Best New Songs of the Week (September 25, 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.)

Chuwi: “Falta Algo”

As a native Puerto Rican, I get excited when I see young, emerging artists from my island receive attention, even more so when it’s through bringing our folkloric music to a global audience in a modernized lens. Like most of their new fans, I found out about Chewi—a band made up of siblings Willy, Lorén, and Wester Aldarondo, with their friend Adrián López—after hearing their feature on “WELTiTA” from Bad Bunny’s DeBI TiRAR MáS FOToS (which is one of our favorite albums of the year), so I’d been waiting to see what they have coming up next. Their latest single, “Falta Algo,” reimagines bomba with experimental, droney elements. Vocalist Loren sings about having learned life’s lessons and having everything she ever needed, but still finds that something is missing. While it’s a massive win for us boricuas that Benito has become one of the biggest artists in the world, it’s vital that we pay attention to others who are doing really cool stuff beyond Bad Bunny and make it last beyond Hispanic Heritage Month. —Tatiana Tenreyro

Hannah Frances: “Life’s Work”

The first four seconds of “Life’s Work” feel like you’ve stumbled into the wrong movie theater, a horror score leaking through the walls, before the finger-picked guitar seamlessly transforms into a delicate, twangy backdrop to Hannah Frances’ melodic gymnastics. Everything tilts, and tilts again: polyrhythms skitter, brass flares, and that central mantra—“learning to trust in spite of it is life’s work”—tightens like wire around the song’s spine. The melody slips sideways, the arrangement keeps layering more claws and teeth, until the whole thing feels like grief dressed up in vaudeville clothes: brutal, theatrical, a little absurd, melancholic in spite of itself. You can hear Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen’s collaboration in the architecture—careful, tensile layers rather than ornament—yet nothing blunts Frances’ voice, which cuts clear as glass through the din. There’s a mischief twining through the song, the melody unpredictable and cheeky, the words sitting light on her tongue, but no matter where the track turns, it can’t outrun the melancholy that seeps in—which is, of course, the point. Resilience isn’t stoicism; it’s motion, breath, re-entry. “Life’s Work” turns trust into labor, ritual, a spidery lattice, a grin stretching tight even as it trembles. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Lael Neale: “Some Bright Morning”

Lael Neale has summoned the likes of Cate Le Bon and Margo Guryan on her newest single, “Some Bright Morning,” a charming folk-pop track that chases a glimmer of optimism. A quick turnaround after her latest album, Altogether Stranger, which came out in May, Neale’s new song carries on many of the merits of her past work, particularly her effervescent production. As a sweeping snare and tambourine establish the pace of the song, a bright synthesizer floats to the surface, and a tinny guitar wails in a solo that pans from left to right. Neale questions in the verses whether the dawn she dreams of will ever come, and if it does, “Will I ever see the light?” But she’s steadfast in her resolution to “get it right some bright morning,” and her hope is galvanizing. She brushes off her woes with a series of “doo doo doo”s as the song rounds out, and if you listen carefully, you may just hear the twinkle of the sun rising. —Caroline Nieto

Liam Kazar: “Day Off”

“Losers two, losers toodaloo” goes the chorus of Liam Kazar’s achingly perfect new song, “Day Off.” I’m not shocked that it bowled me over immediately. I loved the Tom Petty choogle of Kazar’s last Pilot Light single, “The Word The War,” but “Day Off” saunters more than it boogies, its front-porch symphony lapping at the creek bed of my wincing heart. With the weekend’s barrel begging for me to look down it, Kazar’s words on “Day Off”—“Would it be such a bad day if we take the whole day off?”—taunt with the riches of skipping work to do nothing much at all. “We could play Monopoly if you got a year to burn, or brush up on our Urdu,” he speaks into the garden of Michael Prince Coleman’s Wurlitzer. “Takes the same time to learn! Just look at it this way: It’s another no good dead-end job, and playing hooky is only taking money from the man or the mob.” I have to highlight Dorian Gehring’s fiddle, as it sings like a fourth voice alongside Kazar, Hannah Cohen, and Sima Cunningham’s. “Day Off” rumbles in the halfway between a snoozed alarm and a parlor guitar’s serenade. Music this sincere and homey ought to come by the bale. —Matt Mitchell

Pansy: “Mercy, Kill Me”

Pansy, the Seattle band led by singer/guitarist Vivian McCall, worship at the altars of Big Star, the Clean, and Teenage Fanclub, which always gets me barking like Pavlov’s dog. A new EP, Skin Graft, is on the way, and lead single “Mercy, Kill Me” is one of the best successors to “Sparky’s Dream” I’ve encountered recently. But “Mercy, Kill Me” isn’t just excellent pop-rock, it’s a lyrical balm for trans folks looking for a story like their own. “Transition is like molting,” McCall explains. “Once that period of rawness is over, and you’ve cobbled together a new exoskeleton, you’re in a position to tests its strength against the day to day stuff like heartbreak, anxiety, disappointment, failure; and truly intense experiences like transmisogyny and sexual violence.” The song feasts on a hook you’d need a lobotomy to forget, and, a week after first hearing it, I am thinking of the third verse even still. “Cut my hair and drove real far,” McCall sings. “Felt the miles, tight like a wire, snap in the wind of a waning fire.” Pansy make music so catchy and necessary I might start rooting for the Mariners. —Matt Mitchell