There’s so much music coming out all the time that it’s hard to keep track. On those days when the influx of new tracks is particularly overwhelming, we sift through the noise to bring you a curated list of the most interesting new releases (the best of which will be added to our Best New Songs playlist). Below, check out our track roundup for Wednesday, May 7, 2025.
Fiona Apple – ‘Pretrial (Let Her Go Home)’
Fiona Apple previously scored and narrated a PSA about court-watching, and she hones in on the subject on her first new song since Fetch the Bolt Cutters. As protest anthems go, ‘Pretrial (Let Her Go Home)’ is as raw and to the point as it gets. “I was a court watcher for over two years,” Apple shared. “In that time, I took notes on thousands of bond hearings. Time and time again, I listened as people were taken away and put in jail, for no other reason than that they couldn’t afford to buy their way free. It was particularly hard to hear mothers and caretakers get taken away from the people who depend on them. For the past five years, I have been volunteering with the Free Black Mamas DMV bailout, and I have been lucky to be able to witness the stories of women who fought for and won their freedom with the tireless and loving support of the leadership. I hope that this song, and the images shared with me, can help to show what is at stake when someone is kept in pretrial detention. I give this song in friendship and respect to all who have experienced the pain of pretrial detention and to the women of the group’s leadership who have taught me so much and whom I truly love.”
Nourished by Time – ‘Max Potential’
Nourished by Time has announced a new LP, The Passionate Ones, with the glistening, sumptuous ‘Max Potential’. Marcus Brown worked on the project, which follows 2023’s Erotic Probiotic 2 and last year’s Catching Chickens EP, in Baltimore, London, and New York.
Matt Berninger – ‘Inland Ocean’
The National’s Matt Berninger has shared ‘Inland Ocean’, the sparkling opening track of his upcoming solo album Get Sunk. Co-written with the Walkmen’s Walter Martin, the song features backup vocals from Julia Laws, otherwise known as Ronboy. “God loves the inland ocean,” they sing, “Lost cause, I have no emotion.”
DJ Haram – ‘Voyeur’
DJ Haram has announced her debut solo album, Beside Myself, which features guest spots from Armand Hammer, Bbymutha, her 700 Bliss bandmate Moor Mother, and more. The producer likened its clanging lead single ‘Voyeur’ to“the voices in my head screaming wordlessly while I’m at the center of a moshpit on research chemicals. Someone is like, ‘You’re gonna make it boo, promise, just wait it out’ — but the future doesn’t exist in this mind state, so does that really matter?”
Frankie Cosmos – ‘Bitch Heart’
“My bitch heart is aflutter/ It can be such a fucker,” Greta Kline sings on the latest single Frankie Cosmos’ forthcoming album Different Talking, which is quite a lovely way to describe goosebumps. It comes with a video directed by Eliza Lu Doyle, who commented: “To me, the song is about being torn between the comforts of domesticated life and your innate wildness. There’s a yearning for a more feral time — before you touched your fucking phone all day. So we made Greta into a dog-shepherd, someone who straddles those two realms. Meanwhile, the band performs a line dance that’s somehow constrained and exuberant at once. Everything is shot in the dark, using infrared and thermal cameras, hovering in the not-quite-real.”
Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band – ‘New Threats From The Soul’
Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band have announced a new album, New Threats From The Soul, out July 25, and shared the title track. The rambling, nine-minute country-rock track features backup vocals from former Freakwater singer Catherine Irwin, while Will Oldham, Lou Turner, and Myriam Gendron also feature on the project.
One Step Closer – ‘Jinx’
One Step Closer’s latest single ‘Jinx’ starts with a melancholy guitar line, but it doesn’t take long to ramp up. It arrives with a video directed by the band, whose guitarist Russ Thompson said: “I was inspired by director Andrei Tarkovsky: come up with a strange concept and make it look pretty. My goal was that if you paused the video at any moment you could print it out and hang it on your wall. Just make a pretty video with my pretty friends. This was all done within two weeks. Three days of filming (one day, one half day, then four hours) and then the rest was editing. I made the first rough draft in iMovie as the demo, then my friend Layne, who also shot it, translated everything into Premiere. This was a group effort and fun project to work on with all the homies.”
Cola – ‘Mendicant’
“What was that the pope just said?” guitarist/vocalist Tim Darcy wonders on Cola’s new single, ‘Mendicant’, which features a delightfully surprising woodwind section. “’Mendicant’ came together quickly for us in our usual writing flow, but it was really asking for another element in the mix,” Dacy explained. “Ben gamely took a stab at tracking whistle and Uilleann Pipes, an instrument he’s been learning in his spare time. Add that to his discogs profile, friends, because he laid down the heat. The lyrics are a playful investigation of being a humble beggar of sorts, a person freed from need with their aura primed to headnod to some whistle.”
