merlot and grigio” [ft. Father Philis]
Brooklyn singer Yaya Bey’s self-produced soca tune routes to her late father Ayub Bey’s Barbadian heritage with a little detour via Grace Jones, who would surely appreciate her punning oenological humor. In “merlot and grigio,” Bey’s the love sommelier, pulling up to the bumper and whining it up. She could charm the flowers off the wall and Bajan toaster Father Philis spins in her orbit, awed by her stamina. She’s not really playing the hedonist, though—Bey is a romantic at heart, here to insist that true love is still waiting for you. Hearing the peacocking flair of her steel-panning keys and charmingly retro swag, even skeptical Father Philis must concur: “Rest di case.” –Anna Gaca
Listen: Yaya Bey, “merlot and grigio” [ft. Father Philis]
Kali Uchis: “Sunshine & Rain…”
“I do nothing in the dark ‘cause I believe in karma,” the Colombian American singer-songwriter confesses over organ and light sitar. Little else in “Sunshine & Rain…” develops the Hindu concept of cause and effect except perhaps how Kali Uchis will give lovers an evening’s pleasure, reciprocity be damned. Nevertheless, she admits we all need someone to love in a world that’s “deranged” (and how nice to see this word in an R&B song). Mixed as if through an incense haze, the song asserts itself as an internal monologue and a classic fuck-or-die plea, and Uchis’ whisper register never suggests cynicism. “Sunshine & Rain…” is both not enough and just enough. –Alfred Soto
Listen: Kali Uchis, “Sunshine & Rain…”
Kieran Hebden / William Tyler: “Secret City”
There’s something oddly punk to “Secret City,” the irresistible closing track of Kieran Hebden and William Tyler’s collaborative album 41 Longfield Street Late ’80s: just three chords and attitude. Not that the song sounds like punk—“Secret City” is more Pink Floyd B-sides and watching the clouds on a sunny day—but its ultra-reductive production, just guitar strum and radiant electronic drone, suggests punk’s anyone-can-do-it, stomach-pit energy, the kind of almost effortless brilliance that only hard toil and pure musical instinct can provide. –Ben Cardew
Listen: Kieran Hebden / William Tyler, “Secret City”
Gelli Haha: “Bounce House”
Gelli Haha’s absurdist electro-pop lives somewhere between spangled disco and truly out-there psychedelia, but it’s her goofy sense of humor that keeps everything in check. On “Bounce House,” the bubbly lead single from her debut album Switcheroo, the Los Angeles–based singer and producer born Angel Abaya crafts a spinning carousel with appetites bounding freely between a “Tommy” and a “Sally.” “I’ve been hoppin’ on the honest train,” she sings sweetly to the former, “Don’t love you less just because I got off without ya.” By the time the song ends in a chatter of giggly, excited voices engaging Abaya in a call-and-response about “drumming like a battery bunny,” it’s impossible to stop the giant smile from forming on your face. –Eric Torres
Listen: Gelli Haha, “Bounce House”
Thirteendegrees °: “Da Problem Solva”
At first blush, Tumblr-obsessive turned underground superstar Thirteendegrees might seem derivative, thanks to his Young Thug-inflected flows and Impact font aesthetics. But as he puts it, “everything comes from something, it’s just about how you twist it.” His woozily maximalist anthems are greater than the sum of their parts, thanks to his playfully glamorous bars and savvy instinct for ultra-wailable hooks. On “Da Problem Solva,” the Chicago rapper yowls about playing mind games with a shawty who “suck my dick so good, had to saaaaang” over a bed of fizzing synths courtesy of his right-hand producer Gyant. Thirteen’s delivery makes relatively mundane anecdotes about swiping across his girl’s profile on the apps (“Why’d I caught her on Hinge?”) and hitting the studio to make rent money feel larger than life; but it’s the call-and-response style hook, where he waltzes around the track’s infectious Stevie V flip, that proved Thirteendegrees knows how to make the familiar feel fresh. –Vivian Medithi
Listen: Thirteendegrees °, “Da Problem Solva”
Neko Case: “Wreck”
It’s a tale as old as time: first crush, first love, first partner. “Wreck,” somehow, is not one of those tales—or at least not in song, where falling head-over-heels in your fifties is uncommon fodder. With giddy violins and dreamy vocal harmonies, Neko Case lights the wildfire of offering up your heart as a postmenopausal woman, casting herself as an enormous fireworks display and her loved one as the sun. Yet, when she repeats, “So please/Don’t be afraid of me or my love,” it’s not out of fear, but trust. Reinvigorated by seeing the world anew from the top of love’s perch, Case reveals that the freefall of loving deeply when you no longer care what anyone else thinks is the most beautiful part. There’s no time for the insecurities of adolescence or the overthinking of adulthood; just the blurry ride from thousands of feet in the sky, where not even a fear of heights could make your heart beat faster than love itself. –Nina Corcoran
Listen: Neko Case, “Wreck”
Juana Molina: “siestas ahí”
Eight years after her last studio album, Juana Molina’s first single from DOGA arrived as if out of a long sleep. Accordingly, Molina’s first verse is a series of “nonsense words” that by the second verse transform into actual lyrics, though they remain lost in processing, approximating a language where words don’t suffice. Against this primordial backdrop of synthesizer and acoustic loops, “siestas ahí” records the vanishingly brief moment when a kiss dissolves you to a cellular level. –Stefanie Fernández
Listen: Juana Molina, “siestas ahí”
Silvana Estrada: “Dime”
Before writing “Dime,” Silvana Estrada thought of anger as wholly unproductive. But, making the song, which expresses her deep frustration at a lover’s inability to invest completely in a relationship, she learned to appreciate and embody the emotion. “Dime,” from Vendrán Suaves Lluvias, is jubilant, a symphony of strings, horn, and Estrada’s lilting, poised falsetto. It is the sound of the freedom that emotional realization enables: to understand and respect exactly how you feel and why, to be yourself fully. –Vrinda Jagota
Listen: Silvana Estrada, “Dime”
Destroyer: “Bologna” [ft. Fiver]
Like the art-house directors who inspire him, Dan Bejar writes songs whose depth can be measured by the questions they leave us asking. What role does guest vocalist Simone Schmidt play in the cryptic espionage of “Bologna”? What are the two doing in the Italian city they keep naming? What exactly is the difference between “listening” and “listening… in,” and why is Bejar so adamant and emphatic that the latter is happening? “There’s an outside chance you’ll never see me again,” Schmidt sings, and it’s one of the only lyrics that needs no explanation. As soon as you think you’re onto these people, they’re off to the next town. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen: Destroyer, “Bologna” [ft. Fiver]
MOLIY: “Shake It to the Max (FLY) (Remix)” [ft. Silent Addy, Skillibeng, and Shenseea]
Imagine hoping to write a hook as good as Rihanna’s on “Pon de Replay” and hitting it right away: That’s how Ghanaian singer MOLIY explains international dancehall smash “Shake It to the Max,” produced by Jamaican duo Bashment Sound’s Silent Addy and Disco Neil. In 2020, we heard MOLIY’s distinctive whisper-raps via Amaarae’s “Sad Girlz Luv Money.” A half-decade later, in 2025, she rode through on this shatta-inspired sound system steamroller. “Shake It to the Max,” whose best and biggest remix features new-gen Jamaican superstars Skillibeng and Shenseea, is a party honeypot, but what makes it so unforgettable is the way MOLIY sends the request up from the floor knowing she’s not about to take any bullshit: “You looking for love, and I’m looking for jollof.” Picture a breakup song that knows she’s hot and a diva who always politely insists on one more take—hey, mister DJ, run that back. –Anna Gaca
Listen: MOLIY, “Shake It to the Max (FLY) (Remix)” [ft. Silent Addy, Skillibeng, and Shenseea]
