5 songs you need to hear this week

Featuring Jane Remover’s blown-out dance prayer, Dirt Buyer’s vast and stormy guitar brilliance, and Nothing’s stripped-down collaboration with Mary Lattimore.

By Paste Staff  |  December 11, 2025 | 2:00pm
Photo of Jane Remover by XXX
Music Lists Best New Songs
5 songs you need to hear this week

Every Thursday, the Paste staff and contributors will choose their five favorite songs of the week, awarding one entry a “Song of the Week” designation. You can hear these songs in our ongoing Best New Songs of 2025 playlist, which gets updated weekly.

Song of the Week: Jane Remover, “Music Baby”

Jane Remover’s banner year continues. I loved Revengeseekerz and its maximalist playground of EDM, techno, and pop-rap. And the guitar blasts from the spiraling, Midwest emo-flecked Venturing tape still weigh heavy on the sprawling, fragile mind. But the best thing Jane Remover has ever done is drop four perfect pop songs in one calendar year, which she did in 2024: “Magic I Want U,” “Flash in the Pan,” “Dream Sequence,” and “How to Teleport.” Jane was in a deep, vibrant pocket of talent that combined her splashy rap streaks with a cocktail of digicore, breakbeat, and Miami bass. But even in her EDM, Euro-club, post-R&B abundance the guitars are never too far away. “Music Baby” is of the same ilk as “Professional Vengeance” from Revengeseekerz: Jane’s appetite for glitchy, blown-out dance music is contagious. “Music Baby” lowers the mask on her sentimental side, as she recites her desires like a prayer (“Please, God, save me, I just wanna party / Please, God, forgive me, I just wanna rock like that”). But the comedown is greater than spiritual: “I don’t give a fuck what they think about us, we just make music, baby.” It’s a game of cat and mouse—a “will they/won’t they” clattering in the flames of two, maybe three songs at once. In a wash of ecstatic noise, the melody pulls Jane apart: “You make the city so hot, you can’t break my heart.” —Matt Mitchell

♡ by Jane Remover

Dirt Buyer: “Baseball”

How does anyone follow up a SOTY candidate? I think Dirt Buyer’s got that figured out on “Baseball.” Joe Sutkowski’s new single doesn’t hit the same level of catchiness as his previous, “Get to Choose,” but it doesn’t need to. Facsimiles are overrated. “Baseball” chugs, crushes, and contorts. The song is immediately pronounced by piles of distortion—guitar pummelings that overwhelm but never suffocate—and blinking piano lights that jut through the blasts. Sutkowski’s voice soothes the gaps with a shade of twang, especially in his enunciation of “holler.” But “Baseball” luxuriates best in a restless, noisy downpour, when the melody growls louder the heavier he strums. But there’s resolution in a sudden snap of quiet, when acoustic strings begin to vibrate. “Baseball is somethin’ I’ll never get, but I sleep on it, wake up, and try again,” Sutkowski lets out, gently. In his stupor of guitar mania, which covers me with a vast and stormy brilliance, Dirt Buyer squares American’s pastime in overdrive. —Matt Mitchell

Dirt Buyer III by Dirt Buyer

Draag: “Miracle Drug”

LA band Draag is looking for a quick fix. Their latest single, “Miracle Drug,” paints love as a rare antidote with a deadly kind of withdrawal. “Fuck your bender, you took it all away,” opens the song, intoned by a snarly whisper laying low in the mix. The lead guitar follows suit, amping up the distortion until the song seethes with tightly-wound angst. Following in the footsteps of their shoegaze forefathers, Draag tends to cut their sonic rigidity (maybe not right word) with the sweetness of their melodies. Singer Jessica Huang stands at the helm of the song’s vulnerability, her voice breezy as she sings, “I can’t settle for more when I’ve settled for less.” Huang’s doubled vocals twist in tense harmonies, pairing with the tenor of Adrian Acosta almost seamlessly. “Miracle Drug” anticipates an EP of the same name, out on January 23 via Smoking Rooms. If this single is any indication, Draag will be churning out hazy rock songs just in time to soundtrack the dog days of winter.—Caroline Nieto

Miracle Drug by Draag

Dry Cleaning: “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit”

It feels cruel that I encountered “Let Me Grow And You’ll See The Fruit” today, of all days—as if the universe catalogued my past 24 hours then said, “Hey, want to be read like a book?” So perhaps I’m just biased, but Dry Cleaning’s quiet, experimental latest single is altogether gutting. Atop chiming guitars and Bruce Lamont’s haunting sax, Florence Shaw’s delivery borders on spoken-word poetry: “People move away from me,” she mutters, her voice a low monotone. “I constantly think there are spiders on me and around me.” The syllables are dulled, blanketed with a thick layer of intentionally affected apathy—but exhaustion and numbness bleed through every word, rendering the indifferent tone less invulnerable than flayed raw. By the end, the song feels less like a performance than a recording of someone trying to keep themselves company amidst a vast ocean of faceless faces and hourless days. Trying, maybe, to answer that awful modernity-defining question: the world is your oyster, you can do anything—so why aren’t you? —Casey Epstein-Gross

Secret Love by Dry Cleaning

Nothing ft. Mary Lattimore: “purple strings”

“purple strings” sounds like it’s happening in the moment right before a breakdown—but not the loud kind. Following the restless intensity of previous single “Cannibal World,” the fact that Nothing strip everything away here is made even more stark: just acoustic guitar, a slow swell of strings, and Mary Lattimore’s harp glinting like glass shards in the wreckage. Nicky Palermo’s voice, finally unfiltered, wavers on the edge of collapse—raw, trembling, too close for comfort. It’s a song about fragility, but not the ornamental kind; this is fragility as a state of being, something you live inside. The band’s usual noise is replaced by air and ache, until even silence feels stifling. By the time the strings bloom into their final surge, it’s less catharsis than surrender—a kind of stillness so heavy it feels like pressure. Nothing have never sounded so quiet, or so completely undone. —Casey Epstein-Gross

a short history of decay by Nothing

 
Join the discussion...