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 November 2025.
Grace Ives, ‘Dance With Me’
Grace Ives’ ‘Dance With Me’ is a gift that keeps on giving, the kind of pop song that takes its time to build and relishes the payoff. The hook is simple and catchy enough: “Why don’t you come out and dance with me?/ Because it’s only the same when you’re next to me.” But the magic is in all the narrative details and musical touches she streaks across, working with producer Ariel Rechtshaid to really make the song come alive. It swings from the solitary image of quoting The Hours in the company of your cat (“Always the love and the years in between us”) to actually going out into the world, it feeling “bigger than we thought it would be.” The excitement bubbles and trickles from one place to the next, and you can only hope it’s bottled into a bigger project come 2026.
Jana Horn, ‘Go on, move your body’
Having completed a creative writing MFA in Charlottesville, Jana Horn is well aware of Joseph Campbell’s seminal work Power of Myth. On the lead single from her self-titled album, she stirs to mind one of its most famous quotes: “I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.” She then counters pointedly: “But what do you follow when there’s no scent of it?” ‘Go on, move your body’, naturally, is about fighting through inertia, but it’s the rare song about aimlessness that doesn’t just emulate the feeling, but drifts through it, like a mind stuck in both memory and a body that’s got to get going. “Nothing compares to a thing already done,” she sings, obviously doing the thing.
Robber Robber, ‘Talkback’
We often want to have a sharper, more quick-witted retort than we can actually come up with in the moment. ‘Talkback’, Robber Robber’s first single for Fire Talk, zeroes in on that relatable feeling, but together with her bandmates, Nina Cates actually traces it in the body as opposed to analyzing what she should have said. “Settle back down cool again/ I shouldn’t bother, sucked back in,” she intones, but the band locks into the state of nervous embarrassment, the mind running the conversation back and twisting and returning without pause. Without quite shifting the tempo, they seem to relax as Cates acknowledges that the moment’s passed. Unlike her initial response, it certainly doesn’t fall flat.
Robyn, ‘Dopamine’
‘Dopamine’ is classic Robyn from its very first moments. As the singer’s first single in seven years, that’s particularly affirming, but it also rationalizes the pop euphoria – intertwined as it often is with lust – that she’s so well-versed in. “I know it’s just dopamine/ But it feels so real to me,” she sings over and over again, a human fact playfully juxtaposed with a robotic voice repeating what sounds like the word “dope.” (I know which part I’ll be singing when the song comes on the dancefloor.) But no amount of Giorgio Moroder-like synths can downplay the sheer emotionality of her voice, which becomes more nuanced, but no less Robyn, than its very first moments. When she proclaims that “Nothing’s ever going to taste just as sweet/ As when it is just out of reach,” it sounds like she’s pulling it closer. It sounds like you can almost taste it.
underscores, ‘Do It’
I was late to the underscores hype, overlooking April Harper Grey’s 2023 album Wallsocket. But ever since her July single ‘Music’, I’ve been all in. Irrespective of the different strains of pop it joins together, ‘Do It’ is even more infectious. It pairs perfectly with the Robyn single, except Grey is playfully interrogating the conditions of a relationship as opposed to just diving in. “If you want it/ Better know that this ain’t gonna be the real thing,” she warns After all, there aren’t many things reserved for that realness, that absolute investment: “I’m married to the music,” she sings, and the best this suitor can hope for, in line with underscores’ ‘Music’, to catch the BPM.
Rosalía, ‘Reliquia’
Rosalía sings in 13 languages on LUX, but there’s something spine-chilling about her reverting to her native Spanish on ‘Reliquia’, a song that finds her breezing through world cities that have left a mark on her. The same way LUX regardless of how many of its languages you speak, ‘Reliquia’ feels like a personal map of memory no matter the extent to which you can project upon it, though I can’t help but be moved when she begins with Jerez, a birthplace of flamenco and the place where I lived when MOTOMAMI broke through. I have friends who maybe relate more to losing their temper in Berlin or running away from Florida. Rosalía memorializes all these places over a string arrangement that makes her sound like she’s hovering above the earth, not fully tied down to a single place but attached to so many. “We are dolphins jumping, going in and out/ Of the scarlet and shining hoop of time,” she sings – a rough translation, a half-shared understanding, the thing that brings us together.
Why say “I made an ambient album” when you can say I Created the Universe so That Life Could Create a Language So Complex, Just to Say How Much I Love You? That’s the title of Sega Bodega’s new album, and the eponymous track, slotted right in the middle, is appropriately spacious and moving. The features are intriguing, too: there’s a notable appearance from legendary folk singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan on the opening track ‘Pipe’, plus two tracks each with Lucinda Chua and Maya Alkhateri.
PLOSIVS – the underground rock supergroup composed of Rob Crow (Pinback), John Reis (Rocket From The Crypt/Drive Like Jehu/Hot Snakes), Atom Willard (RFTC, Against Me!, The Offspring, etc), and Jordan Clark (Mrs. Magician) – have a new album out. 
These New South Wales have dropped their fourth studio album, 
