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 May 2026.
Ariana Grande, ‘hate that i made you love me’
Ariana Grande isn’t keen on flexing her vocals on ‘hate that i made you love me’. Her low-key delivery sounds like it’s actively reining in Max Martin and ILYA’s production – all those bubbly flourishes can barely distract from how mid-tempo it is. If she wants a hit out of it, Grande will have to make it look like she stumbled over it, keying in the “I I I” to access a secretly infectious chorus. ‘hate that i made you love me’ may be downcast, but it’s pointedly steeped in regret, at one point twisting its intimacy to hold a mirror up to her audience: “Is it really my fault you all gave me your hearts of your own accord?” she sings, making a case for the lead single to petal as her own ‘Anti-Hero’. Nothing about it is half-ironic or even rhetorical, though, as she answers bluntly, “I don’t really think so.”
Charli XCX, ‘SS26’
As a mission statement, ‘Rock Music’ was an interesting point of conversation that was bound to be divisive. But whether ‘SS26’ is genuine, satirical, or a bit of both has little to do with whether the second single from Music, Fashion, Film is actually enjoyable. Knowing the title of the album, ‘SS26’ scans more like a mission statement than its predecessor, dryly despairing over the artistic facade of any industry while having at least some fun walking the “runway to hell.” Though subdued, the instrumentation offers more layers of distortion to chew on, and the hook brings out the vulnerability in her filtered voice. If BRAT still clings to its relevance wherever you spend your summer this year, ‘SS26’ might be the tune stuck in your mind and really expressing how you feel.
Kim Petras, ‘Jeep’
Can the booming alt-country scene make some space for Kim Petras? ‘Jeep’ may be the best song the genre produces this year, charmed by the same simple pleasures that animated Kevin Morby’s Little Wide Open this past month – in Petras’ words, “the middle America shit.” In the music video, her boyfriend is played by Porches’ Aaron Maine, who is at least partly responsible for sending the song to the stratosphere as a producer. As the song’s cynicism gives way to fantasy, a puddle of synths reanimates a brain on amphetamines, Four Lokos, and Monster – the white one. Your friends are right: they’re bad for you. But sometimes, this strange mixture of nostlagia is better than the real thing.
Olivia Rodrigo, ‘the cure’
If ‘drop dead’, the first single from Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, was about the joyful rush of infatuation, ‘the cure’ might trick you into thinking it’s about heartbreak. Instead, it finds the pop star burrowing inward to unravel the insecurities that no amount of romantic affirmations can drown out. Strummed acoustic guitar and lush strings soundtrack her intrusive thoughts, lending credence to the title you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. There’s no enemy or even a real object of jealousy here; Rodrigo is struggling against herself, and ‘the cure’ beautifully externalizes that battle.
Rostam, ‘Hardy’ [feat. Clairo]
There’s a part of ‘Hardy’ that feels like an outlier on Rostam’s new album American Stories, and there’s a part that seems to epitomize his sound. Maybe it has something to do with the song’s own ambivalent perspective, the way it oscillates – over a sweeping sample to the score to Truffaut’s 1973 film Day for Night, no less – between believing in fate and numbing out on oblivion, observing how it affects not just his own art but the ones around him. And so he reunites with Clairo, taking a break from the dizziness of the arrangement to let her spiritual affirmations seep through. But it’s these lines he sings himself that feel most potent: “Maybe the greatest art is never completed/ We only have to leave it knowing we tried.” The effort leaves the song feeling anything but hardened.
Wild Pink, ‘Round of Applause at the End of the World’
“I don’t know what my idea of fun is anymore,” John Ross sighs on ‘Round of Applause at the End of the World’, the lead single from his forthcoming Wild Pink album Still Coming Down. The personal confession cuts through a string of hyper-specific references that seem to amount to a grand conspiracy but only serve to underline the narrator’s disaffection. Yet Ross’ post-apocalyptic vision is buoyed by an accordion riff that should instantly make any crowd cheer, not to mention Xandy Chelmis’ always-inviting pedal steel. Some fun is being had, even as it appears distant and undefinable.
