Every week, we update our Best New Songs playlist with several tracks that catch our attention, then round up the best songs of each month in this segment. Here, in alphabetical order, are the best songs of August 2025.
Asher White, ‘Cobalt Room: Good Work / Silver Saab’
A killer sludge riff sweeps the floor on ‘Cobalt Room: Good Work / Silver Saab’, the 7-minute centerpiece of Asher White’s new album 8 Tips For Full Catastrophe Living. Then the narrative, like White’s ludicrous range of sonic reference points – Brazilian Tropicália, experimental jazz, death metal, krautrock – gets all wound up. Inspired by Claire Denis’ 1999 film Beau Travail, White sings from the perspective of an aging military wife who, in her words, “is left to imagine the sort of fraternal love and belonging her husband is enjoying at camp and begins to suspect it is his way of actualizing an unrealized gay lifestyle and subsequently reflects on their marriage with newfound skepticism.” White’s theatricality has a touch of the absurd: “I know the house had cost us nothing but I felt so evacuated/ Mornings would draw the dust to settle where you once had masturbated.” It’s almost cartoonish, but she lets the festering frustration spill out, craving its own release.
Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo, ‘Radioactive Dreams’
Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo are Oklahoma City residents, which makes their unlikely collaboration easier to rationalize. But how do you carve a middle ground between the band’s harrowing noise rock and the fingerstyle guitarist’s acoustic folk instrumentals? One way, the striking first single from their upcoming album In the Earth Again suggests, is by digging right into it. “So I share my song/ With the veins of the soil/ And the angels of the earth/ And God,” Raygun Busch intones over reverberating guitar harmonics, pounding bass, and distant drums. Reverent, mournful, and captivated by an “unshakeable feeling,” the singer is tempted to stay below the surface, in ghostly company, where it doesn’t matter if he’s able to speak it. But he can’t linger too long; he’s blessed with life, he reminds himself, as the song twinkles into the night.
Deftones, ‘milk of the madonna’
No band can make cataclysmic music sound quite as sumptuous as Deftones, who were quick to remind us of that fact with the early private music single ‘milk of the madonna’. In his invocation of bloody rain, thunder, quaking winds, and most of all fire, Chino Moreno sounds utterly consumed yet invigorated by the pummeling force of the instrumentation, which relents only for a few ethereal seconds before the song’s final chorus. “The display ignites your mind,” he sings. How could it not? When so many contemporary shoegaze bands reach for the same imagery while sounding oddly unaffected by it, Deftones still match their legacy with passion.
Dijon, ‘Yamaha’
The immediate acclaim surrounding Dijon’s sophomore album speaks, in part, to how immediate and universal its songs are, rendering emotions with the perfect mix of gloss and fire, past and future. ‘Yamaha’ may stand out because it’s one of the album’s most accessible-sounding songs, but also because, in an effort to express just how big the euphoria of being in love is, it’s one of its longest songs. Dijon and his cast of collaborators (in addition to close confidants like Mk.gee, Cara Delevingne is listed as a co-writer here) layer in so many sparkling synths and acrobatic harmonies they almost muddy the mix, but they don’t collide around his voice so much as the earth-shaking beat. “So, shall I repeat?” he asks at one point, “Still want you more.” Four and a half minutes is enough, but he sounds like he could go on forever.
Militarie Gun, ‘B A D I D E A’
It sounds like a crazy idea, but Militarie Gun initially pitched their new song’s instrumental for the hardcore record that Doja Cat wanted to do. But then, frontman Ian Shelton was like, “Nah, I’m taking that.” On top of an unsurprisingly anthemic chorus that sears its way into your brain, he ended up using it to tackle a particularly sensitive topic, which is giving into vices he spent his whole life actively avoiding – neither celebrating nor quite beating himself up for the slip-ups. “I’m well aware that being this vulnerable turns my personal trauma into a marketing hook for this album,” Shelton said of the upcoming God Save the Gun, and that awareness makes ‘B A D I D E A’ more fun than simply self-indulgent. Not giving it away was probably for the best.
Scarlet Rae, ‘A World Where She Left Me Out’
Shoegaze often channels melancholy through the language of metaphor. It emotes by way of shrouding it. On ‘A World Where She Left Me Out’, the opening track on Scarlet Rae’s No Heavy Goodbyes EP, her vocals are whispery and manipulated, but her lyrics ultimately express her desperation matter-of-factly. “I literally don’t know what to do, it’s getting hard to be here without you.” It was the first song the New York-based artist, formerly of Rose Dorn and bar italia’s live lineup, wrote after her sister died, and you can feel the knot in her throat as she untangles the anger and confusion that loss has left in its wake. Seventy days into her grief, she’s allowed herself to be around others, afraid of solitude but somehow aching harder in their company. The cloud of instrumentation dissolves for the titular line, giving weight to each word, the odd grammar just a slight representation of how strange it’s all been.
Skullcrusher, ‘March’
An existential sigh of a piano ballad sounds like an odd way to introduce a new album, but not for Helen Ballentine, who makes knottily confessional songs as Skullcrusher. ‘March’, the second single from And Your Song Is Like a Circle, weighs up the burden of what that song can do. Though she begins by questioning what she lives for, she’s not oblivious to the gift she’s chosen to share with the world: “I made the tears fall/ From your eyes with my words.” We’re all staring down the same unknown, after all, so it’s not unlikely her words get through to you. She stretches the words beautiful and terrible as if trying to strike a balance between them, but they are stringy and simultaneous; in this stripped-back environment, it is not hard to tell they hold power over her, too. But she finds a way to describe that feeling, one that seems to lift a weight off her shoulders: “forever pressing into me.”
Wombo, ‘S.T. Tilted’
Wombo’s music is wonderfully off-kilter, and the lyrics to ‘S.T. Titled’, a highlight from their new album Danger in Fives, seem to play with that feeling in kind of a meta way. “And with a tilted head, try to regain balance/ Turn on it now and then, quietly to open,” Sydney Chadwick sings over and over again, her humming and roiling bass line a mood all their own. Yet it’s the skronky guitar work that enlivens the song unlike any other on the record, scratching through the lush, vaporous haze it leaves behind. It suspends a moment of disorientation, splicing together disparate parts that end up making the trio sound uniquely locked-in.
Great Job Konstantinos Pappis & the Team @ Our Culture Source link for sharing this story.
