Clockwise from top left: Rico Nasty, Miley Cyrus, Lucy Dacus, Yung Lean, and Wet Leg.
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: YouTube (Rico Nasty, Miley Cyrus, Lucy Dacus, Wet Leg, Playboi Carti)
Spring allergies abound, but at least there’s great music to listen to. While we load up on Claritin, we’re listening to Miley Cyrus blend free jazz with electro-lounge music, a debaucherous new night-owl anthem by Norwegian duo Smerz, and Isle of Wight rockers Wet Leg’s warnings to men who try to approach them at bars (tldr: You might get puke on your shirt and your lights knocked out). Elsewhere, Car Seat Headrest resurrects the rock opera, and Zambian Canadian rapper Backxwash stares down death at home and abroad. You can check out the rest of this month’s selections and suggestions below.
Songs are listed by release date, starting with the most recent tracks.
An anthem for late-night denizens. “Roll the Dice,” the thudding new electro stomper from Norwegian duo Smerz, sounds like a song that plays inside your head between 2 and 3 a.m. while you stumble between bars after ingesting one too many substances. “Feel the places, walk the streets, and take no advice,” they sing over buzzsaw synths and a lurching piano solo. (Is it okay if the only advice we do take is this lyric?) —Alex Suskind
Car Seat Headrest’s foray into lo-fi electronics on their 2020 album Making a Door Less Open felt like a rare misfire from a band once deified in indie rock. On “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You),” Will Toledo and his band reestablish that they can make rousing rock anthems. Technically, the song is the opener of their rock-opera-ish album The Scholars, but it requires zero backstory to enjoy. The band finds their footing in the song’s first minutes — tittering cymbals, a piano line, a knotty electric guitar, and chanted vocals in Spanish and French build like a symphony. Once everything clicks into place in the third minute, Car Seat Headrest sounds just as unstoppable as in their late-2010s glory. —Justin Curto
You should think twice about approaching Wet Let singer Rhian Teasdale when she’s out with friends. “Some guy comes up, says I’m his type, I just threw up in my mouth,” she sings in the catchy fight prelude of “catch these fists,” the band’s first single off their upcoming sophomore album. Unfortunately for this would-be suitor, he’s going to have bigger problems than puke on his hands if he keeps shooting his shot. “You should be careful, do you catch my drift? ’Cause what I really wanna know is can you catch these fists?” Teasdale warns with a mix of dead seriousness and deadpan humor. —A.S.
The title track of Miley Cyrus’s ninth album opens as a leisurely electro-lounge track, fit for a smoke-filled 1950s club in outer space. Then the illusion falls apart. The horns, synthesizers, and guitars all crash in like an anvil — a musical climax to the song’s sultry lyrics — before devolving into free-jazz chaos. It may not be beautiful, but it’s definitely astonishing. —J.C.
Don’t flex on Bb Trickz: You’ll go home crying. The Spanish rapper delivers every line on her dreamy, downtempo single “Super” like someone who treats disposing haters as casually as running errands. “Tengo el cora bien frío, bien frío, tengo un chulo que solo es mío,” she raps. (“I have a very cold heart, I got a pimp that’s only mine”). And later, “A la Bb les gusta verlos mad, Mis haters deben fumar crack” (“The Bb like to see them mad / My haters should smoke crack”). —A.S.
Backxwash stares down death on “History of Violence.” At first, it’s the Zambian Canadian rapper’s own, as she recounts a week spent in her room in a drugged haze. Over a cinematic synth-rock track, she raps in harrowing detail: “Puffing, heaving, on the floor / Shadows sleeping at the door.” Then suddenly, mid-song, Backxwash widens her perspective, considering the loss of life in Gaza. Her empathy quickly turns to disgust: “Thinking ’bout all the people dead in the street / How young was this kid, like 11 or 3? / While the presidents sit and smile in the embassy seats.” —J.C.
The first new music from Tortoise in nearly a decade sounds like being stuck inside a giant grandfather clock, all clanging tones and tick-tock drumming. There’s a fun hesitancy to the way it unfolds, as if each guitar strum is asking a question the post-rock (okay, experimental instrumental rock, if you want to get layman about it) legends don’t know the answer to. Before they find it, everything dissolves into a scuzzy outro. —A.S.
