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 2025.
Alan Sparhawk and Trampled by Turtles – ‘Stranger’
Low’s Alan Sparhawk made the collaborative nature of his second solo LP clear by titling it With Trampled by Turtles. Sprawhwak may be the more recognizable name outside of Duluth’s creative community, but the alt-country group are also longtime pillars of the city’s music scene. It’s not hard to imagine the simplicity of ‘Stranger’, the album’s lead single, being refracted and slowed down to fit the distorted atmospherics of Low’s BJ Purton-produced records, but the song’s bluegrass arrangement pushes Sparhawk’s voice toward clear conviction. “You gotta put up with stranger people than you know now/ You gotta go through some dangerouser things than you thought you’d have to,” he sings, still bending grammatical rules to emphasize his point. More innocent souls might settle with might have to; Sparhawk knows life’s uncertainty is non-negotiable.
Car Seat Headrest – ‘Gethsemane’
“A series of simple patterns slowly build themselves into another song,” Will Toledo sings on ‘Gethsemano’, casually revealing the Car Seat Headrest MO. The lead single from The Scholars stretches over eleven minutes, stitching together fragments of what could be separate tracks into an epic narrative introduction to the mysterious, spiritual world of the band’s latest rock opera. There’s a clear evolution between its parts, though: “I never missed a prayer and I always did the dishes” becomes, through some form of dark mysticism, “I can do whatever the fuck I want when I want to.” The song is seemingly about Rosa, a medical student at the fictional Parnassus University whose life is transformed after reviving a medically deceased patient, but you’re never quite who’s speaking, and a whole cast of characters eventually comes up: “the naked priest, the introvert, the millionaire, conspirator.” Through it all, the song brims with the possibilities of new love, even if it, too, ends up being reduced to rubble.
Chappell Roan – ‘The Giver’
Chappell Roan’s long-teased country pop offering could have raised a few eyebrows, but whether it’s been stuck in your head since its Saturday Night Live debut or its official release in March, you know that fiddle is all camp, no cringe. Roan delivers a country song with all the panache and playfulness of knowing she might never put out another one without making this one sound like a one-off. You can get plenty of airplay out of song with a winking hook like “I get the job done,” but the single becomes an anthem via the gasp-inducing lines it sneaks in around the chorus: “Girl I don’t need no lifted truck/ Revving loud to pick you up/ Cause how I look is how I touch.” The rest of whatever project it ends up appearing on may be stylistically louder, but ‘The Giver’ sounds as effective as it claims to be.
Destroyer – ‘Cataract Time’
Another month, another Destroyer song on this list. The entirety of Dan’s Boogie is now out, so there probably won’t be another one next month, but the album’s third single, ‘Caract Time’, might be its most revelatory. It sprawls over eight minutes, but the song might be the most gentle and inviting on the whole record, hardly veering off course in favour of unfiltered emotion – a rarity in Destroyer’s catalog. “I just sat down and started singing it over a little chord progression and melody,” Dan Bejar said in our interview. ‘Cataract Time’ is a portrait of exhaustion, of being on the road too long, the performative bubble bursting. It runs slower than the world requires of him, but its pace feels not just correct, but somehow illuminating.
MJ Lenderman – ‘Dancing in the Club’ (This Is Lorelei Cover)
When his cover of This Is Lorelei’s ‘Dancing in the Club’ was released, MJ Lenderman revealed that Box for Buddy, Box for Star was the album he listened to the most in 2024. By inviting him to take on the track for the record’s deluxe edition, Nate Amos expresses his own admiration by way of trust: someone like MJ Lenderman could only bring the song’s lonely desparation higher up the surface. Lenderman understands that fucking up your guitar means fucking up your heart, not just the other way round. He’ll slow down the song and draw out the lyrics to make their dissociation feel more personal than situational. And he will, of course, take pleasure in singing the words “A loser never wins/ And I’m a loser, always been,” lifted as they seem from his own Manning Fireworks. More than self-lacerating, though, the cover arrives as a source of comfort, too: being your own worst enemy doesn’t mean you can’t be seen, or find yourself a little less alone.
Matt Berninger – ‘Bonnet of Pins’
“It takes a lot to really disappear/ Always leave traces in the leaves,” Matt Berninger sings on ‘Bonnet of Pins’, the first words we get to hear from his next solo album. At first glance, it seems to dig further into the depressive patterns of the National’s last two albums, which came out of a period of creative and personal burnout for the singer. But on the lead single from Get Sunk, the narrator is not the one who appears as a ghost. “The closest thing she’s ever found to love/ Is the kind you can’t get rid of fast enough,” he says of the person suddenly reemerged, flesh and bones and all, the one finishing off his drink. It sends a jolt through his nervous system big enough to turn ‘Bonnet of Pins’ into one of Berninger’s most revitalizing solo songs to date. “Poor you,” the ghost shrugs. But you feel way more than pity.
billy woods – ‘Misery’ [feat. Kenny Segal]
Another song about misery loving company – only hazier and more haunting than anything else on this list. billy woods introduced his new album GOLLIWOG with a Kenny Segal collab that sticks to the formula the pair mastered on Maps while marking a kind of lyrical shift. The album supposedly finds the rapper revisiting a story about an evil golliwog (like the one on the album cover) he wrote when he was nine, but one hopes no part of ‘Misery’, a song that includes the line “she came to me already wet with sex,” can be traced back to his childhood. The jazz-inflected track is dreamlike in a way that seems to travel through time even though it only lasts two minutes, blurring the line between ecstasy and confusion, night and the morning after – so fast there’s barely a moment to question any of it.
caroline – ‘Total euphoria’
Three years after their debut album, caroline returned in gloriously off-kilter fashion with ‘Total euphoria’. Driven by stabbing guitar, drums that never quite gel into place, and keyboards that hover radiantly but never quite in sync, you’re left wondering how the song could possibly amount to a sound befitting its title, but the experimental UK outfit naturally gets there. The instrumentation doesn’t cohere so much as endlessly revolve into something greater than the sum of its part, something blissfully communal, especially as Jasper Llewellyn and Magdalena McLean start singing in unison. The ambiguous betrayal at the song’s emotional core is never resolved, but you somehow get it, totally.
feeble little horse – ‘This Is Real’
Unlike songs like ‘Dancing in the Club’ and ‘Cataract Time’, ‘This Is Real’ makes a dissociative trip sound like a blast – in the literal sense, at least. “Put the heater to the–” Lydia Slocum sings before the – nu metal? death metal? neither tag quite conveys the disruptive wall of distortion – guitars complete the sentence for her: max. The Pittsburgh four-piece’s first new music in two years showcases a band not so much harnessing the contrast between hypnotic contradiction and dynamic intensity as erasing the difference. They’re the kind to drill the point home, but not without a twist or two; they’ll let out an indecipherable scream, but not without a real confession. “I got my anger off my chest but/ We’ll never be the same again,” Slocum ultimately sings, hushed and human. It’s a good thing, you venture.
The Ophelias – ‘Salome’
Vengeful and invigorating, ‘Salome’ uses the Biblical story of the titular character to take a stab at sexist men in the music industry. “I want your head on the platter,” Spencer Peppet sings, stretching out the I as much as she revels in the daydream. “It gets boring, the monotony of misogyny,” Peppet wrote in her Substack, but the song itself is anything but. Although sort of a lyrical anomaly on the band’s mostly diaristic new album Spring Grove, it punches up their sound – with the assistance of producer Julien Baker, who also provides additional guitar and harmonies – in electrifying ways they’ve long been reaching for. It’s about people that drive you mad, yes, but mostly the madness that drives you forward.