Lifeguard – ‘Under Your Reach’
Chicago trio Lifeguard are gearing up for the release of their Matador debut Ripped and Torn, and today they’ve shared a dancey yet discordant new single, ‘Under Your Reach’. The accompanying music video, directed by Liam Barton, outlines drummer Isaac Lowenstein’s post-high-school plans and opens with the disclaimer: “This music video was hard to arrange – what with Isaac’s school load, Asher’s bouts of temporal confusion, Kai’s being an on-call surgeon.”
Lawn – ‘Sports Gun’
Lawn – the New Orleans duo of Mac Folger and Rui De Magalhaes have signed to Exploding in Sound, marking the announcement with the fantastic new single ‘Sports Gun’. About it, Rui De Magalhaes shared: “Sports Gun is supposed to be written from the point of view of a coach/parental figure who pushes the subject to their absolute limit without regard for them otherwise. It came from a short story I wrote pre-pandemic. The idea was that any trauma — long or short term notwithstanding — would only be implied, if that, and that we only get to experience the narrative through a very thin, biased lens. It’s a frail attempt at writing something inspired by Julio Cortazar, but I still thought it fit the drive of the song. It is supposed to be more about the lengths some people go to accomplish something, conflating happiness with ambition, and overall being inept at being content.
“I knew that we were going to an actual studio this time around,” he added, “so we built the song around the idea that it would sound ‘heavier’ for us. We had wanted to record with Greg [Obis] and really loved the sound he was getting from his own music, so we were open to the notion of layering as much noise as we could. The original demo had a slightly different beat, and I sort of rapped the lyrics. Once we got into the studio and everyone started adding their own take, I just went for the yell instead.”
No Windows – ‘Tricky’
A few days ahead of the release of their The Great Traitor EP, Edinburgh duo No Windows have previewed it with the strikingly intimate ‘Tricky’. Morgan Morris said it’s “as much of a love song as we’ll likely ever write. Verity and I are quite cynical people so sometimes love songs can seem benign to us. There’s definitely a time and a place though. Sometimes there’s this beautiful cohesion that occurs between us, it was a joy writing this song despite its deceivingly difficult guitar part that I loathe playing live, hence the song’s name.”
Hayden Pedigo – ‘I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away’
Texas-born and Oklahoma City-based fingerstyle guitarist Hayden Pedigo has unveiled ‘I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away’, the title track of his forthcoming record. It’s the “least like me” song on the album, Pedigo said, but its sincerity shines through. “The title is based on a 1978 episode of Little House on The Prairie that still crushes me to this day (look up the synopsis if you have never seen it,” he explained. “Actually, just go watch the episode if you can). It’s a lot different than anything I have ever written before. It has this almost Chet Atkins/Merle Travis bounce to it that I’ve never before on a song. It’s pulling from the classic 1950s chord progressions that I’m a sucker for. It’s like Merle Travis’s version of ‘I’ll See You in My Dreams’ flipped on its head. The opening chord clusters are kind of the Wizard of Oz moment where the screen turns to color and it kind of brings the sense of wonder and mystery I really love. It ends the album on the purest/sweetest note possible and feels like the absolute perfect way to end this record.”
Andy Jenkins – ‘Blue Mind’
Richmond, VA artist Andy Jenkins has announced a new album, Since Always, which was produced by Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn. It’s out June 27, and the pensive lead single ‘Blue Mind’ is out now. “Here is a song about falling in love and wondering if it will last,” Jenkins stated. “I tend to be optimistic but we all have spells of darkness, call it the blue mind, the sad mind, the lost mind. Entering into an understanding with another person will not change that, but there’s comfort in camaraderie. Also, it could be a love song for the sun.”
Pictureplane – ‘Heaven Is a State of Mind’
The Depeche Mode comparisons will be hard to avoid on this one, but that’s certainly not a bad thing – in fact, it was Travis Egedy’s intention. “I’ve always been of the opinion and feeling that our external reality is of our own design,” he said of the new Pictureplane song. “The idea of ‘Heaven’ as not some sort of physical destination or place, but as a state of being within yourself. Nirvana basically. I suppose that is what the song is about. Producing this song I was really sort of trying to write a song that sounded like Depeche Mode — a proper romantic, industrial goth pop song.”
Artificial Go – ‘Hallelujah’
Artificial Go have dropped ‘Hallelujah’, the propulsive second single from the Cincinnati band’s new effort Musical Chairs.
CMAT – ‘Take a Sexy Picture of Me’
CMAT calls ‘Take a Sexy Picture of Me’, the second single off her upcoming album EURO-COUNTRY, “one of the best songs she’s ever written.” In a statement, she expounded: “With the internet, every woman is now in the public eye. And no matter who you are, or what you look like, somebody will take umbrage with the fact that you even exist, and there’s no escaping it. ‘Take a Sexy Picture of Me’ was born out of that, because I held back for so long; not out of frustration or sadness for myself, because I AM in the public eye, but I realised it’s actually like this for every woman. It’s all women, all the time. That song is me calling out anyone who criticised my weight or how I looked… and it’s one of the best songs I’ve ever made.”“one of the best songs she’s ever written.”