Since Saba last added to his “Westside Bound” series, on 2016’s Bucket List Project, he moved to L.A. full-time. So “ Pt. 4” is a joyous homecoming to the Chicago neighborhood where he grew up. The horns on fellow hometown hero No ID’s beat trumpet the rapper’s return, as he honors his family’s musical history in a zigzagging verse, until his Pivot Gang groupmate MFnMelo nearly steals the show. —J.C.
This is a Shakespearean tragedy as a rock song: a three-act odyssey that (spoiler!) ends with our narrator getting shot mid-sentence. That’s just the ambition of the Liverpool band Courting, who believe more is more when it comes to concepts, genres, instruments, and references. Everything adds up on “Lust for Life” — the swaying saxophone-accented ballad builds into a thrilling last-call anthem before one final left turn into reverent landfill-indie pastiche. —J.C.
The Carti community is still debating whether this or the original “Evil J0rdan” — which the rapper first premiered in 2023 — is the superior version. Well, consider me Team Synth-y Preamble (what can I say, I’m a sucker for a cinematic intro). The latest version kicks off with a moody set piece before a gun shot and thudding drums make way for a beat that sounds like a drowning beeper. Carti is mostly talking nonsense throughout, but no one comes to this music for clear narratives. We’re here for creaky vocals, twitchy production, and general mayhem. —Alex Suskind
Going country is more fashionable than ever, but that’s not why Chappell Roan made “The Giver.” This is the breakout pop singer-songwriter’s take on the music she grew up around in southwestern Missouri. Roan leans in here with feeling, drenching the song in fiddle and even getting close to a yodel in her vocal delivery. With a grin, she flips the usual clichés about country boys to fit her queer message, boasting that she can “rhinestone cowgirl all night long” better than any man. —J.C.
➼ Read Justin Curto’s full review of “The Giver.”
“This Is Real,” the latest from Pittsburgh rock band feeble little horse, is one of the most overwhelming music experiences you can have in three minutes. The song is a mosaic of ideas and sounds — that singsongy opening, Lydia Slocum screaming her throat raw against thrashing guitars, the auto-tuned bedroom-pop fade-out. Each section could have been a fine song on its own, but taken together, they’re a visceral rush. —J.C.
Rarely does Benmont Tench — best known for co-founding Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and his prolific session work — step into the spotlight. He should do it more often! The title track off his second full-length, The Melancholy Season, pairs a deceptively tricky piano riff and solo with some devastating couplets. “What would I give to turn the track of time to match our traces,” he sings in a charming warble. “Orion cries out from the black, the melancholy season is upon us.” —A.S.
The Blackpink star’s splashy solo debut has high-profile guest spots from Doechii, Dua Lipa, and Kali Uchis. But Jennie’s talent shines brightest on the featureless adrenaline boost of “Like Jennie.” When she delivers lines like “They can’t deal with me ’cause I’m priceless” and “I’ve slayed it, and I graved it” you know she means it. —A.S.
After more than a decade and a half of “doin’ it for the fame,” Lady Gaga understands how the game works. That’s why, on “Perfect Celebrity,” she wears the hate she’s endured like a badge of honor, knowing it’s a sign she’s doing something right. The track takes after some of her forebearers, specifically Hole’s Courtney Love and the harsh, grungy guitars from Live Through This. But while Love sang about faking it so real she was “beyond fake,” Gaga is only screaming her raw feelings. —J.C.
➼ Read Craig Jenkins’s review of Lady Gaga’s Mayhem.
This one starts with some simple delights: delicate acoustic picking, a winding falsetto, three syllables on the word “you.” But Semones is too wily of a musician to let that ride for the entire song. A few seconds in and the Japanese American upstart is throwing down time-signature changes, dizzyingly intricate guitar riffs, and a staccato string section. Few artists could pull off such hairpin pivots, but for Semones, this is business as usual. “I’m going to do this the way I want to do it,” she sings. —A.S.
During COVID lockdown, XL Recordings label head Richard Russell gathered a group of musicians in his London studio to discuss mortality and loss. Those conversations — along with a prompt Russell had given himself (“What if folk music had ‘gone digital’ in the ’80s?”) — would lead to his poignant third collection as Everything Is Recorded. The project’s high point comes from an unexpected pairing: a duet between pop-leaning singer Noah Cyrus and indie-folk powerhouse Bill Callahan, each meditating on survival. “And I’ll die a thousand times before it’s through,” they sing over gently plucked strings. “And I’ll live a thousand lives, some with you. And I’m alive, I am sci-fi.” —A.S.
