In this segment, we round up the best songs of each month. Here, in alphabetical order, are the 10 best songs of January 2025.
Black Country, New Road – ‘Besties’
Jaunty, playful, wholesome – if you haven’t tuned into Black Country, New Road in a while, you may be surprised these words confidently describe ‘Besties’, the lead single from their new album Forever Howlong. Then again, fans who have kept up with the band since Isaac Wood’s sudden departure in 2020 will recognize it as a sequel of sorts to ‘Up Song’ from the live album Live at Bush Hall, which spun around the refrain, “Look what we did together/ BCNR friends forever!” But while Georgia Ellery doesn’t sing on any of the Bush Hall tracks, her endearing and emotive vocals take center stage on ‘Besties’. In a statement about the song’s music video, director Rianne White said: “Knee-high in January’s jacket of mud, darkness, fields, street corners and a pack of hounds we found the beating heart of a world made better by chasing love and connection.” ‘Besties’ definitely felt like that this past month.
Destroyer – ‘Bologna’
I urge you to listen to ‘Bologna’, the lead single from Destroyer’s upcoming LP Dan’s Boogie, on a late night walk – not just because Dan Bejar’s smoky synthpop provides the perfect company, but because of the song’s hypnotic personification of the city after midnight. “Night comes in on wings,” Bejar warns, “Wearing your rings/ Parading her furs/ Pressing its luck.” There are many things about the ethereal arrangement that instantly strike as classic Destroyer, but Bejar keeps the implicit threat of the song elusive, enlisting Fiver’s Simone Schmidt to help it rise above the surface. “That explains things,” they repeat, but I doubt even the whole of Dan’s Boogie will neatly wrap things up.
Jane Remover – ‘JRJRJR’
Jane Remover blows up the whole idea of “new year, new me” on ‘JRJRJR’, a song that literally dropped on New Year’s Day to preview their forthcoming album Revengeseekerz. “2025, I got none left to shake, but mine still do,” they declare, “I don’t believe a single soul no more, not even you.” Over a corroded, abrasive hip-hop beat that barely lets them stop for breath, suspicion morphs into self-doubt, which balloons against the terrifying ordeal of being known. They contemplate changing their name – “hate the way it rolls off the tongue, full circle” – but the frustration runs deeper. The artist is sticking to the name for now, even describing their side project venturing as a fictional band created by Jane Remover. Maybe there’ll be a new moniker in the future, or maybe they just needed to vent about the perils of this one for four and a half minutes. That’s more time than I’d like to spend listening to anyone’s New Year’s resolutions, but ‘JRJRJR’ is a song I can’t help but go back to.
Japanese Breakfast – ‘Orlando in Love’
At just over two minutes, ‘Orlando in Love’ might be too delicate and dreamy of a ballad to pull listeners in the way ‘Be Sweet’ did four years ago, but it’s as vividly rendered and enchanting as Japanese Breakfast’s best songs. Inspired by Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo’s ‘Orlando Innamorato’, the song introduces us to the archetype of a male poet writing “for melancholy brunettes and sad women” (which is also, winkingly, the title of the new JB album), only to be lured in by a siren with no distinct features beyond her mysterious origin and the way she sings his name (“like a mother,” of course). Like another great Japanese Breakfast song, Michelle Zauner is fascinated by the dual workings of seduction and foolishness, and she does a great job of teasing out both perspectives in the song and its accompanying video. Elusive as both figures may be, Orlando’s fate is revealed just in the way his name echoes out in the end. This is how the story goes, but it’s only the start of For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women).
jasmine.4.t – ‘Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation’
‘Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation’ is a different song from the one jasmine.4.t wrote and recorded years ago. The Manchester-based singer-songwriter was living at her best friend’s house and – having come out as trans to her closest people in her hometown of Bristol and ended her marriage – experiencing extreme PTSD symptoms. The song is about losing your mind at Tesco while there are fireworks outside; it’s also about suicidal ideation, and the friend who grounds you in your own body, that makes you promise not to go through with it. jasmine.4.t’s description is literal, until it isn’t: “When I push harder something stops me like a forcefield like a membrane/ Like two north poles like two train doors closing freezer food inside.” It’s a vital part of a song that, aided by all three members of boygenius on production and Phoebe Bridgers on vocals, has changed significantly since the demo Jasmine Cruickshank tracked originally, which had one guitar and vocal panned on the left and one guitar and vocal on the right. But the tidal shift is contextual, as the next chapter she imagines in the second verse – where she finds “connection next to true self something larger than my life” – has now caught up to her. Wherever it finds you, ‘Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation’ is a shot of hope moulded out of despair.
