Every week, the Paste staff and contributors will choose their five favorite songs of the previous seven days, awarding one entry a “Song of the Week” designation. After taking time off for the holiday, we’re back with our first roundup of new music for 2026. Here, we’ve taken stock of songs that came out between December 19th and now. Next week, we’ll return to our usual Thursday column.
Song of the Week: Tyler, The Creator: “SAG HARBOR”
Tyler, The Creator spent the interim between Flower Boy and IGOR dropping freestyle tracks on YouTube: “435,” “GELATO,” “PEACH FUZZ,” “BRONCO,” and the A$AP Rocky-assisted “POTATO SALAD.” While he has mostly been in album-mode ever since, sharing CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST, CHROMAKOPIA, and DON’T TAP THE GLASS in a four-year span, he put out “SAG HARBOR” on Christmas Day (a year after giving away “THAT GUY” as a holiday treat). Seated with his accomplishments, Tyler’s basking in the glow of Grammy nominations, his supporting role in the critically-acclaimed, totally bonkers ping-pong drama Marty Supreme, and a sold-out world tour. And you better believe he’s rapping about all of that on “SAG HARBOR,” an ice-cold, 3-minute classic. “SAG HARBOR” name-drops a few of Tyler’s Odd Future pals, like Jasper and Lionel Boyce, and you’ll need extra hands of your own if you’re gonna count all the hit-points he’s referencing on this track: SpongeBob Squarepants (“she sponging up my Plankton, it got her moving crabby”), pop-punk bands (“blink and it’s 182 like Travis Barker”), his own car collection (“backseat of the Phantom, tell the driver move it slow-mo”), and sustained chart relevance (“son got his 4th #1 in a row, I’m a champion”) are just the tip of this one-liner iceberg. Tyler stunts on the vultures in his life by tapping into the evergreen text message bubble divide (“they ain’t seeing green from me, I’m switching to an iPhone”). He has high expectations for how the world thinks of him and his riches (“I want them to see me like the bottom of a boat, bro”), but he’s holding his expectations for himself much closer to the chest (“lust in my body made commitment see the exit, I pray to God I settle down and stop the second-guessing”). But mostly, Tyler’s just talking some shit (“white bitches saying ‘period’ at the end of the sentence but wouldn’t let the Black girls they copy inside their kitchen”) and doing it over a sample of Cobra Heart Band’s “Cobra Heart” and a $ilkmoney-type beat. His loosies are the best kind of tradition. On “SAG HARBOR” he’s pure money and knows it: “Fuck who y’all calling the best. I seen they ticket sales, give it a rest.”
Che & OsamaSon: “WHIPPIN”
Che and OsamaSon’s music is rage rap’s crystal ball. The noise they make is forward-thinking and ambitious, as they take Playboi Carti’s template and twist it inside out. They’re both young Southern rappers (Che is 19, OsamaSon is 22) but lend a veteran’s poise to their maximalist art-making, and you can hear that on their 2025 records (REST IN BASS and Jump Out, both of which landed on our best rap albums of the year list). On Christmas, Che shared a surprise deluxe edition of REST IN BASS with 14 extra tracks, including “WHIPPIN,” another collaboration with OsamaSon—and a sort-of continuation of Che’s not-so-hidden feature on the OsamaSon Psykotic track “FMJ.” “WHIPPIN” is all gas, no brakes for two manipulated, textured, overblown minutes. Diced-up bars about Dior kicks, dirty Sprite, Timbs covered in blood, Bentleys, and threesomes clash with thudding bass, bloopy radar synths, mile-a-minute verses, and slime-covered beats. Hedonism gets cranked to an 11 when it’s in Che and OsamaSon’s pockets of brainrot and indulgence. You can’t help but see the future.