Eliana Glass: “Good Friends Call Me E”
In the middle of an album haunted by the sounds of singers and composers past, Eliana Glass finds her own voice on “Good Friends Call Me E.” Dangling her silvery alto over shadow-strewn piano chords like a young Billie Holiday, she recounts her life in broad strokes: the street she grew up on, the boy she knew who “grew up a bad man.” Time passes, friends and lovers are lost. Those still close enough to know her well need to call her by just one letter. “Good Friends Call Me E” finds comfort in the connections that last through loss, and who we become in their wake. –Sam Goldner
Listen: Eliana Glass, “Good Friends Call Me E”
Mavis Staples: “Sad and Beautiful World”
In Mavis Staples’ inimitable voice—still synonymous with freedom struggles, heaven on Earth, and the promise of American music—a six-word refrain clarifies the human condition. “It’s a sad and beautiful world,” she sings, grounding a phrase Mark Linkous borrowed from Jim Jarmusch in 1996. Staples’ Sparklehorse cover, produced by Brad Cook, quakes gently. Joined on guitar and backing vocals by MJ Lenderman, her voice transforms the original’s existential ennui into awed resilience, confronting the contradictions of modern living with a glint of hope. A country in freefall cannot be said to have a national mood, but one frequency of it is contained in this resonant, elemental song. –Jenn Pelly
Listen: Mavis Staples, “Sad and Beautiful World”
Tyler, the Creator: “Sugar on My Tongue”
Coming off the ego-death sprawl of last year’s CHROMAKOPIA, Tyler, the Creator’s DON’T TAP THE GLASS is pure body music—horny, kinetic, and unserious by design. The funhouse mirror within is “Sugar on My Tongue,” a carnal Italo disco jam buzzing with laser synths, rumbling 808s, and Tyler crooning about cunnilingus like an emo Rick James. The video—a latex-heavy, kink-positive freakout that climaxes in a body-horror gag—pushes the bit further, turning lust into campy performance art. It’s funny, filthy, and strangely tender, Tyler finding liberation through movement and box-munching his way to nirvana. –Bhanuj Kappal
Listen: Tyler, the Creator, “Sugar on My Tongue”
Hotline TNT: “Julia’s War”
Hotline TNT’s debt to the slacker kings of ’90s alt-rock accrues interest every time they make a video. You know the deal: deadpan irony on a shoestring budget, the kind of things you could imagine between similarly toned clips for “Harnessed in Slums” and “Gold Soundz” on 120 Minutes. Yet the premise of “Julia’s War”—shoegaze boot camp!—is deadly serious. The Raspberry Moon single marked their transition from Will Anderson’s shaggy, solo bedroom project to a ruthlessly efficient, musclebound studio band. That scene where all of their friends are marching in unison, singing the chorus? It’s still pretty funny, but Hotline TNT aren’t joking. This is an anthem. –Ian Cohen
Listen: Hotline TNT, “Julia’s War”
DJ Travella: “Mchakamchaka”
The average singeli track is driven by a palette of simple melodies and understated drum patterns chugging along rapidly between 180 to upwards of 300 beats per minute. DJ Travella is a standard-bearer for the genre, and “Mchakamchaka” maintains the hallmarks that make the fiery Dar es Salaam party music so unbelievably exciting. It’s a lush interpretation of singeli that’s produced with more digital sheen, and it’s also a cut slower than you might expect. Sure, there are DJ Travella tracks that go faster, louder, or harder, but few are as joyful as the celebratory “Mchakamchaka.” The world would be a better place if we all partied to this. –Benny Sun
Listen: DJ Travella, “Mchakamchaka”
dexter in the newsagent: “Special”
dexter in the newsagent’s “Special” arrived as few songs do: full of grace and fully imagined, as if it had always been with us, waiting for the right artist to fulfill its inevitability. The London singer floats over finger-picked acoustic guitar and muted Jersey club percussion, detailing a love strong enough to upend her sense of self. “I would give up so much in my life/Just so I can say you’re mine,” she declares with the airy confidence of the truly obsessed. “Special” is a patient and entrancing romantic opus that’s as sure of itself as dexter is of the love she’s set to stake her life on. –Brady Brickner-Wood
Listen: dexter in the newsagent, “Special”
Myaap: “Fairy”
“Fairy” is the sound of finding inner peace at the party. The smack of Milwaukee lowend production gives you just the chance to let your guard down, and Myaap flutters over the eighth-note handclaps to dispense encouragement like an imaginary friend, the little voice in the back of your head that says “yes” to every thought. No matter what else is going on around you, that harp sample can carry you away. Spread your wings. Yop yop. –H.D. Angel
Listen: Myaap, “Fairy”
Barker: “Reframing”
The Berlin producer’s music might best be suited for a club that forgot to install subwoofers, but don’t mistake the kick-less washes of Sam Barker as some kind of intellectual exercise. “I want to avoid a situation where you have to read the script on the wall before you even have a chance of understanding or appreciating what’s going on,” he told Tone Glow earlier this year. “Reframing,” the lead single from his second LP, Stochastic Drift, pulses with a wondrous melancholia, caught in the balance between elation and despair. At its core is a synth that anxiously tumbles around the mix and expands as the track grows more confident. It’s intuitive dance music, because it’s also very human. –Ben Cardew
Listen: Barker, “Reframing”
Beatrice Dillon: “Basho”
“Basho” is all movement and no resolution, as if the constituent parts of dance music—rhythm, melody, texture—had been put inside a box and shaken forever. Beatrice Dillon named the track after the philosopher Kitarō Nishida’s concept of a “place of nothingness,” of pure experience, where the duality of subject and object collapses. If you think that’s heady, just put the track on: patterns never quite establish themselves, and instead appear and disappear with tantalizing rapidity across its 20 minutes. The vocabulary of electronic music is all here, borrowed from glitch, IDM, and even footwork, twisted into a syntax all Dillon’s own. You can’t follow her logic—you can’t really even nod along—but you can lose yourself, utterly and blissfully. –Matthew Blackwell
Listen: Beatrice Dillon, “Basho”
SHERELLE / George Riley: “FREAKY (JUST MY TYPE)”
As pickup lines go, the one George Riley drops in the opening bars of “FREAKY” is pretty whatever: “Been around the world/Seen a lot of pretty girls/But nothing compares to you.” But then it gets a little more interesting: This girl has a man and so does the narrator… and he’s cool with this scenario. How au courant! Meanwhile, SHERELLE shows off her range behind the boards, at first providing a psp-psp-psp breaky foundation in the verses and then flipping into a four-on-the-floor stomp during the chorus that barrels at you at 160 beats per minute. It’s practically designed for us to respond with: “What a rush!” –Rich Juzwiak
Listen: SHERELLE / George Riley, “FREAKY (JUST MY TYPE)”
Eiko Ishibashi: “Coma”
Eiko Ishibashi’s “Coma” is a sweeping and lilting song that conjures the uncanny feeling of a dream. On the Antigone standout, the Japanese composer and multi-instrumentalist blends syncopated rhythms, her soaring voice, bouncy synths, and a wobbling accordion to otherworldly effect. It’s sugar-sweet and a little unsettling, but altogether inviting, asking us to get lost inside its ambient-jazz alternate reality. –Vanessa Ague
Listen: Eiko Ishibashi, “Coma”
skaiwater: “pop”
Serrated bass spawns moshpits; it makes misanthropic teens smash their bodies and lose their brains. You’d think it’s antithetical to the delicate swoon and tender embrace of a romantic song, but not for skaiwater, who plucks flower petals just to shred them in an InSinkErator. Just as skai’s situationship goes awry, they crank up the tasteful tremors. “Tell me if we’re falling apart/’Cause where did I go wrong?” co-producer Elkan sings, a hook so immense it gives the track Titanic-level stakes. It’s more falling-out-of than in, but the song’s so breezy it feels like fresh love. –Kieran Press-Reynolds
