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 July 2025.
The Antlers, ‘Carnage’
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ 2021 song ‘Carnage’ opens with a childhood memory of Cave’s uncle decapitating a chicken outside his country home in Mount Martha. “A rain deer frozen in the headlights steps back into the woods,” he later sings, “My heart it is an open road where we ran away for good.” On the track of the same name that leads the Antlers’ first album in four years, however, such cruelty has no metaphorical usage. Over muted keys, Peter Silberman describes a series of violent incidents against animals, in order, it seems – judging from its slow-burning escalation – of severity, from toad to fawn. The spine-chilling refrain, however, focuses on the casual perpetrator, the one barely paying attention, rather than the victim or its level of intelligence. The way he thins and stretches his breath between the words “accidental” and “damage,” you’re forced to acknowledge the kinds of suffering even the environmentally conscious would brush off, though we all contribute to it.
Blood Orange, ‘Mind Loaded’ [feat. Caroline Polachek, Lorde, Mustafa]
As you hit play on Blood Orange’s latest single, maybe you’re on vacation somewhere. Maybe the weather’s different, or your phone is on Airplane mode, or you try to trick your brain into a steady place. But the voice still hits you like a good look in the mirror: “You still seem the same/ Still broken, can’t think straight.” Few artists can articulate this blurry state of brokenness with the same ghostly splendor as Dev Hynes, let alone get Lorde and Mustafa to deliver a brief but gut-wrenching Elliott Smith interpolation or have Caroline Polachek punctuate his own lush melodies. The beauty here is as undeniable as the darkness, taking the not-quite music in your mind and making it sound rich and unalone.
Geese, ‘Taxes’
On the surface, the narrator of Geese’s new single seems to be astoundingly annoyed by the idea of having to pay his taxes, even willing to turn himself into a martyr. “You better come over with a crucifix,” Cameron Winter – who, since the band’s last record, happened to have a critical breakthrough with his solo LP Heavy Metal – bellows. “You’re gonna have to nail me down.” More deeply and to the point, though, he sounds preternaturally committed to the whole morality of personal responsibility, making the band behind him sound all the more eerily uplifted. “Doctor! Doctor! Heal yourself,” he commands, an insufferably self-involved setup for the most ego-crushing joke: “I will break my own heart from now on.” Society – no, God – be damned.
They Are Gutting a Body of Water, ‘trainers’
Doug Dulgarian doesn’t assign a subject to the line “Treat death like a teacher’s pet”: the I is crushingly silent, the possible you just as self-incriminating. But hanging over ‘trainers’ like a dark cloud is that we. They Are Gutting a Body of Water are just as much about conjuring uproarious noise as they are about cutting through it, and while most contemporary bands would sing such lyrics with moody submission, TAGABOW’s cacophony seems to actively blast against it. The moments of quiet are just as necessary and pervasive. “Dawn spreads over dead sunsets,” Dulgarian sings, the death-obsessed’s thought on an early walk to the store. What you hope, at the end of the day, is that it’ll teach you to live.
Tyler, the Creator, ‘STOP PLAYING WITH ME’
Tyler, the Creator is in aggressively braggadocious mode on ‘STOP PLAYING WITH ME’, the only song from DON’T TAP THE GLASS to get a music video, but it hardly sounds provocative. The rapper has already gathered us all on the dancefloor; he’s effortlessly boastful, which most fans should find familiarly thrilling. Unlike the comeback record by Clipse, who appear in the visual, it’s less a game of who’s playing who. It’s not even his words that do most of the talking; the taunt is in the bassline, the muscle in the beat, the ad-libs the cherry on top. They’re all saying: you know the game’s already over. Now let’s have some fun.
Water From Your Eyes, ‘Playing Classics’
Before you accuse Water From Your Eyes of cashing in on Brat Summer, consider ‘Playing Classics’ as a dizzying bit of time travel: last year, Water From Your Eyes played the same stage at Primavera Sound 2024 as Charli XCX just hours before for the festival’s big finale, where she debuted songs like ‘Everything is romantic’ and ‘365’ before BRAT‘s release. At the time, I couldn’t imagine that Nate Amos and Rachel Brown would make anything that sounds remotely like ‘Club Classics’, but no musical venture is totally inconceivable for this band. If previous single ‘Life Sings’ amalgamated an indie rock devotee’s disparate influences, ‘Playing Classics’ channels their presence in the club through existential non-sequiturs like, “Tried to make it to hereafter/ Just wound up at the mall.” These days, you may well hear ‘Apple’ in a place like that, stripped of all its power. ‘Playing Classics’ remembers dancing more like a transcedent exchange: “Souls with something to lose/ Take that long hard road from here to the truth.”
Wednesday, ‘Pick Up That Knife’
It’s funny that alphabetical ordering once again juxtaposes Water From Your Eyes and Wednesday, because while the former may remember Charli’s 2024 set at Primavera, Karly Hartzman takes us back a year earlier, when pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis (confirmed) threw up in the pit at the Death Grips show. On ‘Pick Up That Knife’, the band slices through the blurry space between relief and discomfort, harnessing their signature transformation from easygoing alt-country to full-band explosion. What distinguishes Hartzman’s writing is how her catalogue of day-to-day misfortunes seems relatable until she sings about being “baptised to freedom and born in bondage,” as if tethered to some other realm. She doesn’t just let her bandmates surge up a storm; her voice is on the brink of collapse, the mark of someone so close to the edge that the individual incidents matter less than the state of mind they tease. “One day I’ll kill the bitch inside my brain,” she sings. Instead, she flips a switch, summoning distorted memories.
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