• News

• All

May 09, 2025 By Mark Redfern

Welcome to the 15th Songs of the Week of 2025. This week Andy Von Pip, Caleb Campbell, Matt the Raven, Scotty Dransfield, and Stephen Humphries helped me decide what should make the list. We considered over 25 songs and narrowed it down to a Top 10.  

Issue 74, The Protest Issue, is out now. It features Kathleen Hannah and Bartees Strange on the two covers and can be bought from us directly here.

In recent weeks we posted interviews with Lael Neale; Samia; Sunflower Bean; Beirut (a digital cover story); Miki Berenyi Trio; Florist; SPELLLING; Craig Finn; Djo (a digital cover story); Black Country, New Road (a digital cover story); Japanese Breakfast (a digital cover story); and more.

In the last week we reviewed some albums.

Under the Radar subscriptions are currently 50% off, as are back issues. Check out the sale here.

To help you sort through the multitude of fresh songs released in the last week, we have picked the 10 best the last seven days had to offer, followed by some honorable mentions. Check out the full list below.

1. U.S. Girls: “Bookends”

This week, U.S. Girls (aka Meghan Remy) announced a new album, Scratch It, and shared its first single, the 12-minute long “Bookends,” via a music video. Scratch It is due out June 30 via 4AD.

The album came together when the Toronto-based Remy put together a new band for a one-off performance at a festival in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Aided by her friend, guitarist Dillon Watson (D. Watusi, Savoy Motel, Jack Name), Remy assembled a band of Nashville-based musicians. She then decided to travel to Nashville to record a new album with this new band, which features Watson on guitar alongside Jack Lawrence (The Dead Weather, The Raconteurs, Loretta Lynn) on bass, Domo Donoho on drums, both Jo Schornikow and Tina Norwood on keys, and harmonica legend Charlie McCoy (Elvis, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison). They recorded Scratch It in only 10 days. On May 14 Remy will be reassembling the band to perform the album live for the first time at Soft Junk in Nashville.

“Bookends” is described in a press release as a tribute to Remy’s late friend and former Power Trip frontman Riley Gale, but done so “through the lens of Remy’s reading of John Carey’s Eyewitness to History, a historical collection of 300+ eyewitness accounts of great world events spanning twenty-four centuries. In consuming these first-hand accounts of human history, she began to ponder the thought, ‘there is not a hierarchy to suffering, and death is the great equalizer.’”

Caity Arthur directed the “Bookends” video and had this to say about it in a press release: “The video is ultimately about death and absolution—how death is one of the only certain things in life; the ‘great equalizer,’ nolens volens. However, it also subverts the traditional narrative of death as a despairing void, rather, portraying it as a euphoric transitory experience or new beginning through a hallucinatory ensemble cast, a 1960s pop-star performance, and sleight of hand magic. As the video progresses, the TV channels alternate through these scenes as Meg’s lyrics evoke death in its various forms.”

U.S. Girls’ last album was 2023’s Bless This Mess, which was inspired by Remy’s pregnancy and the birth of her twin boys.

Remy’s album before that, Heavy Light, came out in 2020. Read our interview with Remy on that album here.

2. Fiona Apple: “Pretrial (Let Her Go Home)”

This week, Fiona Apple shared a brand new song, “Pretrial (Let Her Go Home),” about how the cash-bail system negatively affects women and girls, especially Black women.

Apple had this to say about the song in a press release: “I was a court watcher for over two years. In that time, I took notes on thousands of bond hearings. Time and time again, I listened as people were taken away and put in jail, for no other reason than that they couldn’t afford to buy their way free. It was particularly hard to hear mothers and caretakers get taken away from the people who depend on them. For the past five years, I have been volunteering with the Free Black Mamas DMV bailout, and I have been lucky to be able to witness the stories of women who fought for and won their freedom with the tireless and loving support of the leadership. I hope that this song, and the images shared with me, can help to show what is at stake when someone is kept in pretrial detention. I give this song in friendship and respect to all who have experienced the pain of pretrial detention and to the women of the group’s leadership who have taught me so much and whom I truly love.”

