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 March 2026.
Aldous Harding, ‘One Stop’
The strangest, most delightful thing about the first glimpse of Aldous Harding’s imminent album is that it almost tricks you into believing you’ve never heard her music before. Even if you can sonically trace a line from 2022’s Warm Chris to Train on the Island – they were both produced with John Parish, after all – Harding stays true to the feeling that sometimes when you write, no matter how long ago the last time was, it flows like the first. In the case of ‘One Stop’, that means looping a quivering, unpredictable piano underneath prickly, playful vocal performance: “I’m gonna write what I know/ Things I ain’t known for a long time,” she sings, as if songwriting is merely a process of conscious iteration, of reminding oneself the deeper truths we tend to ignore in daily life. Harding’s humour usually has the flair of an inside joke understood by a single insider, but the next bit is almost like standup: “I met the real John Cale/ He had no words, but I don’t mind/ I packed the stage while he ate rice.” Another enigmatic artist, it seems, that’s just like us.
Carla dal Forno, ‘Going Out’
Carla dal Forno makes a love that’s both forbidden and unrequited sound like a breeze. The first Confession of her forthcoming album is a familiar one: her romantic interest is going out with an old friend, and she can’t hide her feelings any longer. “Shouldn’t want to hold you but I do,” she sings over a clangorous, insistent bassline, and the leap to And I will is as short as that from the verse to the chorus. Against the tactile rhythm section, the Australian singer-songwriter’s pensive, reverb-drenched voice and vaporous synths remind us that this all may be a bout of wishful thinking. But at least for the duration of the song, dal Forno dresses up the possibility of their intimacy as a mathematical certainty, finally urging one half of the equation to come on and listen. The rest of us, at least, should oblige.
Fire-Toolz, ‘Balam =^..^= Says IPv09082024 Strawberry Head’
Few artists can make the guttural splurge of a song like ‘Balam =^..^= Says IPv09082024 Strawberry Head’ sound so pristine. Not just pristine, but seamless, diffusing the boundaries between its seemingly contradictory sonic signifiers – shimmering synths, fiery screams, purring, the perfect pop song runtime – rather than balancing them. Fire-Toolz has pulled this off countless times before, but with a new album, Lavender Networks, coming out on Warp, it could serve as a gateway to Angel Marcloid’s bountiful, uncompromising world for a lot more people. So long as it remains “the new Fire-Toolz single,” you can easily recommend it as a good place to start; from then on you can probably just say Lavender Networks.
Gelli Haha, ‘Klouds Will Carry Me to Sleep’
The most gleeful song of 2026 so far comes from Gelli Haha, who put out one of the most undersung art-pop LPs of 2025, Switcheroo. Tacked on at the end of the album on streaming services but released as a standalone single, ‘Klouds Will Carry Me to Sleep’ ensures you’re paying attention. Someone in the comment section of its delightfully cartoonish video mentions the Gelliverse, and you want to be in on it. Any song that spells “clouds” like that is bound to be a little kooky, but this one earns all its absurd maximalism with a singalong hook that hasn’t escaped my brain since it was released. I don’t know if it can carry you to sleep, but it can definitely transport you to a fantasy realm where your imagination has a lot more power. “I feel you wrapped around my finger,” she declares in one of the song’s most legible lines, all the whimsy in the world at her disposal.
Iceage, ‘Star’
Elias Rønnenfelt has released compelling music in the years since Iceage’s last album, staying in the limelight last year with his solo album Speak Daggers and an appearance on Dean Blunt’s Lucre EP. But the Danish band’s first single in half a decade is a force to be reckoned with. Instead of mystifying allure, Rønnenfelt aims for feverish eroticism that favours directness over platitudes: It’s not “Love is like a dying star,” but “You got me dying like a star,” and the ensuing “Ay ay a” does most of the talking. The group’s melodic post-punk locks into a jangly groove in the chorus, as if to render the singer’s infatuation a little less ominous. But chaos is inevitable, and Rønnenfelt grabs the opportunity to wrangle the word “Louisiana” into the strangest shapes. Is that the “you” whose “stellar winds rush so well through me”? Is it a diversion or pure devastation? For a song that’s surprisingly poppy, ‘Star’ redeems itself by ending in a nebulous collapse.
Kelsey Lu, ‘Running to Pain’
I haven’t seen enough love for Kelsey Lu’s ‘Running to Pain’, but I feel like that’s going to change around the release of the chamber-pop artist’s Dirty Hit debut, So Help Me God. Co-produced with Jack Antonoff and Yves Rothman, it rivals Lana Del Rey’s ‘White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter’ as the best thing Antonoff has had a hand in producing over the past few years. Shimmering and volcanic – with an accompanying video fittingly shot on the Spanish island of Lanzarote – ‘Running to Pain’ expands and contracts in line with Lu’s acrobatic vocals, which begin in soft resignation as they’re cradled back to the safety of pain. But the very act of running quickens the singer’s heartbeat, finding a different kind of solace in motion. During the bridge, the song reveals a turbulent dynamic with a lover who “smooth[s] like a jagged knife” – but the real dance here is with pain itself, the double-edged sword of managing it: let it go and you’ll risk your sanity, let it rush in and there’s seemingly no salvation. Enter So Help Me God.
Lily Seabird, ‘Demon in Me’
“There’s something inside of us all/ The ones who creep and they crawl in their skin/ Till it feels like it’s gonna fall off,” Lily Seabird sings on ‘Demon in Me’, as if half-remembering a quote that keeps lingering in her mind. For most of the song, she keeps them – seemingly animated by Z Zalewski’s clarinet, Michael Sabin’s trombone, and her own saxophone – at bay, poetically trying to circle it. But as the demon in her keeps picking battles, the Burlington singer-songwriter opts for an exorcism of a crescendo, letting feral guitars do the screaming. As the crescendo thins out, Daniel Snyder’s drums thunder back in at the end as if to ascertain: Game over.
