5 songs you need to hear this week (December 18, 2025)
Featuring DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ’s 12-minute prism of dance hypnosis, the Auto-Tuned vox and pedal steel adrift in more eaze’s prolific world, and candy-coated, disorienting riffs courtesy of Triples.
Photo of DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ courtesy of DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ
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: DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ, “Rainfalls”
One of the most prolific electronic artists of her time, DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ is only reachable by DM or email. And, in a seemingly never-ending battle with major streaming services, her music is only reachable via Bandcamp. That’s where her new 4-hour masterpiece, the recently-released Fantasy, currently lives. Near the end of the tracklist is “Rainfalls,” a monster, 12-minute dance track that features 15-30 samples at any given time—100 or so in total, if Sabrina’s own approximations are correct. Femme and pixelated, “Rainfalls” is emotive. A vocal sample pokes through a Bruce Hornsby’s “Changes”-style piano, declaring that “we’re gonna do our very best to take you on a journey through my personal life. There’s nobody else there, it’s just me” before swelling into a four-on-the-floor heartbeat flushed by spanky synths and discombobulated voices. To describe “Rainfalls,” I go back to this Sabrina quote from my interview with her last year. Talking about the Avalanches song “Since I Left You,” she wrote to me: “[The song] has a very uncanny feeling where it sounds alive and organic, but everything is brought back to life from the dead, like old Victorian corpus photography where they posed the deceased around as if they were still with us.” That’s the crux of “Rainfalls” and its self-referential, skyscraping hypnosis—zigging and zagging through resurrections of techno and splashes of house music in an overwhelming but tenacious pile of pop ideas. The color of Sabrina’s primordial ooze is unmistakable and, hours and hours of music later, still one of a kind. —Matt Mitchell
Fantasy by DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ
Doll Spirit Vessel: “Godless”
After three years of quiet (following 2022’s What Stays), Philadelphia’s Doll Spirit Vessel floats back into the spotlight with “Godless,” a hushed, slow-burning reintroduction that leans into restraint. The song begins with little more than fingerpicked guitar and Kati Malison’s voice, fragile and steady, before gradually blooming into something more ornate as violin and soft chimes drift into the frame. It’s haunting without feeling overwrought, intimate without collapsing inward—three minutes that unfold patiently and leave a long afterimage behind. “Godless” doesn’t announce a comeback so much as calmly reminds you what made Doll Spirit Vessel compelling in the first place: a gift for atmosphere, tension, and songs that seem to breathe on their own. —Casey Epstein-Gross
FLO made one of my favorite debuts last year, Access All Areas. To celebrate that record even further, the British “empowerment pop” trio shared the “unlocked” version this week, with four new songs and remixes from Kehlani, Bree Runway, DIXSON, and Chlöe x Halle. May I direct your attention to “Recently Deleted”? A retro dime billed as a thank you present to FLO’s supporters, the song finds passionate, grown-up R&B simmering in the staccato afterglow of a breakup. FLO are totally in their feels: “You’ll always keep my picture framed, ‘cause you think of me when you’re alone—when you’re touching her, you hear my moan. You’re faking it and, boy, it shows.” Velvety production and lyrical girl-group choreography abound, this is the kind of song you put out when your talent is undeniable. Putting a modern, “storage on the low” story to the tune of a ‘90s slow-jam throwback? “Recently Deleted” is headstrong yet goes down like sugar. FLO are quintessential. —Matt Mitchell
God bless mari rubio! Country, pop, ambient—the multi-instrumentalist Texan does it all, and her next more eaze album, sentence structure in the country, plans to sew the three together. You can hear the influence of rubio’s recent collaborators (Grumpy, claire rousay, and Lynn Avery) all over “bad friend,” the first taste of sentence structure and a song “about knowing you shouldn’t have romantic feelings for a friend.” But it’s also “about not doing a very good job hanging out with people and generally feeling like an alien,” rubio says. With Auto-Tuned vox, violin vignettes, clear-water synths, wincing pedal steel moves, guitar phrases generated by the great Wendy Eisenberg, and a killer opening line (“With new conditions you walk it back, pervert the air but leave in tack”), “bad friend” is three blurry minutes of a somber, drifting quiet. —Matt Mitchell
Toronto project Triples is all bright, dizzy clarity on “Be Around,” a track chronicling the emotional whiplash of early infatuation without sanding down its complications. Built from forward motion, barely-contained feeling, and punchy riffs that feel both rough-edged and melodic, the track moves with an easy momentum that mirrors its subject: the thrill of being pulled so fully into someone else’s orbit that the rest of your life briefly fades into the background. There’s an undercurrent of self-awareness running through the single, though: the joy is real, but so is the quiet disorientation that follows when you realize how much of yourself you’ve given over. But rather than frame it as a question of “before” versus “after”—of sugar rush versus sugar crash—Eva Link allows the ecstasy and unease to coexist in the same breath. Candy still tastes sweet even when you’ve eaten enough of it to feel nauseous, after all. —Casey Epstein-Gross
