Best New Songs of the Week (August 21, 2025)

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.)

Dijon: “Yamaha”

Dijon does the dated stuff better than most, preserving the ‘80s and ‘90s in grains and textures rather than copying someone else’s image or attitude, and his new album Baby is meteoric proof that his debut, Absolutely, was star-making and his sound will command R&B’s next destiny without leaving any of its ancestry behind. The vocals on “Yamaha,” which come in at every direction, boast a handsomeness not unlike prime D’Angelo and stack where guitars rambled in Dijon’s work three years ago. Here, his voice is not only his instrument but an ecstatic ride that plays well into the album’s collage-y, with cresting, contrasting synth programming, manipulated pitches, choral tangents, and Top 40 piano drama coagulating. For some, that might make for a frustrating listen. For me, it makes writing down whatever hyphenated genres have been swirling around Dijon’s output feel less corny. Alt-R&B, post-pop, anti-Americana, and nu-jungle are all ludicrous descriptors but apropos. “Yamaha” sounds out of time but of the moment. —Matt Mitchell

Elias Rønnenfelt ft. Dean Blunt: “tears on his rings and chains”

Iceage guitarist Elias Rønnenfelt and Dean Blunt are two of my favorite collaborators. From their sunny 2023 single “Smile Please” to the recent release of their EP Lucre, the duo’s meshing of post-punk and experimental rock is a fusion that just makes sense. On Rønnenfelt and Blunt’s latest collaborative effort “tears on his rings and chains,” warm guitars mingle with midtempo drums and sparse synths to create a dizzyingly romantic soundscape. The song’s clean production gives it an innately effortless sound, while Rønnenfelt’s broken vocals provide a satisfying contrast to the cleansing backdrop. “And I just wasn’t made up for these times, but I don’t care as long as you are mine,” Rønnenfelt sings, traversing equally poetic themes of love and existentialism. It’s another satisfying piece of off-kilter rock from two of the scene’s best voices. —Camryn Teder

Greg Freeman: “Salesman”

Greg Freeman’s “Salesman” doesn’t just knock—it barges in, briefcase swinging, kicking up dust as the band tears into one of the liveliest cuts on Burnover. Slide guitar smears across the mix, horns jab in like punctuation marks, the rhythm section pulling everything forward with a reckless kind of swagger. It’s a strange, exhilarating tension: the lyrics circle mortality, fate, the inevitability of time’s door-to-door routine, but the music refuses to sink under that weight. Freeman sings about clocks, rules, bullshit, and eternity, his voice catching somewhere between resignation and a grin, and the band answers back by sounding like they’d rather keep playing than let life itself get a word in. Halfway through, the song unspools into a screeching instrumental stretch—pedal steel grinding into sax, riffs unraveling into their own crooked logic. It doesn’t feel like a funeral march, but a stubborn detour, a tongue-in-cheek joyride, a way of putting off the knock just a little longer. That’s the trick of “Salesman”: it knows what’s coming, but it dances anyway. Sometimes the racket is the only rebellion we’ve got. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Jean Dawson: “Rock A Bye Baby”

As he told me in our cover story conversation in January, the wisdom of Prince’s music remains one of the best gestures of love in Jean Dawson’s life. It’s become, as he put it, a “Lovecraftian romance.” Dawson’s work is a vault not just of Black performance, but of cross-generational excellence—just as Prince’s mononymic heritage was and is. Dawson’s first single since last year’s Glimmer of God, “Rock A Bye Baby,” is superbly culled from the education that Prince’s innovations have afforded pop music for four decades. It’s a chugging, snappy synth-pop track smacked with rattling snares and head-pounding bass phrases. But don’t get it twisted: Dawson’s latest is not a novelty or some, as he would say, “retro-fuck.” A song covered in chrome, “Rock A Bye Baby” lovingly wears its inspirations into the present. I’ve been saying that dance music is up right now, and it’s echoing back to me. This is pop perfection. Templates remain outdated in the company of Dawson’s ear. —Matt Mitchell

Joyce Manor: “All My Friends Are So Depressed”

It was about time for some new music from Joyce Manor. After a 3-year absence, the SoCal punk band returned this week with “All My Friends Are So Depressed.” Bandleader Barry Johnson said the track comes from his stab at writing a Joyce Manor version of Lana Del Rey’s lyrical style, with references to the Lord on Tecate trucks, key lime pie, writing songs being high, wearing a dress, and, of course, being deep in depression. Close enough! But instead of fully committing to the bit and making it sound like a Lana track, Joyce Manor goes for an alt-country slant, a direction that feels fitting with the genre’s rise to the mainstream. Johnson has always been a vivid songwriter, one who, even when approaching songs with a sense of humor, makes them feel sincere and conversational, so it’s no wonder that even while challenging himself with an admittedly silly prompt, he comes up with something that still retains that relatable quality. The way he casually throws out the line “Wish that I would fucking die” is said with the same cadence as you would while venting to a friend. And who wouldn’t go for some “key lime pie and Frampton live”? —Tatiana Tenreyro