Doechii & SZA: “girl, get up”
“Anxiety” was a pop-chart hit in 2025 but I wasn’t into it. After Alligator Bites Never Heal, one of the best mixtapes of the decade, came out and turned Doechii into a crossover superstar, I just expected more oomph in her next idea. And she definitely had something cooking when she shared “Nosebleeds” the morning after becoming just the third woman to ever win Rap Album of the Year at the Grammys. The Gotye-sampling, re-recorded “Anxiety” (it was first uploaded to YouTube in 2019) that followed “Nosebleeds,” however, was a corny, annoying epilogue to Doechii’s incredible 2024 run. But now she’s back on course. After opening for Kendrick Lamar and her labelmate SZA’s Grand National Tour in Australia, Doechii and SZA have teamed up on the Jay Versace-produced “girl, get up,” rapping and singing about access (“Life is but a dream for a dark skin bitch like me / Life gets dark when you’re dark like me”) and survival (“I did eight years of failin’, plus a lot of cold winters / Used to be a starvin’ artist, now I want the whole dinner”) over the Neptunes’ “What Happened to That Boy?” drums and a hazy beat. This song is probably going to be huge (it already has 1 million YouTube views)—if it’s not a #1 hit at some point in 2026, it’ll at least get close. And this isn’t the first time Doechii and SZA have teamed up: SZA sang on Doechii’s “Persuasive” single in 2022, and even joined the Florida rapper onstage during her Camp Flog Gnaw set in 2024. On “girl, get up,” Doechii wants to set the record straight: she’s not an industry plant. “What’s the agenda when the ‘it girl’ Black? Y’all can’t fathom that I work this hard, and y’all can’t fathom that I earned this chart,” she declares. “Y’all can’t stand my vibe, ‘cause I’m anointed. All y’all evil-ass hoes just annoying.” Even at its most sedated, “girl, get up” is a sharp, wowing maneuver.
Jane Remover: “Headbanger”
A year ago on New Year’s Day, Jane Remover shared “JRJRJR,” which we named one of the best songs of 2025. To ring in 2026, Jane shared a SoundCloud link on X, sending fans to her self-produced song named “Headbanger.” The title tells all, as Jane is operating out of the very same glitched-out, maximalist rage rap we heard on Revengeseekerz. It’s a total switchup from the pop expanse scattered across the ♡ EP she dropped last month, with a reference to her venturing song “Sick / relapse” sprinkled in. This time, the bass is gonna blow your fucking ears out. No hooks, all distortion. This is the same artist that made “Cage Girl / Camgirl” three years ago, by the way. But, while I’m clamoring for a Jane Remover slowcore revival in the vein of Census Designated, the musical whiplash I get from her remains exciting. This could just be a loosie that didn’t make sense on a full-length project or ♡. But: “JRJRJR” came out on January 1 last year and wound up on a great album. So, if history is supposed to repeat itself with “Headbanger,” then a Revengeseekerz follow-up could happen any day now.
There’s an anonymous Korean musician wearing many hats: yarny shoegaze (Parannoul), psych-rock (Huremic), and ambient pop (Mydreamfever), just to name a couple. The last Parannoul record we got was the very good Sky Hundred in 2024—a harsh, scorched-earth epic with ear-warping freakout jams. But there was a track tucked into that LP, “암전고백,” that was more in tune with Neutral Milk Hotel’s folk-punk strums than Ride or mbv’s piling guitars. The five-minute “연말 다짐” is carrying that torch and adding a grip of droning, dreamy backdrops and lush, finger-picked arpeggios, thus anointing Parannoul with an all-new adjective for their always-unpredictable wardrobe: pleasant. They sing in their native tongue for most of “연말 다짐,” except for one recurring line: “You are the only thing I understand.” The lyric takes me back to the Sky Hundred release, when Parannoul left a lasting image on their Bandcamp page: “If the end of magic is something that everyone experiences, is there any meaning in falling? Hundred skies have shone brighter than me, and I think I’ve grown too preciously to accept the truth and disappearance.”
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