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, January 15, 2025.
Lucy Dacus – ‘Ankles’ & ‘Limerence’
Lucy Dacus is back with two new songs, ‘Ankles’ and ‘Limerence’, which lead her forthcoming album and major-label debut, Forever Is a Feeling. The driving, string-laden ‘Ankles’ is the one that gets a music video (filmed in Paris and featuring Havana Rose Liu), while ‘Limerence’ is a heartfelt ballad as striking as Dacus’ best. “I’m thinking about breaking your heart someday soon,” she sings. “And if I do, I’ll be breaking mine too.”
Perfume Genius – ‘It’s a Mirror’
Perfume Genius has announced his fifth LP, Glory, sharing the single ‘It’s a Mirror’. “What do I get out of being established?” Mike Hadreas sings, “I still run and hide when a man’s at the door.” In a statement, he explained: “I wake up overwhelmed even when nothing is going on. I spend the rest of the day trying to regulate, which I prefer to do at home alone with my thoughts. But why? They are mostly bad. They also haven’t really changed for decades. I wrote ‘It’s A Mirror’ while stuck in one of these isolating loops, seeing that something different and maybe even beautiful is out there but not quite knowing how to venture out. I have a lot more practice keeping the door closed.”
My Morning Jacket – ‘Time Waited’
We’ve waited quite a while for the next My Morning Jacket LP, but now we know the follow-up to the band’s 2021 self-titled LP, titled is, releases in March. Lead single ‘Time Waited’ is equal parts jaunty and dreamy. “I made a loop of that piano intro and listened as I went for a walk, and all these melodies started coming to me,” Jim James explained. “For a long time, I didn’t have lyrics, but then I had a dream where I was in a café and a song was playing, and the lyrics to that song became the lyrics to ‘Time Waited’ — the melodies just fit perfectly. And the lyrics are about how flexible time is, how we can bend and warp time, especially if we are following our hearts, the universe and time itself can flow to work with us.”
Porridge Radio – ‘Don’t Want to Dance’
Today, we got the sad news that Porridge Radio, the Bright outfit led by Dana Margolin, is breaking up. They’ve got one more project on the way, though: Machine Starts to Sing, a four-track EP of songs recorded during the sessions for last year’s Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me (which we interviewed Margolin about.) Leading the announcement is the raw and bittersweet ‘Dont Want to Dance’, which includes lyrics like, “It’s too late to try, but I’m not done trying.”
Girl Talk feat. T-Pain and Yaeji, ‘Believe in Ya’
T-Pain and Yaeji have joined producer Girl Talk on a bouncy, exuberant new song called ‘Believe in Ya’, which samples Change’s 1981 single ‘Hold Tight’. “T-Pain is a living legend and an absolute master of his craft,” Girl Talk said in a statement. “It was an honor to make music with him again. I was excited about getting T-Pain on some sample-based production. He has such a distinctive vocal style, and I wanted to put it into a complimentary but unique musical environment. I wanted to give him a different sound, something that takes elements from the past but transforms it into a modern style…” Yaeji added, “It was a joy to create music that’s positive and uplifting, especially alongside T-Pain and Girl Talk.”
Yukimi – ‘Sad Makeup’ and ‘Winter Is Not Dead’
Yukimi, the vocalist and co-founder of Swedish group Little Dragon, has announced her debut solo LP. For You arrives March 28 via Ninja Tune, and two new songs, ‘Sad Makeup’ and ‘Winter Is Not Dead’, are out now. “I wrote a song called ‘Sad Makeup’ about those days when you try to push down and control a sad feeling,” Yukimi explained. “The more I try to control it, the more it’s felt by others around me, growing bigger as an energy.” Of the icier ‘Winter Is Not Dead’, she added: “Living in Scandinavia, we must face our long, dark winters. The lack of light brings many of us down. At the same time, underground, life thrives. Microbes stay busy breaking down organic matter, recycling nutrients and improving the soil, quietly preparing for spring. I also grow during my personal winter seasons, even though things might feel dead on the surface. Wheels turn as I transform and move through it getting ready for spring and summer.”
Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory – ‘Trouble’
Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory have dropped ‘Trouble’, the final pre-release single from their forthcoming self-titled debut album. It boasts an incredibly melodic bass line by Devra Hoff, while Teeny Lieberson’s atmospheric synths really fill out the space of the song. “’Trouble’ is about the idea of having to coexist with people you love who have opposing views, and not being able to share deep parts of yourself and your narrative based on someone else’s beliefs,” Van Etten explained. “It’s about when there’s that big part of you that someone who loves you can’t know because it’s not something they want to hear or are willing to learn about or understand, and those painful realizations when you choose to love and respect someone else’s needs over your own to salvage a relationship.”
Anxious – ‘Some Girls’
Connecticut punks Anxious are releasing their new album, Bambi, on February 21, and its latest single is the sweepingly dynamic ‘Some Girls’.
