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 Tuesday, February 25, 2025.
Model/Actriz – ‘Cinderella’
Model/Actriz have announced their sophomore album, Pirouette, with the dynamically radiant and frantic ‘Cinderella’. The track “distills within it many of the objectives that would become the lifeblood of Pirouette,” vocalist Cole Haden explained. “The song switches between moments of tension and fluidity, dissonance and harmony: we aimed to write something with an inherent brightness that differed anything we had made before, and the light that shines through the song was made not through removing darkness, but through upping the contrast. The lyrics were written in response to that canvas, and give voice to an inner dialogue I once had while on a date with a beautiful man. It’s a song about the realization that there was shame and pain I carried long after it had become obsolete, and while it was uncertain if I would ever see this person again, I could remember him always as the mysterious catalyst that released me from it.”
Jenny Hval – ‘To be a rose’
Jenny Hval has announced a new album, Iris Silver Mist, sharing ‘To be arose’ along with the news. “’To be a rose’ was written as a restless pop structure,” Hval explained in a statement, treating both that structure and the titular cliché with signature playfulness. “It has a chorus, with chords and a melody, but each chorus sounds slightly different, like we are experiencing the melody from different seasons, decades or even different bodies. The clichéd rose metaphor in the song is equally restless. It can change shape into a cigarette and then evaporate to smoke. My mother and I (two restless humans) are both present in the song: ‘I was singing in my room, she smoked on the balcony/Long inhales and long exhales performed in choreography.’ If about anything, ‘To be a rose’ is about how one thing becomes another thing, how we all come from somewhere and someone, and how this is stranger and more powerful than we think.”
Marlon Williams – ‘Kāhore He Manu E’ [feat. Lorde]
Lorde guests on ‘Kāhore He Manu E’, a stirring new ballad from New Zealand singer-songwriter Marlon Williams’ upcoming Māori language album, Te Whare Tīwekaweka. Lorde’s voice, Williams said, “in a very real sense wrote the song. The distinct and striking characteristics in her voice cornering and demanding of the melody and phrasing what only her voice could. Singing with Ella is incredible; the amount of mind she’s able to pour into the vessel. We got to know each other through sharing the highs and lows of touring life, and in a real sense this song is an ode to the colourful but grim wormhole of road life, to the friends made and lost in the folds of time, ‘visions lost in the blur.’” Lorde added: “Singing with Marlon is one of my favourite things to do on earth, whether we are tipsy backstage by a pool table or in a luscious studio, and I was honoured he asked me to sing with him on this album. I’m so proud of my friend.”
Momma – ‘Bottle Blonde’
‘I Want You (Fever)’, the previous single off Momma’s upcoming album Welcome to My Blue Sky, made our list of the best songs of January. The newly unveiled ‘Bottle Blonde’ is softer and more self-reflective; “Bottle blonde, you’re a god/ You’re gonna figure it out,” “Bottle blonde, you’re a god/ You’re gonna figure it out,” Friedman and Weingarten sing on the track. “We wrote this song as a letter to our past selves, when we were 23 and 24, stumbling through an extremely grueling tour that ended up taking a huge toll on our hearts and minds,” they explained. “We both had bleached hair and were in the midst of making huge decisions that would change our lives and also our perceptions of ourselves. The song started out as kind of an affirmation to our younger selves, that everything would be OK if you just follow your heart, but now looking back on it the lyrics could also be read as us talking to each other.”
Sparks – ‘JanSport Backpack’
Sparkshave shared their details of their 28th studio album MAD!, arriving May 23, with the playful and theatrical ‘JanSport Backpack’. It follows the recently released ‘Do Things My Own Way’.
Darkside – ‘Hell Suite (Part II)’
For a song called ‘Hell Suite’, the latest single from Darkside emanates a strange sense of serenity. In fact, it’s one of the most gorgeously arranged songs on their new album Nothing, which comes out Friday.
Deafheaven – ‘Heathen’
Deafheaven have previewed their upcoming LP Lonely People With Power with ‘Heathen’, which starts out mellower than the harrowing lead single ‘Magnolia’. Stick around, though, and you’re in for a (heavy) treat.
