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 September 2025.
Cate Le Bon, ‘About Time’
Cate Le Bon fills her guitars with reverb as if forming a wave that could ripple across eternity. Half a minute in, though, she poetically declares she’s “not religious on the water.” Her voice is radiant without the weightlessness that would diffuse it, partly succumbing to the hypnotic atmosphere but mostly commanding it: “I want to sing to regret/ I just can’t pay its debt.” There is a world in which the titular refrain simply spells out the meaning of the song, but Le Bon avoids abstract thought, instead drawing a line in the sand. As rattling percussion threatens to throw her off balance, caught in a “rigid/collapse” binary, she reminds herself to stay on the firm side, collected. “There’s a softness that comes from the surrender,” Le Bon told The Guardian, opening up about the breakup that informed much of Michelangelo Dying. This is about her saying it’s time to embrace it.
Danny Brown, ‘stardust’
One of Danny Brown’s most vicious insults reveals what he’s always working against: being “a burden to instrumentals.” To match the beat Portuguese producer Holly hands over for ‘stardust’, the first single off his hyperpop-inspired new album, he revives his twitchy, ravenous vocal style, announcing his wakefulness with an Evanescence reference before hilariously relaying the impulses of the monster inside: “I ponder going bonkers then knocking out ya chompers.” Brown’s rampage is brought to a halt with a sobering epilogue from Frost Children’s Angel Prost, suggesting that as exciting it may sound, the album’s early peak, its laser-focused high, could crash out into a whole other musical realm. “We chase silence out of our world, ’til Gabriel blew his horn.” Something tells me stardust will have Brown leaning into the silence, too.
Dry Cleaning, ‘Hit My Head All Day’
In today’s climate, it’s tempting to view ‘Hit My Head All Day’ solely as a song about political manipulation, with Florence Shaw drawing inspiration from the far right’s use of social media. Its stultifying effects are made clear on the song’s first verse: “The objects outside the head control the mind/ To arrange them is to control people’s thinking.” But a concurrent influence in Shaw’s mind was undergoing physio for nerve problems: “It sounds so stupid in comparison,” she said in a press release, “But I’ve only just met her and I’m supposed to be floppy.” This creeps up on the second verse, as Shaw dryly intones, “Manipulate me, wiggle my arms.” With Cate Le Bon on production, the song toes the line between childlike stupor, curiosity, and playfulness, its dizzying sprawl either numbing you out or keeping you moving. But Shaw’s outlook is so naturally absurd it rearranges the outside world, which is its own kind of resistance.
Ratboys, ‘Light Night Mountains All That’
In the music video for ‘Light Night Mountains All That’, directed by Ratboys drummer Marcus Nuccio, footage of the band’s performance is interspersed “with some benevolent rock and roll ghosts we met along the way.” It’s an extension of the track’s central idea: “a fantastic, rural vision-quest where the days and nights blend together and nothing is quite as it seems,” as leader Julia Steiner put it. Featuring piano and production from Chris Walla, the song spreads out over six minutes, landing with the goosebumps-inducing brilliance of 2023’s ‘Black Ice, WI’. But the new track is a different beast altogether. Bristling with tension from the very beginning, a raging chord progression is bolstered by rapid-fire drums and buzzsaw bass, its distortion ratcheting up alongside Steiner’s frustration, her insistence that “you didn’t care.” That “rural vision-quest” starts to sound a lot like regular life, where one’s desire to share can feel like the sun exploding – and another’s hollow indifference can fuel a fantastic slice of rock ‘n’ roll.
Sassy 009, ‘Butterflies’
For Sassy 009 – the project of Sunniva Lindgård – style comes with a cool air of detachment. You can hear it percolating through the ethereal synths, lurching beat, and the Norwegian artist’s effected vocals on ‘Butterflies’, the lead single from their long-awaited debut LP Dreamer+. But the song also attests to Lindgård’s effort to introduce a sense of intimacy to their music, framing it as “an ode to the real ones” and celebrating them even if it’s often through the veil of metaphor. “All my friends/ Keep me safe day and night,” Lindgård sings, buzzing electronics hinting at lurking threats. “They shine,” then most of the production outclears for the sentiment to ring through, “so bright.”
Stella Donnelly, ‘Feel It Change’
When a relationship’s run its course, no judge will satisfy your need to be proven innocent better than the person who’s no longer in your life. “I made a wish upon a satellite/ That you’d come over tell me I was right/ That I’m the perfect friend who does no harm,” Stella Donnelly sings on her latest single ‘Feel It Change’, the melody so breezily agreeable, her voice so gentle – and, considering the three-year gap since her last album Flood, so missed – that even her winking sense of humour couldn’t stand in the way of believing her. Yet Donnelly is too self-aware to let the truth slide, admitting she’s lying as soon as she says she can fix it all. And while another artist might slip the most brutal confession in the margins, she makes it the chorus: “I love you baby but I’m scared to be near you.” She repeats it like someone who knows love and fear are incompatible, rubbing it in the face of the one still oblivious, and smiling it out.
Wednesday, ‘The Way Love Goes’
The obvious choice here might have been to go with ‘Townies’, a highlight from Wednesday’s Bleeds that was astonishingly not a single but naturally became the focus track on release day, getting its own music video. ‘Townies’ exemplifies the best of what Wednesday has evolved into: a hooky, shocking, stunning showcase of Karly Hartzman’s storytelling. ‘The Way Love Goes’ could never have been a single. It would never get a music video. But the more I listened to Bleeds, the more it stuck out as proof of their growth in quieter territory, their best ballad since ‘How Can You Live If You Can’t Love How Can You If You Do’. That Karly was prone to blurring pleasure and pain, tracing suffering into completeness. Here, comforted only by Xandy Chelmis’ pedal steel at her most devastated, she is simply scared and worn-out, telling it like it is. The question remains the same; that old song echoes in your mind; only this time, the hurt just cuts through.