Listen: skaiwater, “pop”
Pulp: “Spike Island”
“Spike Island” finds Pulp returning to the scene of the crime, the site of a Stone Roses concert where the Britpop era began, according to the lore of Cool Britannia. Jarvis Cocker isn’t leading his reunited band through an exercise in nostalgia; he’s rummaging through the cultural remains, wondering what it all meant. As the band pulsates to a second-hand indie-disco beat, he discovers, “I was born to perform/It’s a calling,” a manifesto that allows Pulp to reconnect with the spirit of 1993, shying away from the insurgent anthems of Different Class in favor of something quieter and artier but no less urgent and affecting. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Listen: Pulp, “Spike Island”
Tate McRae: “Sports car”
You’d be happy to let Tate McRae drain your wallet after hearing “Sports car,” her minimalist sex song of tire squeaks, engine revs, and ASMR-whispered findom demands. Atop a chord progression that is so canny that at least one classical virtuoso has marveled over its use of the Phrygian mode, McRae is a much chillier coquette than her button-loosened forebears. Her blunt message here is that there are few greater pleasure enhancers than a fat wallet, particularly if you can uh-uh in its spoils. –Owen Myers
Listen: Tate McRae, “Sports car”
Jenny Hval: “To be a rose”
Jenny Hval named her ninth album, Iris Silver Mist, after a powdery scent the Norwegian experimentalist fittingly described as “perfume that a ghost could wear.” Phantoms of the past linger throughout the record, where Hval inhabits a loungey sweet spot to merge distant memories with the present. The elliptical, beautifully spare “To be a rose,” inspired, in part, by Gertrude Stein’s “Sacred Emily,” distills Hval’s off-kilter style into a straight shot of splendor: synths spiral out like animal calls around knocking drums and Hval’s gently floating voice describing a stage “obviously, literally falling apart.” Her sensory lyrics follow their own dream logic, moving from childhood memories of her mother smoking on the balcony to images of microphones and flowerbeds to a sudden curtain call. Hval’s plea during the song’s closing moments, a sustained and desperate “give me a rose,” winds up like the final scene of a movie, leaving your breath snagged in your throat just before the screen goes dark. –Eric Torres
Listen: Jenny Hval, “To be a rose”
Earl Sweatshirt: “TOURMALINE”
Earl Sweatshirt has never danced between affection and depression like he has on “TOURMALINE.” Not only is the siloed brand of alternative rap he’s leaned toward since the I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside days flourishing, he’s filled with gratitude for his wife Aida Osman, the “pitch-black tourmaline tower” who keeps him grounded and covered from the worst of life. “Both my ears ringin’ with your love,” he coos over the crunchy sway of Theravada’s beat. As a husband and father, the clarity inherent to rerouting through the struggle is evident in one of his most affecting songs ever. –Dylan Green
Listen: Earl Sweatshirt, “TOURMALINE”
Turnstile: “NEVER ENOUGH”
Even in the context of Turnstile’s dramatic transformation from circle-pit scrappers to alt-rock dignitaries (and all the Diplo collaborations, Grammy nominations, blink-182 tours, and Charli XCX shout-outs that have come with it), the opening title track of NEVER ENOUGH is still startling in its oceanic ambition. Beginning as a calm, chillwaved meditation, “NEVER ENOUGH” finds Turnstile bracing for the hypestorm that would inevitably greet their fourth album, with frontman Brendan Yates marinating in feelings of ennui and insecurity like an athlete having a private panic attack in the locker room before a big game. But at the 70-second mark, “NEVER ENOUGH” erupts into a triumphant grungegaze anthem that you can easily imagine usurping the Foo Fighters’ “My Hero” as the soundtrack of choice for NFL playoffs bumper montages. As the song dissolves into an ambient swirl of cello and seagull sounds, it completes its transformation from a lonesome cry for help to the bulletproof mission statement of a band that knows no limits. –Stuart Berman
Listen: Turnstile, “NEVER ENOUGH”
Life Without Buildings: “Love Trinity”
There’s a reason Life Without Buildings endured long after their breakup: Sue Tompkins’ beguiling lyrics were the perfect backdrop to the band’s precisely structured sound. But their final song, “Love Trinity,” originally captured on their 2007 live album and released officially in October, is actually the most straightforward track the band ever made. Still, it’s no less captivating as it builds into the kind of epic climax they’d rarely attempt on Any Other City. Robert Johnson’s delay-heavy guitars and Sue Tompkins’ multitracked vocals suggest a more ambitious direction they never pursued. It feels appropriate that this is their last released song, as it has an unusually literal lyric, “don’t leave the visual world,” that seemed to foreshadow Tompkins’ decision to commit to visual art. Even 24 years after it was recorded, “Love Trinity” fits right in with the modern post-punk bands who built on their sound. –Hannah Jocelyn
Listen: Life Without Buildings, “Love Trinity”
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Lucrecia Dalt: “cosa rara” [ft. David Sylvian]
Lucrecia Dalt’s “cosa rara” cuts between a speeding car and a steamy hotel room. A pair of lovers inhabits both, and they’re in trouble. Alex Lázaro’s tense percussion and David Sylvian’s disquieting guitar color Dalt’s Spanish narration blood red—they’re going 150, the conspiracy’s in pieces, their luck is horrible. Still, they're in love, they’re in heaven. Then the crash: Screeching tires and shattering glass announce they’ve gone too far, too fast. Sylvian ends the track in a menacing baritone: “The walls are thin, my nerves are shot/I’m vulnerable and I know it/Is that door locked?” Half love song, half noir, baked by the desert sun, “cosa rara” is a delirious collision of lust and violence. –Matthew Blackwell
Listen: Lucrecia Dalt, “cosa rara” [ft. David Sylvian]
Ichiko Aoba: “Luciférine”
Ethereal and uncanny, the piano arpeggios around minute two of Ichiko Aoba’s “Luciférine” belong squarely in a Tim Burton dream sequence. Over orchestral swells and lush, cinematic arrangements, Aoba’s Japanese lyrics describe “a place for our stars to sleep” inside each of us, before “a child of the future opens its eyes.” Wondrousness awaits in the bridge as the tempo builds, the strings get louder, and twinkling keys evoke a velvety, starlit sky. “Luciférine” is all swirling instrumentation, an invitation to astral project. –Linnie Greene
Listen: Ichiko Aoba, “Luciférine”
Clipse: “So Be It”
In 2025, Pusha T and Malice reminded the world what it meant to be a principled antagonist. Rekindling the Clipse project for Let God Sort Em Out—their first full-length collaboration since Avatar was crushing the 2009 box office—involved cutting a path through a rap landscape they perceived to be rife with charlatans, liars, and leeches. The second single, “So Be It,” oscillates between gothic organs and an ethereal 1970s Arabic vocal sample. Malice locks in with his brother like it’s 2002 again, spitting spiritual self-efficacy bars, while the younger Thornton delivers the crushing blow, a precise dismantling of Travis Scott for lack of loyalty and prior disrespect, after nimbly rattling off a laundry list of luxurious flexes. While it may seem like punching down to outsiders, for rap fans it’s a standout from two apex predators returning to the ecosystem, restoring the creative order as they see fit. –Matthew Ritchie
Listen: Clipse, “So Be It”
zayALLCAPS: “MTV’s Pimp My Ride”
