Every week, we update our Best New Songs playlist with several tracks that catch our attention, then round up the best songs of each month in this segment. Here, in alphabetical order, are the best songs of October 2025.
Anna von Hausswolff, ‘Aging Young Women’ [feat. Ethel Cain]
For the subjects of ‘Aging Young Women’, a family is a disappearing dream: not a thing of the past so much as a reminder of time’s encroaching tide. The fear that looms over it is often internalized if not totally repressed, but on top of the imposing elegance that characterizes most of album ICONOCLASTS, the Swedish musician renders it the most accessible ballad on the album, letting its flurry of possibilities echo out and fold into pop’s nascent reckoning with the complexities of motherhood. More than just a spiritually aligned presence on the song, Ethel Cain marks out the plurality of voices, singing, “In the church, when we cry/ Some fallen angels told us to keep our heads high.”
feeo, ‘Here’
It doesn’t take long for feeo, the London singer born Theodora Laird, to describe what’s happened to the city she calls ‘Here’. “The sun won’t shine/ Not the real one anyway/ Not the sun that once kissed us awake,” she sings over a lone pad that sounds, simply, like a void. As she makes her bid for saying goodbye to this place, a slightly crunchy, fingerpicked guitar opens up the song like a wind that could carry the couple away. feeo curls back into numbness, but her point, like her poetry, is crystal clear: “This place was built to last/ It wasn’t built for love.” As if to demonstrate how much she’s worn the argument, even the feeling thin, ‘Here’ is the longest track of her debut album Goodness, stretching out to seven minutes. But it’s also an absolute highlight, making you feel like feeo does: small, powerless, itching for change.
Hatchie, ‘Only One Laughing’
Hatchie not only delivers a dazzling song about finding herself in a frustrating predicament, but makes it seem like a viable solution. “The only one laughing may well be the only road out of this,” she sings on the latest single from her imminent album Liquorice. So she leans into it, trusting drummer Stella Mozgawa to help her rollick her way out of helplessness over jangly guitars while giving space to the words she most wants to be heard. “Let’s abandon all pretense if only for my amusement/ Would it make any difference when we spend all our lives reminiscing,” she sings as the lights dim; if we can’t control the truth, why bother with a filter? Why not tell it like it is and sweeten it with a laugh?
Living Hour, ‘Things Will Remain’
Before this year, I hardly took many photos; I hated being the one to take my phone out and capture a moment after it’s already passed. But the fragility of life reminded me of the relative permanence of some things, and I now carry a camera with me wherever I go. ‘Things Will Remain’, the gorgeous closing track off Living Hour’s understated new album, Internal Drone Infinity, lands somewhere between a lullaby you remember from childhood and a group photo you’ll cherish for the rest of your life. “Yearn-core” is how the Winnipeg indie rock band has described its music, and what’s more core to the longing experience than a still image? “Almost didn’t take a photo/ But I’m happy that I did,” Sam Sarty sings with a group of friends, “‘Cause it melted all around me/ When I crossed across the bridge.” It refers to a “desperate collage of ice blocks,” but superimposed, as the music drifts into the ether, is everything you might hold dear.
Oklou and FKA twigs, ‘viscus’
The ache in ‘viscus’ is subtle but palpable. It would be easy for Oklou, who sings of letting herself “get lost so deep inside me,” to let it drift into the ether for a wispy, delicate song rounding out the deluxe edition of her widely celebrated debut, choke enough. Instead, she bonded over it – chronic stomach pain, specifically – with FKA twigs, meditating on the body not just as a temple but a home we carry throughout our lives. Their voices intertwine wonderfully, but once twigs’ comes in on its own, it is purely reassuring: “I wanna find a place I feel alive/ The beating of my heart/ Is sure a place to start.” No amount of sunshine, fame, or someone else’s faith is enough to grant you that feeling, but as ‘viscus’ turns these porous thoughts over, it offers an opportunity to recenter – or better yet, restart.
Rosalía, ‘Berghain’ [feat. Björk and Yves Tumor]
‘Berghain’ was always bound to make an impression. As a new Rosalía track; as the lead single from her much-anticipated MOTOMAMI follow-up; as a more substantial collaboration with Björk (most people seemed to have forgotten that ‘oral’ happened) and a high-profile moment for enigmatic experimentalist Yves Tumor. As a song named after the famed Berlin nightclub that anchors in a dramatic string section and Rosalía’s operatic vocals before Björk sweeps in invoking “divine intervention” and Tumor repeats the phrase, “I’ll fuck you ’til you love me,” it was also bound to divide as much as it thrilled. It’s a spectacular single and a giant flex, so insane it makes little to no sense outside the framework of the album. Yet its chaotic conviction alone is enough to sell you on the concept of Lux.
Snocaps, ‘Doom’
Beneath its emotional resolve, ‘Doom’ is about a relationship hanging by a thread. Unassuming though it may start, it turns into one of the most striking songs Katie Crutchfield has written in years, trying to keep casual about “this sentimental rot” but churning out one of her biggest choruses to date. The self-titled album from her and Allison Crutchfield’s new band arrived with little fanfare, and MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook keep their contributions to a minimum. But even the song’s production, stifling rather than amplifying its simple arrangement, serves Katie’s lyrics about running out of breath: “You tell it like it is/ And you’ll suffocate/ Every sight that’s rife/ With a jet black big sky/ Emptiest night,” she sings, almost gasping for air. But she knows she’ll be just fine.
Sugar, ‘House of Dead Memories’
You can imagine Bob Mould writing ‘House of Dead Memories’ alone, ready to turn simmering frustration into another undeniably catchy alt-rock song. “There’s a limit to what I can do/ I cannot make this work on my own/ I need some help,” he sings, and allow me to stretch that metaphor to songwriting: he’s always embraced collaboration in his solo efforts, as recently as this year’s Here We Go Crazy, but there’s something to the fact that he chose this song to be the introduction to Sugar’s reunion. The band may have agreed, in one way or another, to leave the past behind, but here they are after 30 years harnessing the same chemistry as a means of moving forward. Memories don’t die, after all; they just find new places to live.
Westerman, ‘Nevermind’
Westerman hardly lets you in on the voices in his head. But he paints a kind of scene: “She fingered the muddy ground/ And sold me all the luck she’s finding/ I lingered/ As people do/ We fall into a truce that’s binding.” Through the repeated lines and chords, you can taste the exhaustion in the air, the hollowness of whatever resolution the protagonist has wrapped himself into. There was meaning, he tries to convince himself, in the words and feelings he once laid out, mushy and irrelevant as they’ve been rendered. Without filling you in on the details, perhaps even remembering much, Westerman commits the falling to memory; the dissolution of what once seemed valuable but now might as well be left to rot in the sun.