Apple has also launched a new Let Her Go Home website to aid the cause.

Find out more about Free Black Mamas DMV here.

Zealous and Special Operations Studios produced the song’s video.

Apple’s last album was 2020’s widely acclaimed Fetch the Bolt Cutters.

In March, Apple guested on The Waterboys’ song “Letter From An Unknown Girlfriend,” from their album, Life, Death, and Dennis Hopper.

In 2024, Apple appeared on the Iron & Wine song “All in Good Time,” a duet with Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam from his album Light Verse.

3. Elbow: “Sober”

Earlier today, Elbow announced a new EP, AUDIO VERTIGO ECHO elbow EP 5, and shared a new song from it, “Sober.” The EP is due out June 6 via Polydor/Geffen and follows the British band’s 2024 album, AUDIO VERTIGO. Also check out the band’s previously announced North American tour dates here.

Frontman Guy Garvey had this to say about the EP in a press release: “Finishing something for the band in lots of ways. We are having more fun in the studio than ever before. Craig’s on fire as a producer, Pete and Alex are the coolest rhythm section working and Pot’s unpredictable rhythm guitar has started working its way into such a soulful and accomplished place. The words are all stories from my past, sometimes joyful, often dark, but all of it exciting and mostly true. It feels like we’re having another go on the Waltzers after hours.”

In November Elbow returned with a brand new single, “Adrianna Again,” which is featured on the EP. The single was accompanied by a cheeky music video, as it featured a completely different band performing the song. The band in question was Novacane, who are a new band also from Manchester. “Adrianna Again” was one of our Songs of the Week.

AUDIO VERTIGO was one of our Top 100 Albums of 2024.

Stream AUDIO VERTIGO here.

Read our review of AUDIO VERTIGO.

Read our interview with Elbow’s Guy Garvey on AUDIO VERTIGO.

Many of the songs on AUDIO VERTIGO were born of Elbow’s members working in smaller groups, before the whole band finished the songs.

AUDIO VERTIGO was the follow-up to 2021’s Flying Dream 1 and in contrast to that more intimate sounding album, the new record embraced a more varied and rhythmically diverse musical landscape, or as Garvey puts it, “gnarly, seedy grooves created by us playing together in garagey rooms.”

Elbow’s album before last was 2019’s Giants of All Sizes (read our rave review of the album).

Read our interview with Elbow’s Guy Garvey on 2017’s Little Fictions.

Also read our 2014 print article on Elbow and our 2014 web-exclusive interview with Garvey on his favorite cities. Plus read our 2016 The End interview with Garvey on endings and death.

Garvey was also one of the artists on the cover of our 20th Anniversary Issue.

4. Moses Sumney and Hayley Williams: “I Like It, I Like It”

This week, Moses Sumney and Hayley Williams of Paramore teamed up for the new single, “I Like It, I Like It.” The duo has been teasing the track on social media since last week. There’s no official word if it’s a preview of a new collaborative album or EP or is just a one-off standalone single. It sounds a lot more like Sumney’s previous work than Williams’ and is out now on Sumney’s own label, Tuntum. The song was shared via a lyric video directed by Sumney.

Sumney co-wrote the song with quickly, quickly (aka Portland-based artist Graham Jonson). Sumney co-produced “I Like It, I Like It” with quickly, quickly and Rob Bisel.

In August 2024 Sumney released the Sophcore EP on Tuntum. The EP included his previously released singles “Vintage” (one of our Songs of the Week) and “Gold Coast.” Stream the EP here.

In 2022, Sumney put out a live concert film, A Performance in V Acts. In 2021, Sumney released the live album, Blackalachia, as well as an accompanying film. His most recent studio album, græ, came out in 2020 via Jagjaguwar, and earned him a spot on the cover of one of our print issues.

Sumney has also been acting lately, including being featured in A24’s Ti West-directed MaXXXine, alongside Mia Goth, Halsey, Kevin Bacon, and others.

Read our 2017 interview with Moses Sumney on his debut album, Aromanticism.