zayALLCAPS draws from a well of early-to-mid 2000s nostalgia for “MTV’s Pimp My Ride,” an R&B jam with the same zaniness that made the show so popular. At its center is a whimsical extended metaphor disguised as a flirty chorus: the idea that the mere presence of Zay could change your life. The slowed-down, stuttering beat section that begins two minutes in feels like the way time slows down when you’re falling in love, caught in a persistent daydream of your new life with this new person. He rounds the song out with a simple, unifying vocal riff, “I just wanna spend some time,” evoking a bygone era of uncomplicated monoculturism, when spending time meant shopping at Hot Topic, playing Xbox, and watching the Rush Hour franchise on syndication. –Donald Morrison
Listen: zayALLCAPS, “MTV’s Pimp My Ride”
Wet Leg: “catch these fists”
Few singers can talk a bloke’s chin onto the end of their fist like Rhian Teasdale, and “catch these fists” is just the latest combo in the Wet Leg ringleader’s arsenal of sucker-punch songs. Recounting an unwanted nightclub come-on, it’s all friction, whispered verses, and angular riffs. And to cloak the whole thing with a twangy guitar and boozy chorus that’s begging for a pub karaoke shoutalong? Well, that’s about as direct as a smack in the chops. –Will Pritchard
Listen: Wet Leg, “catch these fists”
JADE: “Plastic Box”
The difference between a fine pop song and an excellent one sometimes comes down to attitude. “Plastic Box,” the fourth single from ex-Little Mix artist JADE’s solo debut THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY!, exists within a long tradition of obsessive love songs, but this one has a rare serving of self-awareness. Atop a rhythm track so arpeggiated it could crimp hair and a piano line that drips like glycerin tears, Jade’s narrator compares her current relationship to her partner’s past ones. Naturally, despair ensues: “It’s irrational and impossible/‘Cause I know you had a life before me.” Still, she persists, asking her object of desire, “Can I have your heart in a plastic box?” a suffocating and unnatural image that’s as touching as it is disconcerting. –Rich Juzwiak
Listen: JADE, “Plastic Box”
Jane Remover: “JRJRJR”
On “JRJRJR,” Jane Remover captures what it feels like being part of this new generation of athesitc, asexual, sober, online, and emotionally crippled people. Jesus in the mosh pit one day, crash-out the next. The track’s wall of distortion and stream-of-consciousness raps pivot hard from Jane’s scrapped record of slick pop hits that was going to make them the “like, main pop girl.” Instead, we got a ragey rap record in Revengeseekerz, where “JRJRJR” remains the centerpiece. It’s the platonic ideal of a song for kids who just discovered concepts such as “partying” and “fun,” the stormy sound of endless, gleeful possibility. –Benny Sun
Listen: Jane Remover, “JRJRJR”
Justin Bieber: “Daisies”
Of Justin Bieber’s many hits, “Daisies” is the first that feels handmade, freed from whatever boardroom decision-making plagued the 31-year-old superstar’s past music. It’s alive and roomy and frayed around the edges, the rare radio smash whose pleasures deepen and develop with time. Written and produced with indie darlings Dijon and Mk.gee, it sounds both rigorously composed and thrillingly off the cuff, as if it were laid down in an inspired rush on a random summer night. This is the Bieber we need more of: throwing petals and all in his head, crooning horny and heartsick melodies over a virtuoso's dashed-off guitar lick. –Brady Brickner-Wood
Listen: Justin Bieber, “Daisies”
underscores: “Music”
“Music” cuts to the throbbing core of these funny vibrations called sounds: It’s about pop, rock, electronic, rap, rock’n’roll, the way your body can’t resist bopping to fluttering BPMs just like desire hijacks your being. But it’s mostly about pop, and underscores’ plan to rewrite the script for a frantic new era. She’s a blushing crooner, a drop technician, and a psycho producer all rolled into one. In her deft grasp, a beat like a Theragun jackhammering into your skull lands as smoothly as a kiss. –Kieran Press-Reynolds
Listen: underscores, “Music”
Miimii KDS: “Sé Miimii” [ft. DJ Skycee]
For all its lavish attention to human anatomy, Miimii KDS’s hyperspeed, hyper-sexed bouyon anthem “Sé Miimii” sounds like an alien dispatch from hyperspace. DJ Skycee’s dizzying production hits like a bolt of retro-future-shock, stacking whirling-dervish beats before summoning a keyboard solo that never fails to knock me out, a laser beam to the dopamine center. Fluent in the Dominican power bouyon offshoot known as nasty business, Miimii commands the enterprise with sing-speak vocals that operate on a strictly single-entendre basis, dispensing with innuendo to directly address the question on her suitor’s hips. In the year since 1T1’s “Bouwey” drew the world’s gaze to a rich, algorithm-invading seam of Afro Creole carnival music, “Sé Miimii” stands as an open invitation to the rest of the universe to join the dancefloor. –Jazz Monroe
Listen: Miimii KDS:, “Sé Miimii” [ft. DJ Skycee]
Model/Actriz: “Cinderella”
As straight guys get gayer, gay guys are reinventing punk (again). If Paul Verhoeven designed a Brooklyn rock band, it would be Model/Actriz. “Cinderella,” the single that heralded their second album, the electro-operatic Pirouette, suggests that the most haunted house is the one you grew up in. With its Halloween-synth ostinato, the touching parable of a queer little kid who wants a princess birthday party sounds like a Trevor Project PSA set to a catwalk remix of Hitchcock’s knifing violins. As frontman Cole Haden himself deadpans, “Astonishing, utterly divine, exhilarating, preciously sublime.” –Holden Seidlitz
Listen: Model/Actriz, “Cinderella”
Dean Blunt / Elias Rønnenfelt: “tears on his rings and chains”
We have a friend. Let’s call him Josh. Josh went into a coma in 2015, when Dean Blunt and Elias Rønnenfelt were each insular and enraged—Blunt, an avant-pop provocateur; Rønnenfelt, the hoarse frontman of an apoplectic punk band. (Josh’s coma resulted from injuries sustained at an Iceage show.) Ten years later, Josh, freshly awake and feeling around, looks down at his Iceage shirt and wonders: Whatever happened to those guys? A quick search yields “tears on his rings and chains,” a disarmingly tender Bluntian guitar ballad, buoyed by the boyish singsong of Rønnenfelt—a gutting tearjerker by men with nothing left to hide. “I just wasn’t made up for these times,” Rønnenfelt wails, quoting the Beach Boys with the quavering ache of Jeff Buckley. Josh goes into another coma. –Samuel Hyland
Listen: Dean Blunt / Elias Rønnenfelt, “tears on his rings and chains”
xaviersobased: “uncomfy” [ft. OsamaSon]
What happens when you mix Swedish atmospheric black metal with rage rap? You get “uncomfy,” an experimental blast of euphoria from two of rap’s next-gen torchbearers, xaviersobased and OsamaSon. The beat, produced by xavier and his older brother nurse, borrows the ambient coldness and dreading synths from one-man black metal project Lustre and turns it into a ghoulish hymn, with clinks and clanks that sound like glass bottles being struck together and blown out, bit-crushed 808s that tear at your brain matter. The combination of xavier’s ad-libs, which would make Pavarotti blush, and OsamaSon’s braggadocious energy creates a feeling of hope that could make you move mountains. –Tyler Linares
Listen: xaviersobased, “uncomfy” [ft. OsamaSon]
Cate Le Bon: “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?”
Cate Le Bon’s songs are endlessly sturdy, as though carved out of marble. Timeless and brutal, track after track. But this one has a line that takes the cake: “Love me if you must.” My god, what a burn. Le Bon delivers it with the most savage of indictments. Le Bon, her lover, her lover’s mom, no one comes out alive on this track, a downward spiral of crooked devotion. She plays guitar and sings like Cupid himself was her teacher, but he was always having a bad day. If it gives us songs like these, no one cheer him up. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen: Cate Le Bon, “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?”
