There’s so much music coming out all the time that it’s hard to keep track. On those days when the influx of new tracks is particularly overwhelming, we sift through the noise to bring you a curated list of the most interesting new releases (the best of which will be added to our Best New Songs playlist). Below, check out our track roundup for Tuesday, September 9 2025.
The Mountain Goats – ‘Armies of the Lord’
The Mountain Goats have announced a “full-on musical” called Through This Fire Across From Peter Balka. Lin-Manuel Miranda sings backing vocals on a few songs, including the sweeping lead single ‘Armies of the Lord’. Some context on the story from John Darnielle: “There were 16 men on a fishing boat, but only three survived the storm, and one of those went missing, and is presumed dead. That leaves me and Peter Balkan, whose health is failing as his apocalyptic visions dissipate in the spray at the shore.”
Tortoise – ‘Layered Presence’
Tortoise have announced their first album in nine years, Touch. In addition to the previously released single ‘Oganesson’, it includes the new song ‘Layered Presence’, which describes itself in the title. It’s accompanied by a music video directed by Mikel Patrick Avery.
Drake – ‘Dog House’ [feat. Yeat and Julia Wolf]
Drake has officially released ‘Dog House’, a collaboration with Yeat and singer-songwriter Julia Wolft. I’m not sure if it’ll go over too well given some of its lyrical jabs, but it also sounds pretty placid despite how hyperactive the beat tries to be. None of which, of course, will stop it from being huge.
Juliana Hatfield – ‘Scaratchers’
Juliana Hatfield has a new album on the way: Lightning Might Strike comes out December 12, and the nervy lead single ‘Scratchers’ is out now. “It was a difficult time for me when I started working on this album,” the singer-songwriter shared. “I had just uprooted myself from the city apartment building where I’d been living for twenty years to a house in a more rural town two hours away where I knew no one when one of my best friends died (‘Ashes’), and then my dog died (‘Constant Companion’), then my mother was diagnosed with esophagus cancer (‘Scratchers’). I was pretty depressed for a solid year (‘Long Slow Nervous Breakdown’) and was lost and very lonely (‘Harmonizing With Myself’). I was thinking about fate and circumstance and about how I’d ended up where I was (‘Where Are You Now’).”
Jay Som – ‘What You Need’
Jay Som has shared a wistful, propulsive new song from her forthcoming album Belong. ‘What You Need’ was inspired by a Peter Bjorn and John song that reminded Joao Gonzalez (Soft Glas) of Duterte’s music. “Joao created and sent me the basic skeleton for ‘What You Need’ a couple hours before the fires in LA started,” Duterte recalled. “I remember feeling immediately drawn to it, but the uncertainty and danger we were about to face crept up, pulling our focus elsewhere. We eventually revisited the demo a month later, after witnessing how the people of LA came together in its darkest moments – it felt necessary and only right to create this song with friends.”
Kalia Vandever – ‘Staring at the Cracked Window’
Brooklyn trombonist Kalia Vandever has announced a new album, Another View, arriving November 14 on Northern Spy. It’s led by the beautifully wonky and exploratory ‘Staring at the Cracked Window’, which Vandever says “was written with resilience in mind, specifically the will to break free from a harmful cycle. The character of this piece is hopeful, yet emerging from a darkness that evolves throughout the album. I was drawing from cyclical patterns while writing the music on Another View and imagining the gradual dissolution of these patterns. The album brings you into a fractured dream state and releases you into a renewed sense of reality.”
jasmine.4.t – ‘I Can’t Believe I Did This Without You’
jasmine.4.t has announced a deluxe version of her boygenius-produced debut album, You Are The Morning, featuring five new tracks. Dedicated to Jasmine’s friend Yulia, You Are The Morning (YBT Deluxe) is out this Friday, and ‘I Can’t Believe I Did This Without You’ is out today. It starts out heavily reminiscent of Sufjan Stevens’ ‘Should Have Known Better’ before blooming into its own heavily cathartic thing. “‘I Can’t Believe I Did This Without You’ and ‘I Don’t Think Anyone Else Could Hold The Same Place In My Heart’ are two new songs on this release that I wrote during the LA recording sessions for the album, up on the roof of Sound City Studio between takes,” she wrote as part of a lengthy statement. “I recorded five songs as demos and sent them as a thank you to my bandmates and producers after returning home to Manchester from LA. It’s nice to have more polished versions of these two.”