Paramore released a new album, This Is Why, in 2023 via Atlantic. In 2024 they covered Talking Heads’ classic “Burning Down the House.”

5. Matt Berninger: “Inland Ocean”

Matt Berninger of The National is releasing a new solo album, Get Sunk, on May 30 via Book, Berninger’s imprint with Concord. This week he shared its third single, album opener “Inland Ocean.” The song features backing vocals from Ronboy (Julia Laws) and was co-written with The Walkmen’s Walter Martin.

Previously Berninger released the album’s first single, “Bonnet of Pins,” which was one of our Songs of the Week. Then Berninger shared its second single, “Breaking Into Acting,” which features Hand Habits (aka Meg Duffy).

Get Sunk is Berninger’s second solo album and follows 2020’s Serpentine Prison. For the new album, Berninger partnered with Grammy Award-winning producer and engineer Sean O’Brien, who co-wrote many of the album’s songs. Get Sunk was recorded in a basement studio in Silverlake, CA. The album features a slew of special guests, including Meg Duffy (Hand Habits), Julia Laws (Ronboy), Kyle Resnick (The National, Beirut), Garret Lang, Sterling Laws, Booker T Jones, Harrison Whitford, Mike Brewer, and The Walkmen’s Walter Martin and Paul Maroon.

A press release says Get Sunk is “not necessarily an autobiographical album, the narrator is processing how he became himself. Berninger is an expert in what it feels like to lose all bravery, and Get Sunk points to an undulating reflection in the water. It’s about realizing that you are not yourself without a thousand others: parents, friends, siblings, spouses and exes, college roommates, childhood best friends, cousins, kids, and even strangers.”

The album was partially inspired by the singer/songwriter’s move to Connecticut after years living in Los Angeles. Once there he enjoyed the flora and fauna of the state and “rearranged dust-covered items in his barn into strange and surreal works of art. It felt good to be creating and to understand why he loves what he does,” as the press release points out.

Berninger adds: “I was able to get the blurry picture as close to just right for me.”

In 2023 The National released two albums, First Two Pages of Frankenstein and Laugh Track.

6. Baxter Dury: “Allbarone”

British musician Baxter Dury announced a new album, Allbarone, this week and shared its first single, title track “Allbarone,” via a music video shot in Venice, Italy. Allbarone is due out September 12 via Heavenly. Tom Beard directed the video for “Allbarone.”

Paul Epworth (Adele, Florence + The Machine) produced Allbarone, which was recorded at his Church Studios in London. It follows Dury’s 2023 album, I Thought I Was Better Than You, as well as 2020’s The Night Chancers and 2017’s Prince of Tears.

Dury had this to say about “Allbarone” in a press release: “This is the first track that Paul Epworth and I made and it quickly established why it was a good idea that we were working together. It’s a song about sitting in the rain outside an All Bar One contemplating why what just happened, happened in the way it did.

“It’s kind of a character arc that goes through the whole thing, two personalities. It’s very critical of people, this album, whoever they are, maybe some bloke with a moustache and sockless loafers in Shoreditch or a fat old Chiswick gangster lording it up in a really comfortable middle class part of London.”

Of the song’s sound, Dury adds: “I don’t want to say it’s contemporary. Because I sound like a cunt using that word. But it does sound really contemporary. It doesn’t sound like a Harrods hamper band made it. It doesn’t sound like a band made it all. Which is what I wanted most of all. It’s just something that’s brand new for me. It’s quite exciting, really.”

Read our 2017 interview with Baxter Dury.

7. Gwenno: “War”

Welsh musician Gwenno (full name Gwenno Saunders) is releasing a new album, Utopia, on July 11 via Heavenly. This week she shared its second single, “War,” via a music video. The song is inspired by a World War II-era poem by Welsh artist and poet Edrica Huws entitled “Vingt-Et-Un.”