Djrum: “Three Foxes Chasing Each Other”
While best known for rambunctious DJ sets, Felix Manuel structures his third Djrum album, Under Tangled Silence, more like a madcap dance opera. Drawing on his past life as a pianist, the British producer slots tumbling keys and cadences from jungle, grime, and dubstep into breakcore odysseys that marry naive play and lightspeed virtuosity—one moment confrontational, the next wrestling you to the floor and pointing to the stars. “Three Foxes Chasing Each Other” refines his alloy of discombobulating tone and dazzling texture, its glinting ECM surface smeared with vulpine whelps, pollutant hisses, and ruptured bass. Field recordings of children frolic with cascading mbira and elegiac piano, building to a ruckus of carnivalesque techno. It feels less like club mesmerism than the adventures of a raver speedrunning Wonderland. –Jazz Monroe
Listen: Djrum, “Three Foxes Chasing Each Other”
Ethel Cain: “Nettles”
If Hayden Anhedönia lived in the world that most singer-songwriters of her ability occupy, there’s no way in hell “Nettles” would last for eight minutes. It’s a beautifully frothy country-pop/adult-contempo number that sounds like Sarah McLachlan crooning on a rickety porch, her face smeared with sunblock and motor oil. It also tells a story about tragic love and death, the widescreen melodrama cut with lines of rare truth like “Time passes slower in the flicker of the hospital light.” If a bossy label were looking over her shoulder, they would have asked her to cut it in half. But fortunately, Anhedönia lives in a world all her own, one where narratives unfold at the unpredictable speed of life and gorgeous swells of pedal steel guitar last longer than they need to. –Mark Richardson
Listen: Ethel Cain, “Nettles”
Kehlani: “Folded”
A self-proclaimed “serial leaver,” Kehlani sings like they’re halfway out the door, leaving behind footsteps in the mud they hope we follow. On “Folded,” with the clarity of hindsight, they muster the strength required to come back to a lover. The song drifts like an aching memory, channeling the allure of Faith Evans, the Elysian harmonies of Brandy, and gentle percussion that nods to Destiny’s Child’s “T-Shirt.” When they sing, “I know it’s getting cold out, but it’s not frozen,” they time-travel to the loverboy pleas of Usher and Ne-Yo, or maybe the flirtatious push and pull of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Kehlani’s layered vocals and dreamy production create a sanctuary where softness can bloom again. –Boutayna Chokrane
Listen: Kehlani, “Folded”
Haim: “Relationships”
Three steps forward; two steps back; spinning and spinning; hoping your partner will carry you through the dip—and if they don’t, that you won't get bruised too badly on the way down. On “Relationships,” the Haim sisters go through the motions of the world’s oldest dance. The only problem? Haim (and everyone they know) have been put through these paces before. The song is a frustrated loop of hope still bloody from experience, the beat chopping and stuttering as old wounds color new beginnings. Every element from the babbling samples to the bounce of Este’s bass makes the track’s ground floor incredibly shifty and dynamic, which maps onto the song’s struggle to find its footing. Despite our better judgment, we can’t help falling hard, crashing out, and limping back for more, and from their place in the middle of the dancefloor, Haim are here to commiserate. –Harry Tafoya
Listen: Haim, “Relationships”
Jim Legxacy: “father”
When Jim Legxacy splashed onto London’s hip-hop scene, he brought with him a tornado of inspirations. Midwest emo, drill, UK garage, afrobeat—all of it was fair turf for his aching, fleetingly short tracks. At under two minutes, “Father” is microscopically packed with feeling. Wrapped up in chipmunk samples, jerk drums, and DJ tags, it has all the right ingredients for a surprise, nostalgia-powered breakout hit. But there’s more than just aughts-colored glasses happening here, as Legxacy ponders that absent, titular figure, and his flexes start feeling like a mask for a deeper pain. He may be celebrating how far he’s come, but his toast to success comes with a reminder of the things it still can’t buy. –Sam Goldner
Listen Now: Jim Legxacy, “father”
Maria Somerville: “Garden”
When dream pop is at its best, the emotional narrative of a song unfolds just outside of conscious awareness, a phantom glimpsed at the edge of vision. Maria Somerville’s “Garden” has that sense of mystery and subconscious weight. The song’s overwhelming whole is the product of a few small decisions—the way the melody moves up and down at the end of each line, like a coin bumping against stone as it falls down a well; how that melody is carried aloft by clouds of feedback, where guitars seem to glide without human intervention; and finally, the miniature Bernard Sumner-like guitar refrain at the song’s conclusion, which nudges us back into mundane reality. –Mark Richardson
Listen: Maria Somerville, “Garden”
billy woods / Kenny Segal: “Misery”
If Jay-Z once let a song cry for him, billy woods allows “Misery” to howl his anguish. Kenny Segal’s tightly wound beat casts a bleak backdrop for woods’ account of an entanglement with a married femme fatale on a full moon night. The tension of the music is never relieved because that simply doesn’t happen in a world where every character is untrusting and dread hangs thick in the air. He might howl about it, but for woods, “Misery” is catharsis. –Dean Van Nguyen
Listen: billy woods / Kenny Segal, “Misery”
Big Thief: “Double Infinity”
The tension between Adrianne Lenker’s vast appreciation for the here and now and her inability to escape her own head comes to a boil on the yearning title track from Double Infinity, where memories of what’s been and worries of what’s to come encroach upon her present bliss. Lenker’s wisdom spills out like a Milan Kundera treatise on impermanence set to an Emmylou Harris hymn: We’re all sitting “at the bridge of two infinities/What is forming, what is fading,” she contends over her band’s imagining of a power ballad, her voice radiant with melancholy and acceptance. –Evan Rytlewski
Listen: Big Thief, “Double Infinity”
Chappell Roan: “The Subway”
You don’t have to search far for a romantic cliché to excuse being stuck on an ex. Take the invisible string theory, the idea that fate tethers two people across time and space. It’s a cliché that Chappell tries to escape in “The Subway.” She’s haunted by signs of her ex: the scent of her perfume at parties, or the flash of green hair and a beauty mark on a stranger that makes her heart stop. But there’s no use in clinging to coincidences; her ex has moved on.
That’s the tragedy of “The Subway.” What once brought comfort in a city as big and lonely as New York are now painful reminders of lost love. Still, if you’re going to grieve, there’s no better backdrop than a place built for romanticizing heartbreak. The aching dream-pop guitar could soundtrack the iconic shot of Carrie Bradshaw walking slow-mo through Manhattan with the wind in her hair, bemoaning her latest episode of ego death. Chappell might be too much of a realist for that, slashing through the sentimental haze, amending Jeff Buckley’s desperate pleas of “It’s never over!” with a sobering quip: “Till it’s over.” The reminder of impermanence stings, but she’s going to do whatever it takes to get over this, even if it means starting over in a Canadian province seven hours away. –Heven Haile
Listen: Chappell Roan, “The Subway”
Perfume Genius: “It’s a Mirror”
How do you chart the line between your own brain and the rest of the universe? With “It’s a Mirror,” Mike Hadreas picks at the seam where world-historical turmoil (like a global pandemic) starts to inflame private neuroses. The song sprawls at a magnificent scale, all crashing drums, rolling guitars, and weighted silences, while Hadreas’ voice burrows into some of the softest questions you can ask yourself: Am I haunting myself like always, bound up in depressive states and intrusive thoughts, or has the state of things actually caught up to the terror I feel all the time? Maybe there is no clear seam; maybe we’re ultimately conduits in a vast web of experience, where hurt and triumph flow through us on their way to someone else. In other words: Even our most cloistered feelings still connect us to the world outside. –Sasha Geffen
Listen: Perfume Genius, “It’s a Mirror”
Lady Gaga: “Abracadabra”
The joke among Little Monsters goes that Lady Gaga has made “Bad Romance” at least five times throughout her career. That may be true, but the fact that I love Goodfellas doesn’t mean I have to hate Casino. Over the course of 2025, it became clear that “Abracadabra” is one of Gaga’s best-ever singles, a psychedelically weird acid-techno rager that’s so nasty, so potent, that it makes “Bad Romance” sound like Kidz Bop. A friend once asked me of “Abracadabra,” in a cab, “So, you actually think this is good?” But the right question would have been: So, you want to hear this play twice a night in every gay club in the world for the rest of your life? Like the lyrics “Amor oo-na-na/Abra-coo-da-bra,” it’s a no-brainer. –Shaad D’Souza
Listen: Lady Gaga, “Abracadabra”
Erika de Casier: “Delusional”
