Every week the Stereogum staff chooses the five best new songs of the week. The eligibility period begins and ends Thursdays right before midnight. You can hear this week’s picks below and on Stereogum’s Favorite New Music Spotify playlist, which is updated weekly. (An expanded playlist of our new music picks is available to members on Spotify and Apple Music, updated throughout the week.)
JPEGMAFIA - "Protect The Cross"
Earlier this week on X dot com formerly known as Twitter, JPEGMAFIA made a request: "Can someone tell pitchfork, gq, anna wintor, conde nast media to stop reporting on me? i do not want or need your promo. stop speaking about me and remove my art from your site all together Absolutely noone needs pitchfork in 2025. Keep my name out your nasty hipster mouths." He didn't mention Stereogum, though! Apparently, then, we're still free to discuss the latest track from everyone's favorite crashout-prone, way-too-online rap troll. And our verdict is: It's good! JPEGMAFIA will be so relieved to hear that. On "Protect The Cross," JPEGMAFIA wilds out over some hard-trudging nü-metal guitar riffage -- a provocation in its own right -- and mashes down on one pressure point after another: his prodigious collection of enemies, white boys imitating his style, white girls who lie about voting for Kamala Harris, a year when "your politics is a gang sign." Once again, he goes out of his way to make you uncomfortable. Once again, he uses that impulse to make a banger. The man can truly rap and turn sample-chops into convulsive fits, and a song like this will have its intended effect on all the nasty hipsters in the pit. —Tom
Real Lies - "Towards Horses"
Real Lies have a knack for electronic blips that encapsulate the melodrama of a crazy night. “Towards Horses,” the London duo’s second song of the year, is a frenzied earworm with a euphoric beat and cinematic narration: “An uncanny sense of space/ The night air’s got that new rain taste/ And the quiet of a loaded gun.” The tune is a shot of adrenaline, and it feels great. –Danielle
Courting - "After You"
Courting have never been shy about following their pop instincts to places that might make many indie bands flinch, but they're also not afraid to double back into noise. "After You," our latest preview of the band's pretentiously/majestically titled Lust For Life, Or: ‘How To Thread The Needle And Come Out The Other Side To Tell The Story,' pivots from the revved-up Talking Heads worship of lead single "Pause At You," opting instead for fuzzbombed guitar chords that ring out into the space cleared out by hard-crashing rock 'n' roll drums. When I say it sounds like it could be blaring on MTV2 in 2003 at the height of the post-Strokes gold rush, I mean it as a compliment. —Chris
Daneshevskaya - "Kermit & Gyro"
The severing of a romantic entanglement, even the most fleeting ones, can feel incredibly dramatic and discombobulating. As Daneshevskaya, New York art-folk musician Anna Beckerman crafts soundtracks for when life feels like a particularly punishing movie. "What was I worth to you?/ Of course I forget," go the opening lines of her new single "Kermit & Gyro," a sweeping ballad she wrote amid post-breakup despair. They say the brain disproportionately clings on to happy memories over painful ones, and "Kermit & Gyro" finds Beckerman looking into the rearview, clinging on to as much goodness as she can, even knowing the relationship had its flaws: "It’s better when you sleep/ But it gets boring when you leave," she sings as a string section swirls around her. "That’s how I know we had a good time." Sometimes, Beckerman seems to say, a really good fling makes any resounding pain worthwhile. --Abby
Meat Wave - "Dehydrated"
Chicago’s Meat Wave kicked off 2025 with a pair of drastically different songs: “Voicemail” and “Dehydrated.” Whereas “Voicemail” rages off the bat with shouts and thrashing guitars, “Dehydrated” takes another route. The slow-burner moves menacingly while anchored to a playful, hooky riff, the eerie air gradually intensifying but never to a full-out catharsis, instead lingering in this brooding in-between state that’s hypnotic enough to leave the listener satisfied. –Danielle