“You wanna know how I get away with everything?” Marie Davidson teased on her stellar 2018 single “Work It.” “I work — all the fucking time.” She’s still honing her craft years later. On the exhilarating single “Fun Times,” Davidson fits squeaking synths, thumping bass, and clattering drums together like she’s playing Tetris. The hook is a haunting flip of Madonna’s “Hung Up”: “Tick tock, tick tock / time is never coming back,” Davidson taunts. She’d rather spend it dancing. —J.C.
There’s usually a sharp edge hiding somewhere under midwestern charm — even for Iowa-raised Hailey Whitters, who once laughed at the Nashville game on her song “Ten-Year Town.” That irreverence comes to the forefront again on “Prodigal Daughter,” her riotous, rootsy anthem with bluegrass picker Molly Tuttle. That titular daughter is “saccharine as sugarcane” before she meets a bad boy and leaves her mother “sweatin’ bullets,” worried for her soul. Between the devil’s mention in the chorus and Justin Moses’s scorching fiddle, it all plays a bit like a 21st-century “Devil Went Down to Georgia.” The daughter comes home, of course, but Whitters leaves her fate more open-ended. “Still somewhere in between,” she sings in the bridge with a smirk. —Justin Curto
The Swedish shapeshifter follows his full-length 2024 Bladee team-up with a pulsing track about trying and failing to push a relationship to the next stage. “I wonder where you’re at / I wonder where you go,” he says, flipping between singing and spoken-word delivery. “You’re inside that mask of yours / Take it off and let it show.” —Alex Suskind
Rico Nasty is one of the only rappers for whom signing to storied pop-punk label Fueled by Ramen is a totally reasonable career move. But the blaring guitars and Warped Tour–ready “Yeah-yeahee-yeah!” hook that open “Teethsucker (Yea3x)” make a convincing case on their own. Nasty is her usual overcaffeinated self on the lean track, sneering at her doubters: “You did it worse / I did it first.” —J.C.
With “Everything Is Peaceful Love,” the new single off a forthcoming full-length, Bon Iver makes clear that the pared-back sound of 2024’s EP Sable was only momentary. Justin Vernon’s vision is expansive as ever, pairing a pensive drum track with country guitar strumming (reminiscent of his early band DeYarmond Edison) and pristine, silvery synthesizers. Gone is the glitchy anxiety of his 2019 album, i,i. “And I know that we may go and change someday,” Vernon sings. “I couldn’t rightly say / That’s for parting days.” He’d rather stay in the moment, and it sounds serene. —J.C.
John Carpenter airs float across this bleak cut from Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard’s upcoming full-length. It’s the kind of song that should soundtrack a future slasher flick: pulsing synths, screeching sound effects, a syrupy bass line. “Good to have you back, sir, where’ve you been?” asks Yorke, like he’s been bartending for ghosts at the Overlook. —A.S.
As mischievous as DJ Koze can be, he’s never reckless. A press description of “Brushcutter” painted a picture of the producer swinging the titular tool while wandering the desert: “Nothing to cut, just pure, unleashed power.” But on the track, he only deploys his buzzing sawtooth synths in short bursts, slicing through the landscape of jittery drums and Marley Waters’s hazy warbling for just a moment. It’s enough to make you loop the track back one more time, searching for more. —J.C.
Often, in his project Destroyer, Dan Bejar plays the world-weary nihilist. On “Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World,” though, the singer takes on life wide-eyed. He goes for a walk in the park, talks to the wind, gets mistaken for a priest (by another priest). And he narrates it all over a radiant burst of synths with la-la-las in the background. The moments of inscrutability that define Destroyer are still here too: “Fools rush in, but they’re the only ones with guts,” Bejar notes. Really, he’s still no optimist, but he’s found freedom in some acceptance. —J.C.
On “off to the ESSO,” aya is a mid-bender Mother Goose, frantically screeching tongue twisters over a cacophony of synthetic clangs. Say this one five times fast: “Slick blue gooz, real news / Fake mends, whose booze?” But this isn’t just mad free association. “Off to the ESSO” is a depiction of the chaos that led aya to get sober around the making of her second album, hexed! The song careens toward the clarity of the breakdown, as aya resolves, “I’m trying not to mope, I’m learning how to cope, I said I’m getting on the mend.” —J.C.