A standout from her Lifetime album, “Delusional” nails the ‘90s fuck music vibe, like Madonna’s murmur period circa Erotica or the 1993 Sliver soundtrack. It’s trip-hop so ethereal, you feel like you could float away on it. But there is an uncommon self-interrogation as de Casier encourages the person she has her eye on to call her delusional for fantasizing so hard. There’s an unsteadiness here that calls in everyone but the person she’s singing to, who could easily be put off by the intensity. This one gets bonus points for using a horse neigh sample cribbed from Mel & Tim’s “Good Guys Only Win in the Movies” and popularized by Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Brain.” –Rich Juzwiak
Listen: Erika de Casier, “Delusional”
Sabrina Carpenter: “Manchild”
One of the great indignities of dating men is that you’ll be snot-nosed crying under the unforgiving light of an AMC theater bathroom about how you will never love again and your friend has to gently remind you…He doesn’t own a bed frame. He didn’t know what garlic was before he met you. It doesn’t really help, but you do have to laugh at the absurdity of feeling so much for someone who’s capable of giving so little. On the glitzy country-pop track “Manchild,” Sabrina Carpenter writes with characteristic wit about this experience, of knowing a man is emotionally stunted but still caring enough to sing a whole song about him. She adopts an air of blasé disdain—“Whole outfit you’re wearing, God, I hope it’s ironic”—that eventually reveals itself as a facade as her claims become less and less believable: “I like my men all incompetent/And I swear they choose me, I’m not choosing them.” She’s invested but at a remove, singing like she’s lost the love of their life but knew it was never going to last anyway. –Vrinda Jagota
Listen: Sabrina Carpenter, “Manchild”
Playboi Carti: “OPM BABI”
You can plunge your head in ice water or you can listen to “OPM BABI.” This is the logical conclusion of bowling ball 808s and the baby voice, of bass-boosting and bag-chasing, of goth chaos agents shaping modern rap and soundtracking our rotten feeds, spamming gunshot sounds like they figured out the unlimited ammo glitch. This is the high-water mark of Atlanta retrofuturism, of creeping into the red and finding sacred scrolls on Datpiff. He really is the music. –Mano Sundaresan
Listen: Playboi Carti, “OPM BABI”
caroline: “Total euphoria”
UK group caroline are a physical embodiment of collective spirit: eight people united in glorious discord, each in their own way working toward a common purpose. They might be a punk house come to life. “Total euphoria,” the euphoric opening song off their second album, is the perfect encapsulation of the way they turn difference into a manifestation of radical empathy. Hard-panned guitars strum away at monotone chords, speeding and slowing according to their own whims, never in sync; bashing drums, themselves defiantly rubato, play the mediator’s role, while the rest of the ensemble—violin, reeds, the sweetest vocal harmonies—coax the din toward ecstatic, eardrum-splitting release. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: caroline, “Total euphoria”
Tracey: “Sex Life” [ft. Riko Dan]
“Sex Life,” the standout song from anonymous London collective Tracey’s debut EP, is a sex jam fashioned from machine-tooled parts. Before an energizing guest verse from grime pioneer Riko Dan, a robot-like voice speaks precisely over a humming dubstep beat, punctuating its bassy ebbs and flows with a mission statement cut and spliced into the track: “All I wanna do is fuck.” The sentiment is so straightforward it turns obscure, cloaking unvarnished lust in enough layers of abstraction to render it procedural noise; erotica by numbers never sounded so good. –Maxie Younger
Listen: Tracey, “Sex Life” [ft. Riko Dan]
This Is Lorelei / MJ Lenderman: “Dancing in the Club (MJ Lenderman Version)”
Remember when the indie darlings of the ’80s and ’90s covered each other’s songs in real time? Back then, before the business of pop became a publishing arms race, covers were a vehicle for buzzy acts to throw respect on their contemporaries, dirty up a breakthrough hit, maybe even let their growing fanbase in on a little secret. It was in that storied tradition that MJ Lenderman stripped This is Lorelei’s “Dancing in the Club” down to its forlorn essence—first as a live cover, then a collaborative bonus cut on the deluxe edition of the Water From Your Eyes member’s solo album. Lenderman swaps the depressive Auto-Tune for a lonesome alt-country lament and sounds like he was born to sing this indelible tune about being down bad but not so down bad that you won’t sing along to Steely Dan. –Zach Schonfeld
Listen: This Is Lorelei / MJ Lenderman, “Dancing in the Club (MJ Lenderman Version)”
Nourished by Time: “9 2 5”
Juggling multiple jobs can often feel like you’re on the verge of drowning. “9 2 5,” the euphoric track by Nourished by Time’s Marcus Brown, makes the Sisyphean feat of a working-class artist sound like a scrappier version of an ‘80s boogie anthem for the nightclub. With his voice layered over gurgling synths and glittering piano, Brown isn’t resigned to his fate, but he knows well enough not to be naive. His words to “always have a fight” might spark hope in you: one day, in a brighter, more lucrative future, you’ll find a shirt in the back of your closet, the perfume of grease still lingering on its fibers. Remember when you thought this would be the rest of your life? That day’s not today. But the shoreline is in view. –Jaeden Pinder
Listen: Nourished by Time, “9 2 5”
FKA twigs: “Hard”
twigs shines when she fixates on small, sharp moments: the chaos of losing your friends in the club, the rush of steeping in strangers’ sweat. On “Hard,” she zooms in on pressurized eye contact across a dancefloor, on the breath that snags in your throat before you ask, Wanna get out of here? The song is a shimmery sleight-of-hand: Yes, the chorus is brash, the synths are glossy, and the track pulses like a damp hand wedged against yours, leading you to the exit. But “Hard” curls into something stranger and sneakier. On the second verse, twigs’ voice sounds smothered in cotton, like she’s hiding, even from herself, the urge to ask, “Would you do it if I didn’t ask you?” The drums judder and twitch. She weaves together anxiety and assertiveness, friction and fear—the shiver of oh, shit that comes just before, oh, wow. –Dani Blum
Listen: FKA twigs, “Hard”
EsDeeKid / fakemink / Rico Ace: “LV Sandals”
It’s just one bar of production, but it’s a perfect bar. It’s the one grimy fried bass hit that suddenly cuts off on the third beat. And it’s also how the bass seems to trigger the synth siren swell. And it’s also the silence on the fourth beat before the bar repeats. And it’s also how, if you have the song on repeat, the little noisy artifacts at the beginning and end connect to form a perfect loop in case you wanted to live in this song forever. fakemink, EsDeeKid, and Rico Ace are all swag, but producer Wraith9 is the show. –Jeremy D. Larson
Listen: EsDeeKid / fakemink / Rico Ace, “LV Sandals”
Chuquimamani-Condori: “Breathe Kullawada Caporal E DJ edit”
If you’ve ever DJed, you’ve probably come up with mixes and mash-ups that sound like they‘re gonna tear the party up, but actually empty out the dancefloor. The magic of Chuquimamani-Condori’s edits is that their imagination becomes reality, by not just remixing the vocals of pop darlings and country hitmakers, but adding entire new layers to them. That’s the sauce the Aymara artist lends to the power-ballad hook of Faith Hill’s “Breathe,” cutting it with the wistful folk music of “Breathing,” off their seismic reintroduction record DJ E. As the drums clatter and the noise intensifies, Faith’s sweeping vocals go from the kind that would fit the climax of a Lifetime Christmas romance to being about a connection so deep it’s like sparks ripple when their hands clasp. Now that’s a remix. –Alphonse Pierre
Listen: Chuquimamani-Condori, “Breathe Kullawada Caporal E DJ edit”
Pluto & YK Niece: “WHIM WHAMIEE”
My favorite comment buried in the recesses of the official video for Pluto and YK Niece’s smash hit reads as follows: “I play this when the homies ain’t around,” punctuated with various laughing and shrugging emojis, and driven home with four flames to boot. Overpowering the latent shame of insecure men is just a sliver of the addictive power “WHIM WHAMIEE” holds. The duo bounds alongside an inspired Zaytoven beat that would have made D4L break into tears of joy, spitting with delirium about putting their men in Lululemon, letting the Draco sing with reckless abandon, and throwing it in dudes’ faces without a second thought. The bars could stand as magnetic quotables on their own, but it’s Pluto and YK Niece’s chemistry swirling in the background that cemented the Atlanta anthem as song of the summer: the endless stream of ad-libs leaves phrases that stick in your hippocampus like you’re the Manchurian Candidate. This all to say: fellas, play this when the homies are around—it’s OK, we’re all doing it. –Matthew Ritchie
Listen: Pluto & YK Niece, “WHIM WHAMIEE”
aya: “off to the ESSO”