Lily Seabird – ‘How Far Away’ and ‘It Was Like You Were Coming To Wake Us Back Up’
Lily Seabird has unveiled a pair of tracks from her forthcoming record Trash Mountain. “‘How Far Away’ closes Side A of Trash Mountain and ‘It Was Like…’ opens Side B, but they’re about the same subject, so it’s nice to have them paired together today,” Seabird said of the songs, which are both tenderly understated. “The videos were captured in New Orleans last month during a record snowstorm. I was visiting with one of my best friends — it felt funny that we seemed to have brought the weather with us from Vermont.”
Swans – ‘I Am a Tower’
‘I Am a Tower’ is the title of Swans’ epic new single, which sprawls ominously over 20 minutes. It’s the first single off their seventeenth studio album, Birthing, due May 30. “The material contained in this album was largely developed over the course of a yearlong Swans tour, during 2023 – 2024 (‘The Healers’, ‘I Am a Tower’, ‘Birthing’, ‘Guardian Spirit’, ‘Rope’, and ‘Away’), then recorded and further orchestrated and rearranged in the studio. Two pieces were created and performed in the studio (‘Red Yellow’, ‘The Merge’),” Michael Gira shared. “In all cases the material began with me sitting in my office with an acoustic guitar, singing and dreaming about what would become of these skeletal songs.”
Miki Berenyi Trio – ‘Big I Am’
Miki Berenyi Trio take aim at macho aggression on their pointedly danceable new single, ‘Big I Am’, which will appear on their debut LP Tripla. “I’ve witnessed 50+ years of the trends in masculinity and frankly, nothing much changes — as ever, there are good men and there are shit men, and there are boys who can be misguided but easily mature into the best of their sex,” Berenyi commented. “But this latest incarnation of ‘winning’ the sex war is a laughably infantile and willfully regressive new low.”
Demise of Love – ‘Strange Little Consequence’
Demise of Love is the new collaborative project from three very talented artists in UK dance music: Daniel Avery, Working Men’s Club (Sydney Minsky-Sargeant), and Ghost Culture (James Greenwood). Today, they’ve shared the first single from their self-titled debut EP, the burbling and kaleidoscopic ‘Strange Little Consequence’. Jak Payne, who directed the song’s music video, said, “We wanted to create something really visually driven for this. A visual that gestures towards the breakdown of a relationship, through the clutter and detritus that is left behind.”
Clothing – ‘Tóxico Saico’
Clothing, aka Mexico City-based artist Santi Ropa, has dropped ‘Toxico Saico’, a heartfelt new single from their debut album La Muerte en Realidad no Exist. According to Ropa, “This is a painfully honest song that deals with the blurred line between love and hate. No one is spared—only those you love the most can really hurt you.”
Lucy Rose – ‘Pale Blue Eyes’
Lucy Rose has shared a new single, the jazzy, beautifully swirling ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, the singer-songwriter’s first new music since last year’s This Ain’t The Way You Go Out. “The song, it’s a tricky one, took me a while to figure out what I wanted to say,” Rose reflected. “The chorus is very much about that one person who kept me believing in myself at my lowest time, who was of course my little boy. When I felt like my body was failing and no one around me believed me, he still loved me for me.”
Bria Salmena – ‘Hammer’
“I’ve never seen you in the morning light/ I’ve never seen you as you close your eyes/ But I want to,” Bria Salmena sings on ‘Hammer’, which is brooding before it becomes bracingly vulnerable. It’s the second single from her debut solo album Big Dog. “I’ve been struggling lately to find some light, to find strength in this current global dumpster fire,” Salmena explained. “My personal troubles aside I feel as though this song resonates in a different way to me now. Whether I realized it or not, ‘you are a hammer’ and ‘you are a big dog’ became words of encouragement for myself, and in a way, the mantra for the record.”
Equally notable is Bear with Me, where Shaoxiong embraces a vibrant, cartoony aesthetic to humorously explore the nuances of romantic relationships. The film’s playful character animations are juxtaposed with intimate storytelling, capturing everyday tensions and tender reconciliations between couples. His creative use of exaggerated motion and expressive facial animations not only heightens the comedic effect but also reveals the underlying emotional truths of companionship. The film’s international recognition includes Best Animated Short at the Independent Shorts Awards and Best Animation at the Los Angeles Film Awards.
