Best New Songs of the Week (September 4, 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.)

Blue Bendy: “Poke”

I think I have something of a love-hate relationship with “Poke,” Blue Bendy’s first release since their debut record last year (in other words, our first glance at Blue Bendy post-internal-drama and post-lineup-change). Sonically, it’s wonderful: frontman Arthur Nolan’s vocals are as captivatingly unpredictable as ever, all the more so when surrounded by those beautifully dissonant piano stabs and bursts of quiet harmony, that tingling synth and insistent percussion. But man, is it hard to hear lines like “Extra long, you can call me bae / Pookie doubled down on the hospital stays” without instinctively cringing. Yes, I know that it’s trying to make fun of social media and its terminology (see: the title, which refers to the lost art of Facebook poking), but apparently hearing “bae” and “pookie” in the wild still triggers a mild fight or flight response in me—but I think that, too, is kind of the point. The song opens on Nolan groaning in frustration that someone on the internet spread a rumor that he’d “gone insane,” which… Well, perhaps the statement Nolan wrote to accompany the single tells it best: “‘Who started the rumour of my insanity, and is a Facebook poke still hot 10 years on?’ This pretty much sums up our last 18 months perfectly. Maybe with a pinch of salt.” As a result, there’s a genuine frustration to “Poke” that belies the satire of it: is it a parodic send-up of the melodrama of the terminally online, or a self-aware externalization of it? After I first heard the track, I wrestled with that question for a solid ten minutes—but then I realized that even asking it kind of misses the point. After all, isn’t a song that blurs a line infinitely more interesting than a song maintaining it? —Casey Epstein-Gross

Cate Le Bon: “About Time”

“I get a little upset / I just can’t take it yet.” The third single from Cate Le Bon’s forthcoming LP, Michelangelo Dying, is an unsettling track affixed with guitar reverb, pulsing synths, and crisp vocals at the front of the mix. The song feels like it exists inside a hollow, empty room, with nothing but four walls for the sounds to bounce off of. There’s the occasional self-harmony and backing moves, like on the hook “I’m not lying / In a bed you made,” that add a church-like punch to certain lines. “About Time” doesn’t build so much as it persists, slowly and sneakily growing with more droning synths, layered vocals, and resonant bass tones as it continues. When the synth blares into oblivion a deep reevaluation of relationships and expectations arises and ends with a “Collect yourself / Rigid collapse” loop. Le Bon’s vocals slowly overtaken by all the echo, and the cyclical nature of the closing refrains feels like a ritual, as if life is just alternating between those two things: falling apart and then picking up the pieces. —Cassidy Sollazzo

Cut Copy ft. Kate Bollinger: “Belong to You”

While I was already familiar with Kate Bollinger, the psych-pop song “Belong to You” is, admittedly, my first taste of the veteran synth-pop band Cut Copy. The new single, about a man who is so obsessed with his past mistakes that he can’t enjoy the present moment, feels all too relatable. “All that you want is already here,” vocalist Dan Whitford sings, echoed by Bollinger: “Roads that point to nowhere led me back to your heart.” It’s a wistful back and forth, a reminder that this mysterious world often ends up shepherding you towards the path you’re meant to follow. The rousing message of “Belong to You,” boosted by vibrant synthesizers, airy pedal steel, and stacked harmonies, is an important one—necessary in an age where content and trends are fighting to steal our attention away from the important, fleeting things unfolding right in front of us. —Camryn Teder

Fine: “Portal”

For me, Fine’s last album, 2024’s Rocky Top Ballads, signaled the start of a summer of sunset drives and late nights basking in the moody lamp lights in my bedroom. On tracks like “Big Muzzy” and “Days Incomplete” especially, I felt myself sinking into another one-sided love affair with a Copenhagen musician, much like my previous brushes with ML Buch and Smerz. When I saw Fine released another single this week, at the conclusion of summer, I was elated. “Portal” came just in time for me. The song features a minimal soundscape, one of Fine’s sparest yet, with nothing more than her singular vocal line, a guitar, and subtle percussive flourishes filling out the spaces in-between and beneath her. It’s a song that feels truly intimate as she croons, “You keep on feeling lost / You keep your fingers crossed / Maybe it’s all we got, but it’s not enough.” —Camryn Teder

Hatchie: “Lose It Again”

I’ve been a big Hatchie fan since 2020 and became particularly attached to her 2018 EP, Sugar & Spice. While I’ve loved all of her releases since, to me, nothing topped that record. But after hearing her first single off her upcoming album, Liquorice, I’m convinced we’re going to get Hatchie’s best album yet. “Lose It Again” sounds like if Cocteau Twins and Oasis shagged and made a gorgeous song-child. Hatchie’s music has always felt intimate to me, ripe for listening in solitude while daydreaming, rather than in a large, crowded room. But “Lose It Again” begs for an arena moment. With its commanding, hazy guitars and sing-along chorus, it’s the expansive sound that will surely take Hatchie to the next level. —Tatiana Tenreyro

Liam Kazar: “The Word The War”

Liam Kazar’s new album, Pilot Light, is his first in four years, but he’s been anything but still since Due North. Last February, his song “Next Time Around” floored me, though I was surprised that news of something else didn’t immediately follow. But, considering the recent work he’s been doing with Hannah Cohen, Sam Evian, and Jeff Tweedy, appearing on the latter’s upcoming triple-album, I can understand why. “The Word The War,” the lead single from Pilot Light, is what I imagine Tom Petty might have sounded like had he started making music about ten years earlier. The tune was recorded at Evian’s Flying Cloud Studios in the Catskills and you can certainly tell: At the front of the mix, Kazar’s guitar jangles and rambles against wisps of Cohen and Sima Cunningham’s ageless vocal; in a sun-dappled backdrop, Sean Mullins’ snare splashes against cresting bass thuds; Kazar sings, “What good’s a home if it isn’t full of love,” in one ear while the tune gently boogies in the other. To be quite honest with you, it’s hard to talk about “The Word The War” without sounding like Kazar paid me to. This thing is just that fucking good. —Matt Mitchell