Baths – ‘Eden’
Baths has offered another preview of his first album in seven years. ‘Eden’ is bubbly and euphoric, and Will Wiesenfeld had this to say about it: “A lot of Gut goes into more negative territory on sex, and the psyche, but to keep it honest I also needed a song that reflected the rapturousness of that experience. Sometimes, amidst all my misgivings and self-flagellation, sex can be perfect. ‘Eden’ revels in the joy of my own insatiable sexual appetite and constant search for gratification. It is a reversal, finding god in the body, here on earth. In it, I demand that heaven come down to me, meet me on my terms, and ‘drink’ of me—not unlike a catholic congregation is instructed to drink the blood of Christ in the eucharist. ‘Slip into my ellipsis’ is a demand for the powers that be to share in my erotic fervor, in the feeling that is the closest I get in my adult life to a religious experience. Subsequently, the way that feeling affects me in a broader sense is when the rest of Gut comes into focus.”
Moreish Idols – ‘Dream Pixel’
Moreish Idols have detailed their debut album, All in the Game, out March 7 on Speedy Wunderground. The psych-inflected, knotty ‘Dream Pixel’ leads the announcement. According to the band, it’s “about what we all see in our dreams; the colors, sounds and occurrences that are often too surreal to put into words and leave you questioning how the subconscious can paint such a vivid, psychedelic picture. Inspired by the experience of swimming in phosphorescence in Cornwall, ‘Dream Pixel’ celebrates the moments in life that could easily be mistaken for a dream, glitch or trip.”
Carriers – ‘Blurry Eyes’
Carriers, the musical project of Cincinnati’s Curt Kiser, has a new album on the way: Every Time I Feel Afraid, arrives on May 2 via Brassland. The ethereal new single ‘Blurry Eyes’ features contributions from The National’s Bryan Devendor, The War on Drugs’ Dave Hartley, Ben Lanz, and Peter Katis. “I wrote ‘Blurry Eyes’ right before the first live stream show I did on Instagram during the pandemic,” Kiser explained. “What a wild thing that kept us all together while the world was shut down. It was a hard but also an incredibly special time to refocus on what really matters in life.” He added, “Right now is a weird time to be putting out music and promoting myself, but I’m grateful to share art during such a heavy time. I hope the songs find people when they need it most, and that they can provide some kind of solace — whether an escape from the situation, some magic in the atmosphere, or maybe a lyric to help them process what’s going on.”
SUSS – ‘This Land Is Your Land’ (Woody Guthrie Cover)
We featured ambient country trio SUSS on yesterday‘s track roundup for their Immersion collab ‘State of Motion’. Today, they’ve taken on Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’, and it’s mesmerizing. “Music more than almost anything else can evoke the emotions of a time and place,” Jonathan Gregg said in a statement. “As we find ourselves again in a time of challenge and uncertainty, we reach for solace in the same places as those who came before. Whether it’s a hymn, a battle cry, or a simple folk song, music is at the ready to bring us together and remind us that we have been here before, we are still here, and always will be as long as we remember.”
Mess Esque – ‘Take Me to Your Infinite Garden’
Mess Esque, the Australian duo of Helen Franzmann (aka McKisko) and the Dirty Three’s Mick Turner, have announced their latest record, Jay Marie, Comfort Me. The lead single ‘Take Me to Your Infinite Garden’ is a stomping, ominous rocker, and it comes with a video by Charlie Hillhouse.
WILDES and St Francis Hotel – ‘In the Floodlight’
WILDES and St Francis Hotel have a new collaborative EP, Kopfkino, coming out on February 19. “This song chronicles adolescence into adulthood, and the many versions of ourselves that live and die on the way to uncovering our true nature,” WILDES said of the foreboding ‘In the Floodlight’. “Each verse represents a different period in my twenties, as I grew and fought against who I wanted to be, and who I was told I should be. Despite all of the experiences that change our outlook and values in life, there always remains a little seed of who we were in our youth, before life’s complexities appear, and for me that is deeply reassuring.”
fish narc – ‘boxy volvo’
fish narc – the alias of Olympia, WA-based songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Ben Funkhouser – has dropped ‘boxy volvo’, a hooky new track from his recently announced album, frog song. “After five weeks on tour in the Fall 2023, I had built up a lot of ideas that I didn’t really know how to set into motion,” Funkhouser explained. “Doing music for a living changes your ears, and the streaming format changes the way you categorize and relate to the music you listen to. I wanted to refresh my listening habits and rebuild my library of songs, as well as my guitar and singing chops. I wrote ‘boxy volvo’ that month, while my girlfriend Emma was out of town in New York. I met her in NYC, where she lived at 538 Johnson and drove this old boxy Volvo station wagon with thirty air fresheners on the rearview mirror. I made up the lyrics about the dice, cuz it was too hard to sing ‘thirty air fresheners.’”
LAKE – ‘Wonderful Sunlight’
Bucolic Gone, LAKE’s 10th studio album and first LP for Don Giovanni, has been set for release on March 7. ‘Wonderful Sunlight’ is a lush, soothing introduction: “Sunlight changes all who listen/ With a song of light on the face of children,” goes the second verse, “Will you serve with them today/ Be a believer in the golden rodeo.” So go on and listen.