Last year at Primavera Sound, I saw aya terrorize a crowd of unsuspecting young Europeans: As the West Yorkshire producer DJ’d and sang, she started to climb onto the decks and scream-sing directly into the faces in the crowd. This is what “off to the ESSO” feels like: aya reaching towards you, Spy Kids 3D-style, grabbing you by the throat, and forcibly pulling you into her nightmare. It is a terrifying, upsetting portrait of drug addiction. Paranoid non-linear thoughts crash into each other; the beat pounds into every inch of your body; and then suddenly it’s off to the gas station for more cash. It hammers its message home with brutal efficiency: Even hell would feel better than this. –Shaad D’Souza
Listen: aya, “off to the ESSO”
Alex G: “Afterlife”
Alex G’s musical evolution always feels like one step forward, one step into another dimension. On “Afterlife,” the first single from his major-label debut, he cranks up his music’s cinematic scope: a bright swell of synths; a couple layers of mandolin; his enunciation clearer and more effusive than ever. But he counterweighs the newfound polish by doubling down on his characteristic strangeness: a fake-out ending, a ghostly chorus, a funny little yelped note. As on all of his best tracks, he evokes an emotion whose outlines are blurry—is it nostalgia? Yearning? Regret? It gives you the feeling of trying to describe your earliest childhood memory. But when he sings the chorus, his delivery makes the track disarmingly optimistic. “The light came big and bright/I began another life,” he repeats, like he’s imbuing his songcraft with the glory of the Great Beyond. –Marissa Lorusso
Listen: Alex G, “Afterlife”
Nino Paid: “Tomorrow Will Be Better”
Nino Paid is America's greatest practitioner of the gospel blues. While his stripped-down spirituals reflect the cadences of DMV crank, his search for transcendence reflects an ecumenical tradition. “Tomorrow Will Be Better” is the old-time religion concealed in a two-minute sermon of street life. With a funereal monotone, the PG County rapper creates a psalm of self-determination from betrayal, struggle, and grief. Dispensing aphorisms like “it’s cool to be fake and it’s hard to be real,“ the 24-year old synthesizes his pain into unbreakable perseverance, and the weary hope that the sun will rise again tomorrow and bring forth a long-promised deliverance. –Jeff Weiss
Listen: Nino Paid, “Tomorrow Will Be Better”
Water From Your Eyes: “Playing Classics”
When a weird rock band starts making weirder dance music, we all must heed the call. On “Playing Classics,” the miracle of the band’s album, It’s a Beautiful Place, Rachel Brown and Nate Amos pump-fake from their customary guitar experiments to deliver a blast of bone-dry Eurodance that will unlock the knees of even the stiffest of rock snobs. (The original version of the song was apparently 12 minutes long and inspired by Charli XCX.) Clean piano hooks have been a historically reliable shortcut to transcendence in the club since the first tumbling chord of Marshall Jefferson’s house classic “Move Your Body”; the keys here are immaculate, but have a goofy, bumbling quality, as if bashful about their own existence. And even though the world in the lyrics is recognizably grim, ruled by “desire in crisis” and full of indebted individuals seeking heaven and finding only the mall, Brown delivers their words in a droll monotone that reads as serenity, rather than detachment. Their quiet recommendation to “practice, shake it, you’re free” turns a dance floor command into a philosophy you could build your whole life around—just remember to stretch first. –Molly Mary O’Brien
Listen: Water From Your Eyes, “Playing Classics”
Dijon: “Yamaha”
Dijon’s superpower is his ability to turn the ordinary indignity of heartbreak, or well-worn charms of married life, into something that sounds as big as it feels. Songs like “Rodeo Clown” and “The Dress”—both from 2021’s Absolutely—showed that the guitarist could write devastating confessionals and slice-of-life pop standards in equal measure, even as he began building out the sprawling studio sound he would realize on tracks with Bon Iver and Justin Bieber, as well as on Baby, his resplendent second album.
“Yamaha” is the mushy bubblegum center of this confectionery masterpiece, the moment when its hardened studio lacquer gives way to sublime pop. Is it named for the Yamaha DX-7, the luminous 1980s keyboard that features throughout the album? Is it a nod to The-Dream’s high-octane song of the same name? Wherever the title may come from, its inspiration is clear: the sound is pure Prince, refracted through four decades of popular music remade in his image, a clear before and after. Yet for all of its debt to the past—its raucous Teddy Riley verses, its soaring boy-band chorus—the song is wholly Dijon’s, a transcendent and logical next step for the sound he’s spent years refining. For a brief moment, all of the details of Baby fall away, as the songwriter leans into pop’s limitless capacity to give us back to ourselves transformed. Is there any bigger feeling than that? –Rob Arcand
Listen: Dijon, “Yamaha”
Oklou: “blade bird”
The title conjures up cybernetic creatures and ghastly acts of vivisection. But it also has a pleasing yin-yang symmetry—the sharpness of the blade next to the feather-soft animal. “blade bird” is a bruised and blissed-out allegory for avoidant attachment style, or maybe parenthood. Oklou calls herself a cage, destined to be hurt by an unnamed other whose roaming spirit she admires. She yearns to be a cloud, a porous vessel that neither constricts nor clasps her object of affection. But she can only achieve cloudhood in music, her voice turning into liquid whimpers over gentle strums, thudding drums, and doubles of herself. And so the song takes flight, a swooning peak to an otherwise ambiently dreamy album. –Kieran Press-Reynolds
Listen: Oklou, “blade bird”
Bad Bunny: “NUEVAYoL”
It’s the song that launched a thousand perreos. From the shores of Condado to Orchard Beach, the entire Puerto Rican diaspora was brought together in 2025 by a rallying cry carried down from the heavens—or, more appropriately, a third-floor fire escape. If there was a Latino with a JBL speaker nearby, odds are you heard El Jíbaro call out the Boricua Bat Signal: a spirited “NUEVAYOOOOOLLL.”
“NUEVAYoL,” the opening track on Debí Tirar Más Fotos, is an emphatic tribute to Puerto Rico’s outsized impact on music and culture. This year, Benito, who hails from the north side of the island, has made it his goal to uplift his people and advocate for his island’s independence. On “NUEVAYoL,” he extends his message to include those who migrated to the mainland over the years. The track fuses vintage Nuyorican salsa (courtesy of Andy Montañez and El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico’s “Un Verano en Nueva York”) with skittering dembow, and speedruns through 50 years of Latin ephemera; the lyrics reference Willie Colón, Big Pun, Lápiz Conciente, and Mets outfielder Juan Soto, to name a few. If each song on the album, in line with its title, is a snapshot into a specific moment of boricua history, “NUEVAYoL” puts itself smack dab in the middle of the Puerto Rican Day Parade. –Reanna Cruz
Listen: Bad Bunny, “NUEVAYoL”
Geese: “Taxes”
Watching Geese play an impromptu album release show behind The Lot Radio felt like witnessing the moment a band becomes generation-defining. Beyond just the obvious wheres and whens (Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the fall), it bore a striking resemblance to the parking lot concert the Yeah Yeah Yeahs headlined almost one year after 9/11. Much like “Our Time” became a latent command for a city to rise from the ashes, “Taxes” was a reckoning with American violence from the nation’s largest and loudest city—the city that birthed the current face of American authoritarianism, as well as one of the most important rock bands of his second term. Thousands sang along, sweaty open palms and smartphone cameras aloft, swearing that they too would only pay their taxes under threat of crucifixion.
Is “Taxes” a protest song about civilians’ complicity in the crimes of our empire? A parable about reaping what you sow? A last-ditch plea for absolution after almost an entire record of trying and failing to live an honorable life? “Taxes” stalks and sways on hollow, death-rattling drums and is reborn at its coda, exploding into a raucous pop melody helmed by Emily Green’s sprightly guitarwork and Cameron Winter’s street preacher squawk: “Doctor, heal yourself…And I will break my own heart from now on.” Are we deserving of the hell we live in? “Taxes” neither blames nor exonerates the individual, only acknowledges all of us as both benefactors and victims of an imperfect reality. –Grace Robins-Somerville
Listen: Geese, “Taxes”
james K: “Play”
Of all the songs on the New York producer and songwriter’s latest record, “Play” might be the easiest to map onto a traditional pop narrative: You can read it, without too much fudging, as a breakup song. “Where did you go, my mate?” james K wonders at the chorus as breakbeats chew up the chiffon of her synthesizer pads in their mechanical teeth. But her voice is more wistful than embittered; she seems to be trailing after some new beginning rather than grieving an ending.