The departure of singer Isaac Wood in 2022 only brought the remaining six members of Black Country, New Road closer. Where Wood was the singular, brooding baritone voice of the band before, now three of the members are splitting vocal duties — including violinist Georgia Ellery.” “Besties” introduces a brighter, more approachable band from the opening clangs of harpsichord before the entire sextet crashes in on top. The melody goes down easier than ever; Ellery, too, is more conversational than in her synthpop project Jockstrap as she struggles through a crush on a friend. But many of the band’s old sensibilities remain, like a penchant for of-the-moment one-liners, as Ellery calls herself “a walking TikTok trend.” —J.C.
The syrupy vocal-ed MC stuffs as many truth nuggets as he can into this whistle-y cut off Showbiz!, his latest full-length. “Proud of me, workin’ ‘gainst the odds and the ugly / It’s comedy, the hurtin’ be disguised as a subtweet,” he says, before ending it all with a cleverly worded warning: “The prize isn’t much, but the price is abundant.” —A.S.
A.L. West turns his pretty but rote acoustic yarn from 2023 into a thudding stomper of a sequel. “Rabbitbrush 2” pulls just a handful of lyrics from the original before ditching the rest and infusing what’s left with a gnarly guitar riff and solo. I have already added this to my “things to see played live in 2025” list. —A.S.
For all the talk about their ’90s rock influences, the Brooklyn band Momma aren’t mere nostalgists — the mid-20s members weren’t even alive for most of the decade — they’re revivalists. Their best songs, like “I Want You (Fever),” prize the energy of the decade over dutiful re-creation, sounding thoroughly alive and of the moment. From the opening screech of distorted guitar, “I Want You” crackles with youthful excitement, a sugar rush toward a pithy, perfect earworm: “Wake up and leave her / I want you, fever.” Unrequited love couldn’t sound more satisfying. —J.C.
Stop it with the Britney comparisons — on “Sports Car,” Tate McRae is channeling her fellow Canadian Nelly Furtado. Ryan Tedder and Grant Boutin crafted a beat with the hip-hop stomp of Imperial-era Timbaland, and on it, McRae exudes Furtado’s same seductive swagger. From the opening lines, McRae knows what she wants. “Hey cute jeans / Take mine off me,” she purrs. The one-time So You Think You Can Dance contestant doesn’t have Furtado’s vocal range, but McRae is just as dangerous of a maneater when she whispers the hook. —J.C.
A tightly wound pop anthem from rising act Chloe Qisha, who combines a commanding hook with humor (“Now this could be hyperbole / but I’m afraid I might die / If I’m not here by your side”), fantasy (“If you want to get freaky on hotel floors …” ), and pop-culture bonafides (“… straight out the set of Dawson’s Creek”). —A.S.
The lead single from Lucy Dacus’s Forever Is a Feeling is one of tender negotiation, breaking the mold on what to expect in a song about sex by discussing the act rather than jumping right in. “What if we only talk / About what we want and cannot have?” she asks over gorgeous staccato strings, before pivoting to a more explicit direction: “Pull me by the ankles to the edge of the bed / And take me like you do in your dreams.” —A.S.
It’s great to have Horsegirl back. Three years after their auspicious debut, the young Chicago rock trio’s new album features this insatiable lead single — a quick, crunchy guitar track that’s been putting me in a trance for months. It’s always a little hard to tell what the group is singing about — there are only a handful of words on this one, and they’re pretty inscrutable! — but that makes decoding it half the fun. —A.S.
Bad Bunny is an enthusiastic ambassador for his home of Puerto Rico on Debí Tirar Más Fotos. The album is alive with the sound of different eras, regions, and genres — nowhere more than the plena song “Café Con Ron.” Benito finds community with the like-minded Pleneros de la Cresta, who have been playing the island’s pattering folk music for over a decade. This joyous drinking song begins with pep before slowing down and giving the musicians room to stretch out. One moment, they’re referencing a classic plena (“Ven subiendo …”); the next, they’re slipping modern slang into the lyrics as one of MAG’s chirpy synths sneaks in behind the band. That’s the island as Benito hears it. —J.C.
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