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 June 2025.
Amaarae, ‘S.M.O’
You don’t need to have listened to more than a few minutes of Amaarae’s excellent Fountain Baby to guess that the title of her new single stands for “Slut Me Out.” It’s an infectiously layered and unmistakably sultry jam that flaunts the Ghanaian-American artist’s fusion of styles, which she helpfully points out include Ghanaian highlife, Detroit club bass, zouk, and Janet Jackson’s Control. All of those references may come through, but they do nothing to distract from the titular message of the song, let alone Amaarae’s presence and comedic flair: “I wanna week with her, she taste like Lexapro.” We’re still a month away from the release of Fountain Baby’s follow-up, Black Star, but this is an excellent first taste, not least if you need something to take the edge off.
Blood Orange, ‘The Field’
‘The Field’ is a sunbeam, a deep breath, a prayer, an everyday feeling. But above all, Blood Orange’s first release in three years is a gorgeously orchestrated dialogue. First, between the impressive cast of collaborators Dev Hynes has brought together: a skittering dance beat set against Durutti Column leader Vini Reilly’s lush, fluttery guitar work, the interplay between Hynes and guest vocalists Tariq Al-Sabir, Daniel Caesar, and Caroline Polachek. Maybe you can recognize some of these voices, but the more entrancing conversation happens between the narratively faceless protagonists, who hate to say goodbye but keep yearning for home. There’s a haziness to the warmth, which somehow also feels like a gravitational force. “Sing to me, in the heat of the sun,” Polachek pleads, making quite an entrance. You wouldn’t expect a song this understated to be a contender for song of the summer, but it should be.
Ethel Cain, ‘Nettles’
In what is technically the post-chorus of ‘Nettles’, Hayden Anhedonia delivers a devastating line: “Gardenias on the tile, where it makes no difference who held back from who.” Devastating as a postscript in the love story of Ethel Cain and Willoughby Tucker, whose wedding remains a distant dream because we’ve already learned of the latter’s death. We know Cain’s fate, too, through Preacher’s Daughter, but ‘Nettles’, being the first song she wrote in the house in Alabama where she finished that album, serves as a prequel. And it’s devastating, too, because though it passed through many iterations, the track’s vision of Americana stretches over eight minutes yet remains as sweet as can be, nestled by layers of fiddle, pedal steel, and banjo; a devotional that dares not be entirely mournful or anything less than idealistic. The story of two teenagers “in a race to grow up” is a familiar one in the Ethel Cain universe, but what’s moving about ‘Nettles’ is how they’re forced into the slowness of adulthood through “the flicker of the hospital light,” and how the song itself honours and extends that slowness, clearly beyond the realm of realism. Where it makes no difference if it’s nettles or gardenias, suffering or love. Where it’s always.
La Dispute, ‘Environmental Catastrophe Film’
One takeaway from La Dispute’s astounding nine-minute epic ‘Environmental Catastrophe Film’ is that time moves ceaselessly, and only in one direction. I try to keep this in mind as one of its couplets – “If you give in to the poison inside/ Could they deny you when you try to get in?” – takes me back to the visceral reaction I had upon hearing the band for the first time as a young kid, more than a decade and a half ago, and one of their most quoted lyrics: “Can I still get into Heaven if I kill myself?” While the the song’s nuanced storytelling was lost on some listeners in that climactic moment, the same can hardly happen with ‘Environmental Catastrophe Film’, in the middle of a three-part narrative that takes into account the history of the polluted Grand River, the creation of the Christian Reformed Church, and furniture manufacturing. Sitting in the midst of it all is a boy for whom time doesn’t seem to just be moving forward: grieving the old friend who died by suicide, he’s lost in the swathe of metaphors and allusions, finding comfort in their dissolution: “Watch the past fall away/ All our lives against the blade/ Because the time goes and we change/ Not what we made but what can be.”
Nourished by Time, ‘9 2 5’
It’s a familiar story: an artist waiting tables by day and making music by night, barely holding it together yet holding onto a dream. Musicians have written this kind of song from varying levels of success and cynicism, and while Nourished by Time’s ‘9 2 5’ is written in the third person, you have no doubt Marcus Brown’s perspective comes not just from experience, but from the heart. He neither revels nor quite rebels: this is a glistening dance jam whose circular groove might mirror the unchanging rhythm of the narrator’s life – “hateful,” is how he describes – but the brightness of the instrumentation also hints at where Brown’s head is currently at. He’s not tacky or patronizing about it, though, just wishful: “May you always have a fight/ Be it wrong or be it right/ Shed a raindrop when you cry.” And maybe write a song about it.
The Beths, ‘No Joy’
You wouldn’t call The Beths’ latest single joyful, but it’s an unusually sprightly depiction of anhedonia. It’s not exactly new territory for the band, whose last album, Expert in a Dying Field, showed their proficiency in slipping hooks into heartbroken anthems. But as the first preview of their fourth album, Straight Line Was a Lie, it finds vocalist Liz Stokes less concerned with painful emotions than her own brain chemistry, especially as she started taking an SSRI that, aside from everything else, introduced a barrier to songwriting. “Heartbeat barely pumping,” she sings, yet the band’s naturally locked into a rhythm; Stokes said her musical instincts “weren’t as panicky,” but fight-or-flight is exactly the response ‘No Joy’ seems to incite in its final moments, like every new layer is pulling at her tear ducts. To expel anything – even the opposite of joy – would be delightful.
Water From Your Eyes, ‘Life Signs’
Here’s a great line: “Tick tick you’re alive sunlit sick sky scraped by bright eyed short sight online.” Good luck relating to any other lyric on ‘Life Signs’, though – the lead single from Water From Your Eyes’ It’s a Beautiful Place is as hectically free-associative as anything off their previous albums, though we do get confirmation that it (presumably: “life in a small town”) being a beautiful place elicits no fearlessness about death, but simply feeling unfulfilled. The band – now a quartet, with Rachel Brown and Nate Amos welcoming Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz of fantasy of a broken heart – still work their magic around this sense of dissatisfaction, cranking up a delightfully douchey guitar riff before drowning it out with a dreamily warped chorus. And is that a vision creeping up in the final spoken verse? “To save a tradition imagine it different.” There’s three whole minutes left of the song to keep you guessing, only to realize you need the full album.
Wednesday, ‘Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)’
After the deceptively sweet introduction of ‘Elderberry Wine’, Wednesday’s latest single seems to dive into the gnarled world of Bleeds. Guitars that swirl and itch and dig their nails right through the dirt. A feral scream from Karly Hartzman, who relays a story a friend told her about having to drag a body out of a creek in West Virginia, borrowing a line from Evan Gray’s poetry book Thickets Swamped in A Fence-Coated Briars. It’s ensnared by Hartzman’s own piercing lyricism, which zeroes in on all sorts of ways that deaths mount up like trophies (“Mounted antlers in the kitchen on a crooked nail/ Other killers keep teeth keep the fingernails”), how tragedy is a strange path to undying. “This is what Wednesday songs are supposed to sound like,” Hartzman has said of the new LP, and ‘Wound Up Here’, in all its dark, twisted beauty, stands as an emblem.