“Now when I sing these songs, I am singing them to my best friend, my mother, my sister, my daughter – the political prisoner Yulia Trot,” she concluded. “Of all the things that I have lived through, nothing has felt as big as losing her. I hope that one day she will be able to hear these recordings. I hope that one day she, all of her co-defendants, and all of Palestine, will be free.”
Jessy Lanza – ‘Slapped By My Life’
You ever feel slapped by my life? Does it sometimes feel completely unfunny, entirely sad, yet somehow too absurd to take seriously? Jessy Lanza seeks refuge from that feeling on her new single ‘Slapped By My Life’, the title track to her just-announced EP. “I wrote ‘Slapped By My Life’ while my husband Winston was going through chemotherapy,” Lanza shared. “The treatment cycle was relentless, and he spent most of the time bedridden, so while he slept I wrote this song for him. It’s been challenging to find the space to be creative since cancer came into our lives, but I knew this song would make Winston smile, and that was motivation enough. Collaborating with Pearson Sound made this track exciting too because listening to his music has always been a serotonin rush. When I wrote ‘Slapped By My Life’, I was desperate to feel something other than sadness, to escape my mind and live inside the music, even for a few minutes.”
Ribbon Skirt – ‘LUCKY8’
Ribbon Skirt have announced a new EP, PENSACOLA, which serves as an epilogue to their debut album Bite Down. It’s led by the driving and heavily distorted ‘LUCKY8’.
Hilary Woods – ‘Endgames’
Hilary Woods has announced a new album, Night CRIÚ, which will be out on October 31 via Sacred Bones. It’s led by the darkly enchanting ‘Night CRIÚ’, which arrives alongside a music video. “Each record is a life buoy, a raft, a snapshot, a marker in the sand, a date that requires me to meet it,” Woods remarked. “Making records is a way of being.”
AFI – ‘Holy Visions’
AFI have dropped a new track, ‘Holy Visions’, from their upcoming full-length Silver Bleeds The Black Sun… It’s flashy and gothic, and it comes paired with a music video directed by Gilbert Trejo, vocalist Davey’s son. “Getting to work with Gilbert on two videos was a joy,” Trejo commented. “‘Holy Visions’ is the perfect visual sublimation of the song.”
Home Front – ‘Light Sleeper’
Home Font have announced their sophomore LP, Watch It Die – out November 14 – with the soaring lead single ‘Light Sleeper’. “For all of us in Home Front, Watch It Die comes at a very transformative time,” the group explained. “Geopolitically, musically and in our personal lives. With friends and close family members dying, to massive uncertainty around the world, this album encapsulates what it’s like for us to step into a ‘new world’ where all the old adages of ‘everything is gonna work out fine’ feel like a joke. We watch rich people get richer while the rest of us struggle just to get by. We watch colonizers kill without consequence and in an age of information at our finger tips we watch people choosing to be ignorant to what’s going on around them. ‘Watch It Die’ speaks about our own humanity, a rebirth into a new world and how we can never go back to the way things were. We suffer for their dreams, but in saying that we must recognize the importance of our own community and look to energize them to build a better way of life. We have always been an anti-war, anti-genocide, pro-peace band. We are against crimes to human rights and all of those struggling through the horrors of imperialism. We stand with the people of Palestine and we stand with the Canadian Indigenous communities who struggle to uphold treaty rights as well as basic human rights like clean drinking water and generational trauma. One takeaway from our music is to make a safe space where our community can come together to air out grievances and find a better way to a new future.”
Hinds – ‘Girl, so confusing featuring lorde’ (Charli XCX Cover)
It’s been a while since ‘Girl, so confusing featuring lorde’ made a splash, but Hinds’ indie rock cover of it is different enough from the original to cut through. I especially like how they reimagine Lorde’s verse. In a statement, the Spanish band wrote: “everything about this song resonates with us. we have been a girl band for four albums now, more than a decade. a decade in a world that tries to put girls against each other, comparing everything, our bodies, our songs, our way of talking and existing. making it almost impossible to not feel threatened and constantly insecure. when this song and the feature with Lorde was released, it made history for music and for women. this is our take on it.”
Sessa – ‘Vale a Pena’
Sergio Sayeg, the São Paulo-based artist who records as Sessa, has announced a new album called Pequena Vertigem De Amor. It’s out November, and the lead single ‘Vale a Pena’ is out today. The songs “are a mix of personal chronicles and quiet meditations about life in the face of personal change,” according to the musician, “of experiencing something so big that you realize your insignificant size in space and time.” In that context, ‘Vale a Pena’ has a lovely, understated glow.