Lucy Dacus – ‘Ankles’
Maybe it’s the proximity of their release dates, but with billowing strings and softly strummed guitars, the bed of instrumentation on ‘Ankles’ mirrors the one that carries forth Japanese Breakfast’s latest story of yearning. (Lucy Dacus and Michelle Zauner have been in conversation at least once.) ‘Ankles’ is faster than ‘Orlando in Love’, because it’s hornier, hooked on the endorphin rush of two people finally surrendering their inhibitions, or maybe just one – except this time it’s not a poet and a siren but lovers with no symbolic occupation beyond, perhaps, “Agent of chaos/ Angel of death.” Dacus can’t help that typically poetic bit of wordplay, but she keeps her language direct and explicit while remaining tender with each burst of desire. Unrestrained intimacy and domestic bliss entwine on ‘Ankles’ – “I want you to show me what you mean/ Then help me with the crossword in the morning” – but Dacus doesn’t make it sound like a fantasy. Though it very well may be, it’s worth divulging every detail.
Momma – ‘I Want You (Fever)’
The word in parenthesis makes all the difference. Yes, “Pick up and leave her/ I want you, fever” makes for one hell of a catchy chorus, but fever – beyond encapsulating the feeling of the song, which is about the kind of unrequited love that makes your blood boil with longing because it’s more about knowing the other person wants you – also feels like a switch, allowing all pent-up desire to swirl up the surface over one of Momma’s most irresistible riffs yet. The duo said the song is “about wanting to be with someone who has a girlfriend, or someone who isn’t over their ex,” but the “or someone” is open to projection. Really, it’s about the fever, and we all want it.
Perfume Genius – ‘It’s a Mirror’
In past Perfume Genius singles, the chorus has served as an avenue for salvation and even transcendence, the possibility of which leaves Mike Hadreas toiling through the verses. But on ‘It’s a Mirror’, the lead single from his new album Glory, the chorus is a locust of fear, a hive of irrepressible memories; a siren, like the one in the Japanese Breakfast song, “breaking me down soft and slow.” It wouldn’t be a proper first track if Hadreas didn’t open the door to all of them, transforming twangy wistfulness into swarming cacophony. His language shifts, too, his questioning plainly communicated. “What do I get out of being established?” Hadreas sings. “I still run and hide when a man’s at the door.” Rather than muffling the sound of each knock, though, he renders them inescapable.
SPELLLING – Portrait of My Heart
You can hear the cinematic whimsy of SPELLLING’s 2021 LP The Turning Wheel embedded in ‘Portait of My Heart’, but the first single off her upcoming album of the same name comes charged with a different kind of energy. Chrystia Cabral diagnoses her mental state instantly: “Lost,” she sings, “shattered in the dark.” The dark begins to illuminate a deep sense of regret, even mystical hubris: a spell cast entirely in hte wrong direction. “I don’t belong here,” she exclaims, more directly cathartic than SPELLLING’s music has sounded in the past. She makes a pact with herself to remake her image, and you’re convinced, if only because the song itself sounds like an act of reinvention. It’s what the entirety of the SPELLLING project is about.
Samia – ‘Bovine Excision’
”I was drawn to the phenomenon of bloodless cattle mutilation as a metaphor for self-extraction – this clinical pursuit of emptiness,” Samia curiously said in a press statement about ‘Bovine Excision’, the lead single from her third LP. Synonyms she finds for being empty in the song: “untouchable,” “impossible,” and Bloodless, the title of the album. But the blood that runs through ‘Bovine Excision’ burns bright and hot: the twangy guitars fried with grit, her own voice exploding in the mirror as she sings of being drained. But the need for self-effacement, though ambiguous, reveals itself to be but a symptom of an unattainable ideal, or simply a desire for warmth – to be warmth, “cup of tea in your cold hand.” Hide yourself as you might, you can’t deny the beating of your own heart, and Samia cuts through the metaphor for something palpably human.