If K makes use of some of pop music’s melodic logic in “Play,” she also healthily inverts its structural tenets. The floor falls out of this track halfway through, landing us in a vat of ambient sirens, vocoder, and Squarepusher marginalia. Deftones guitars start to blast in like hot steam once the song reassembles itself. “Hold on to your home,” K urges, like she’s the tornado trying to tear it from its foundation. “Play” whispers that the disintegration of one relationship might actually end up wheeling you onto far more fertile soil. Hanging on to your home might not mean staying pinned to one spot; it might have more to do with setting down roots wherever you happen to land after the storm. –Sasha Geffen
Listen: james K, “Play”
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Babyfxce E: “PTP (Remix)” [ft. Monaleo]
When it comes to the club rap of Flint and Houston, foul-mouthed punchlines are tradition. Carrying that torch for their respective cities are Babyfxce E and Monaleo, two of the hardest rappers of the year, who, on the remix of “PTP,” are throwing filthy fastballs. With E, the hilarity comes from how casual he is about everything, shrugging off losing his girl and weaving in slickly comic dance steps. Meanwhile, Leo’s intensity bleeds comedy out of getting head and goofy wordplay: “Bitches wanna scissor with the top dog, TDE.” Wrapped inside of a clap-heavy twerk anthem, their situational punchline cracks would have been shutting down clubs across the country if we lived in a better world. –Alphonse Pierre
Listen: Babyfxce E, “PTP (Remix)” [ft. Monaleo]
Wednesday: “Townies”
Here’s one for the AITA message boards: Can I still be pissed at the guy who shared my nudes if he’s dead now?
This sort of scenario—interlocking crises that feel at once sobering and surreal—hits a narrative sweet spot for Wednesday, a band that is from North Carolina and won’t let you forget it. Their songs study tragicomedies that play out in overlooked pockets of the American South, and “Townies” is among their best. It quakes with unresolved conflict: between distance and identification, as singer and lyricist Karly Hartzman’s narrator observes small-town life from the middle ground; between banality and calamity, as normal days take brutal turns. Nudes get leaked; people die. At least there’s something to talk about.
All that tension is amplified by the music: warm, campfire country blown apart by guitar squall. Hartzman’s voice tells the story just as well as her words, slipping between dry, talky melody and a laryngitic howl. When the song slows down and denatures in the end, its precise plot points start to fade like sun-bleached newsprint. Somehow, you still feel like you could keep reading forever. –Olivia Horn
Listen: Wednesday, “Townies”
PinkPantheress: “Illegal”
Having a massive crush can feel a lot like getting too stoned, and it can raise a lot of the same questions: Did I sound weird when I introduced myself to them just now? Was offering a handshake too formal? Is my heart pounding loud enough for everyone at this party to hear, or is that just the bass? This is “Illegal,” a one-two hit that’ll knock you right on your ass. For all her talk of shame and paranoia, Pink remains characteristically bubbly, riding the high of a soon-to-be hookup and an anxiety-inducing smoke sesh with equal enthusiasm. From the moment she offers her effortlessly charming introduction, “Illegal” is UK garage maximalism at its most indulgent. Blindingly bright synths flash alongside an Underworld sample and cartoony “Wow!” ad-libs—all of it rolled up and smoked together gives off the effect of strobes felt but not seen through screwed-shut, bloodshot eyes. No greenout has ever sounded so exhilarating. –Grace Robins-Somerville
Listen: PinkPantheress, “Illegal”
Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band: “New Threats From the Soul”
“New Threats From the Soul” welcomes you like the friendliest saloon in town—all fingersnaps and woodwinds and pedal steel—and closes with what sounds like crickets duetting with marimba. It’s long enough to warrant an ad break if you listen on YouTube and catchy enough to keep you humming as you tidy up around your apartment. But it’s a testament to Ryan Davis’ songwriting that, for as kaleidoscopic as the music can be, most listeners will come away just thinking about the lyrics, so full of humor and personality that you want him to keep going for another nine-and-a-half minutes. Even when he’s offering universal portraits of intimacy (“She once said that nothing could make her feel quite as loved as one early morning kiss could”), he always steers toward some new insight, each couplet another chance to get closer to the heart of the matter in cosmic, imagistic ways. Lucky for us, he’s got soul to spare. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen: Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band, “New Threats From the Soul”
Addison Rae: “Headphones On”
In an interview with Variety, flanked by producers Luka Kloser and ELVIRA, Addison Rae revealed that the recording session for “Headphones On” was immediately followed by an emergency flight to the doctor. Not that you can tell by the song itself: four minutes of dreamy, breathy, downtempo heaven that seems designed to play on repeat. “But if you listen to the song, compared to the rest of the music…” she explained. “It’s a little bit more, like, on the verge of tears.”
For all the anthems about dancing through the pain, there is something strangely personal about Rae’s take—and it’s not just a fleeting mention to her parents, whose thorny history has long been a subject of reportage. Credit also goes to her vocal delivery, both casual and elastic, and the producers, who create a sound that’s deliberately current and playfully nostalgic. The suite-like structure also helps, steady and ever-growing, all the way to its winding synth solo reserved for the final refrain. All these decisions helped make “Headphones On” a breakout single, but there’s something else that elevates it to the category of songs that Rae extols in the lyrics: the ones we turn to instinctively to summon confidence through hard times. And if we could pinpoint these qualities, she knows there’d be no reason to keep listening. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen: Addison Rae, “Headphones On”
Amaarae: “S.M.O.”
“S.M.O.” is all that sex can be: a feat of athleticism, a path towards ecstasy, a prism for all our wants and kinks and fears and needs. Amaarae’s always been direct about desire, but she’s never had so many eye-popping lyrics in one song. There’s the titular rallying cry, yes, but she offers up a dealer’s choice of debauched come-ons: “Take advantage of my high”; “Show me how you like to love, I need to know”; “I wanna meet the God that made you.”
She craves it all, though, and so the music follows suit. These few minutes are a masterclass in cross-genre cool, melding gqom’s moody club sonics with zouk’s syncopated grooves. And while Amaarae has cited other genres and, explicitly, Janet’s “The Pleasure Principle,” little from this lineage or her fellow alté pop stars has been so deliciously, sexually brash. It’s easy to overlook her craft: She domineers the track with a sly lilt, offering brazen, vulnerable confessions as windows into lust and longing—she knows that transparency is essential to getting what you want. And as synths flash and glitter, she radiates confidence, drips with sex appeal. The secret is in knowing that “sex is a part of your nature.” All this is inside of you, she suggests. Just let it out. –Joshua Minsoo Kim
Listen: Amaarae, “S.M.O.”
Smerz: “You got time and I got money”
When Smerz perform “You got time and I got money,” they stand in front of a big fan and transform into Victoria’s Secret supermodels. Big city life’s bradycardic beating heart is a slow jam in a Shein top. From a chintzy click track and a treacly string motif that’s instantly familiar yet untraceable, it sounds like the Norwegian duo of Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt is slipping into a plush eiderdown. “I am yours and your boy only,” Stoltenberg sings, as if the song were written for someone else to sing and she’s just holding their spot on the stage, “So put your hands around me.” Her plainspoken observations of a lover trigger profound sense memories—the smell of laundry detergent, every song you’ve ever made out to playing at the same time. “You got time and I got money” reminds me of another pair of angels, these ones sketched by the painter Paul Klee in 1931. Their heavenly bodies conjoin on the page, hastily scribbled in an eternal embrace. –Walden Green
Listen: Smerz, “You got time and I got money”
Cameron Winter: “Love Takes Miles”
We’d thought we’d heard everything that love can do: Lift me higher and higher. Make me feel brand new. Make my dreams come true. And then “Love Takes Miles” stumbled half-drunk up to the microphone and poured its little heart out. Cameron Winter, the rookie of the year, made a solo debut that sounds like he’s a hundred years in.
You can tell from the way those first notes come out that the bruise is still fresh, but “Love Takes Miles” is like a man holding a fistful of lottery tickets: It makes you sick the way his hopes shoot up to the moon and land back in the dust. Maybe he’ll find love on the side of the road, with the blues syncopation and the juke joint piano ringing like a payphone on an empty highway. Who’s that calling? Sometimes I imagine the people in the song are just absent friends and sometimes they’re lovers with their whole lives ahead of them. Love will find you anywhere, which is what makes this one for the ages. Get a grip, you’re telling me, Who says “a-walkin’” unless they’re trying to sound like Bob Dylan on purpose? Of course he is. Lend your shoe to the young wunderkind, coming all this way on foot. Love will take you miles away, drop you off someplace you don’t recognize yourself, and years later still feel like the first time. –Anna Gaca
Listen: Cameron Winter, “Love Takes Miles”