Saintseneca – ‘Battery Lifer’, ‘Burnt Hand Hymn’, ‘May Day’, and ‘Green Ink Pen’
Saintseneca have unveiled five tracks from their forthcoming album Highwalllow & Supermoon Songs, which is framed as a ten-song landscape (tracks 1-10) orbited by two sonic “moons.” Zac Little wanted to release the whole Viridian Moon set in full, explaining:
This song world slowly unfurled, spinning out from the dark.
The little orb of light a candle affords, revealing patterns, colors, shapes, rhythm.
With voice, strings set under tension, tone, and time, I probe about. The place begins to take shape. It is bigger than I first imagined.
I struggled to orient myself in this strange landscape, awash in orange and green light –
Liminal colors, narrow bands caught between the primaries. However surreal, I like it here.
I look up into the sky and see two moons, one a burning pumpkin, one ethereal emerald green.
The Cinnamon Moon and The Viridian Moon.
I found a lot of songs, and it seemed they belonged together – a weird web held together by tension, expansion.
This is a song world, orbited by two moons, influencing the tides and gravity.
I wanted to reveal the place the same way I found it.
Here we have The Viridian Moon, so named for its green color — Shoegrass, Bluegaze, Un-Americana.
For the green ink pen.
I found this green ink pen when I started writing songs again. It made its way through the universe and presented itself on the ground, an offering at my feet. I loved the way the ink looked, how it would glide and flow on the page. It felt good. I wrote every song with it.
I tried not to write this song, but it wouldn’t leave me alone. It kept popping into my head, showing up in dreams.
So I expand into this song, stop stopping myself.
The green ink pen, inert.
Someone picks it up and suddenly, for however brief an instant, it is inhabited by the gestures, the shapes of a poem.
Elliott Skinner – ‘RECALLING’
Elliott Skinner has signed to Ninja Tune, sharing his first single for the label, ‘RECALLING’, which is hushed in its dedication. “‘RECALLING’ is about not holding yourself to a version of your life that isn’t meant for you,” Skinner explained. ““It’s about the pursuit of a better reality. So often we believe and live by the constructs in our societies that help us feel comfortable, but vulnerability isn’t comfortable. It takes work to dig into the realities that hide behind fantasy, to dig into ourselves.”
Skinner added, “Music has always been a force for all of us to connect to each other – to try and understand each other. It’s been a force for me to learn myself. I wrote the words to ‘RECALLING’ in 2018 and have performed it in many forms, always asking the audience to sing ‘I don’t want another fantasy’ with me. I ask for them to sing it like they mean it. This chant is an excavator. I hope wherever people sing this, they choose to dig.”
Lambrini Girls feat. Peaches – ‘Cuntology 101 (Peaches Remix)’
Lambrini Girls have joined forces with Peaches for a ravey remix of ‘Cuntology101’, a highlight from their debut album, Who Let the Dogs Out. Peaches had this to say about it: “The track is c*nt! It was a no brainer! Punk AF.”
Iron & Wine and Ben Bridwell – ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’ (Foreigner Cover)
Sam Beam (Iron & Wine) and Ben Bridwell (Band of Horses) recently shared their take on Kendrick Lamar & SZA’s ‘Luther’ as part of a new covers EP, Making Good Time. Today, they’ve offered their version of a very different song, Foreigner’s classic ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’. Sam Beam commented: “Brad Cook suggested this one and the little kid in me who remembers skating around the roller rink in the 80’s imagining he was Lou Graham sat up and said ‘Yes, let’s do it!’ Such an amazing chorus! Our version ended up sounding a bit desperate and dark, not sure why I was kinda surprised.”
Constant Smiles – ‘Allowed to Be’
Constant Smiles have previewed their forthcoming album, Moonflowers, with a gorgeous track called ‘Allowed To Be’. It arrives alongside a Sam Mason-directed video featuring Leya, Bobby Puleo, Long Beard, Shahzad Ismaily, Bambara, Mallory Hawk, Ann Messner, Slowspin, and Katie von Schleicher. “Internally, director Sam Mason and I were calling this video Day on Earth, inspired by Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, a love letter to New York City and the people who inspire me,” Ben Jones explained. “At first, we even considered centering the entire piece on my neighbor Bobby Puleo, a true skateboard legend whose found art practice and larger-than-life presence capture so much of the city’s spirit. That ‘day in the life’ idea eventually evolved into what became this video.”
Great Job Konstantinos Pappis & the Team @ Our Culture Source link for sharing this story.