Saunders had this to say about the song in a press release: “I’ve loved this Edrica Huws poem for a really long time. She was an artist and poet, and she wrote this at the start of the Second World War. It kept resonating with me over this period where we’ve really normalized the idea of war, and actually at times have perhaps been quite enthusiastic from our sofas. I think her poem is really worth something in an age where we’re obviously tumbling towards something catastrophic. Those words have really reminded me of that very small window you have before it happens—the chance to be considerate, and more vigilant, and aware. It’s the elegance of her writing, the calmness of her writing, the wisdom.”

Utopia is her first solo LP sung mainly in the English language. Previously Gwenno shared the album’s first single, “Dancing On Volcanoes,” via a music video. It was one of our Songs of the Week.

The video for “Dancing On Volcanoes” was filmed in Las Vegas, where Saunders spent two years as a teenager in the lead role in Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance. She lived in an apartment complex with 40 fellow teenage performers, where there was a pool and a gym, but little else to do beyond “drink, drugs, eating disorders,” a press release explains.

“Then every Saturday we’d go to this techno club called Utopia and just get completely spangled until Monday, when we had to go back to work,” Saunders remembers, pointing out that the club inspired the new album’s title.

“In the original Greek, ‘utopia’ doesn’t mean the ideal place, it means ‘non-place,’” Saunders explains. “And that’s the point of the record as well.”

After her stint in Vegas, Saunders moved back to the UK, but not to Wales, instead settling in London. “I didn’t know anyone or anything, I would just hassle people and answer adverts in The Stage magazine, and go to really silly auditions,” she says. “I was looking for people to hang out with and make tunes.”

Eventually she ended up in the Brighton-based girl-group The Pipettes, alongside Rose Elinor Dougall, releasing two albums with them. Post-Pipettes, Saunders has released three acclaimed solo albums—2014’s Y Dydd Olaf, 2018’s Le Kov, and 2022’s Mercury Prize-nominated Tresor—all sung mainly in either Welsh or Cornish (an almost lost language that’s had a bit of a revival in recent years). Saunders felt like her previous albums dealt more with her childhood, whereas Utopia tackles a period of her life where she spoke mainly English and so she felt more natural singing in that language this time around.

“I feel as if I’ve written a debut record, because it’s a different language and it’s a different part of my life,” she says. “It’s about that point where I go out into the world on my own, which people generally write about first, and then get on with their lives. But it’s taken me so long to digest it—I needed 20 years just to make sense of things, and I realized the starting point of my creative life isn’t Wales, it’s actually North America.”

Saunders adds: “I think the way I’ve managed to write in English is by acknowledging that I can’t translate a lot of memories. I’ve found that idea really important to explore. I think if I’d just stayed in Wales, and I hadn’t lived anywhere else or experienced any other culture then it would be really different. I would’ve made records in Welsh, but I left home at 16.”

Saunders’ long term collaborator Rhys Edwards once again produced the album, which was recorded live with her band in her living room. The album also features fellow Welsh musicians Cate Le Bon and H. Hawkline.

Summing up the experience of writing and recording the album and revisiting her past with it, Saunders says: “I feel compelled as a songwriter to keep digging it all up. Everything’s a diary entry for me. And in writing about all of this I’ve remembered the chaos of myself.”

Read our interview with Gwenno on Y Dydd Olaf.

Read our interview with Gwenno on Le Kov.

8. Garbage: “Get Out My Face AKA Bad Kitty”

9. Gina Birch: “Causing Trouble Again”

10. Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke: “The Spirit”

Honorable Mentions:

These songs almost made the Top 10.

CMAT: “Take a Sexy Picture of Me”

Durry: “idk i just work here”

Florry: “Pretty Eyes Lorraine”

Frankie Cosmos: “Bitch Heart”

Guerilla Toss: “Psychosis Is Just a Number”

Lifeguard: “Under Your Reach”

Lord Huron: “Looking Back”

Man/Woman/Chainsaw: “MadDog”

Pretty Bitter: “Thrill Eater”

Phoebe Rings: “Fading Star”

Sandhouse: “Grown”

Soccer Mommy: “She Is (stripped)”

Here’s a handy Spotify playlist featuring the Top 10 in order, followed by all the honorable mentions:

Subscribe to Under the Radar’s print magazine.

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.