11 Best Songs of the Week: Car Seat Headrest, Destroyer, Tunde Adebimpe, Tune-Yards, and More
Mar 07, 2025
Welcome to the seventh 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 30 songs and narrowed it down to a Top 11.
Last week we announced Issue 74, The Protest Issue. It features Kathleen Hannah and Bartees Strange on the two covers and can be bought from us directly here.
We’re also hoping to get 600 new (or renewed) subscribers on board in the next three months and so we’re offering 30% off subscriptions right now.
To help you sort through the multitude of fresh songs released in the last week, we have picked the 11 best the last seven days had to offer, followed by some honorable mentions. Check out the full list below.
1. Car Seat Headrest: “Gethsemane”
This week, Car Seat Headrest announced a new album/rock opera, The Scholars, and shared its first single, the 11-minute multi-part track “Gethsemane,” via a short film. They also announced some new tour dates. The Scholars is due out May 2 via Matador.
A press release explains the concept of the album in greater detail: “Set at the fictional college campus Parnassus University, the songs on The Scholars are populated with students and staff whose travails illuminate a loose narrative of life, death, and rebirth.”
The band collectively had this to say about “Gethsemane” in the press release: “Rosa studies at the medical school of Parnassus University. After an experience bringing a medically deceased patient back to life, she begins to regain powers suppressed since childhood, of healing others by absorbing their pain. Each night, instead of dreams, she encounters the raw pain and stories of the souls she touches throughout the day. Reality blurs, and she finds herself taken deep into secret facilities buried beneath the medical school, where ancient beings that covertly reign over the college bring forth their dark plans.”
Car Seat Headrest is frontman Will Toledo, lead guitarist Ethan Ives, drummer Andrew Katz, and bassist Seth Dalby. The band’s last album, Making a Door Less Open,came out in 2020 via Matador, meaning the band’s touring for that album was derailed by the pandemic.
Toledo self-produced the album, which has a wide range of influences, including Shakespeare, Mozart, classical opera, The Who’s Tommy, and David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. “One thing that can be a struggle with rock operas is that the individual songs kind of get sacrificed for the flow of the plot,” Toledo says. “I didn’t want to sacrifice that to make a very fluid narrative. And so this is sort of a middle ground where each song can be a character and it’s like each one is coming out on center stage and they have their song and dance.”
Car Seat Headrest started out as a solo project from Toledo, but over the years has grown into a full on collaborative band.
“What we’ve been doing more of in recent years is just taking the pulses of each other,” says Toledo. “We’ve really been leaning into that sort of cocoon that started off with the pandemic years and just turned into this special space that we were creating all on our own. I was coming out of it as a solo project and it always just felt like it was in pieces. There’s the album we’re working on, and then there’s a live show that we’re doing, and then there’s everything in between. And it didn’t really feel to me like things got in sync in an inner feeling way until this record, with that internal communal energy. And it’s become that band feeling for me in a much more realized way. That’s been a big journey.”
Bejar had this to say in a press release: “The song is a reckoning, a dressing down, a walk in the park where you carefully record your steps and describe the park and somehow the recording and the description undoes you. Which is why it’s important that the song be as groovy as it is. That part I didn’t see coming. There is a lightness that points to a future, even if I think it’s the heaviest thing I’ve ever written. John [Collins] outdid himself in the mix. His filigree harps changed everything. I think it is his favourite song on the record.”
Destroyer’s last album, LABYRINTHITIS, came out in March 2022 via Merge. It was one of our Top 100 Albums of 2022. Read our interview with Destroyer on the album here.
The song is about the end of a complicated relationship, as Adebimpe sings “God knows you’re the worst thing I ever loved.”
Of the new single, Adebimpe simply had this to say in a press release: “Breaking up is hard to down dooby doo down do.”
Adebimpe has also announced a Los Angeles record release show on the eve of the album’s release, at Zebulon on Thursday, April 17.
Three Black Boltz includes “Magnetic,” a new song Adebimpe shared in October via a self-directed music video. It was one of our Songs of the Week. When the album was announced in January he released its second single, “Drop,” also one of our Songs of the Week.
Adebimpe produced the album with Wilder Zoby, and Zoby executive produced it. There was additional production and contributions from TV on the Radio members Jaleel Bunton and Jahphet Landis. Landis produced “Drop,” for example.
TV on the Radio also features David Sitek and Kyp Malone. In a press release Adebimpe says that when writing and recording music with the band he can rely on the other members to help finish his initial ideas, but with his solo album he was out on his own limb.
“I’ve been doing this thing with this group of people for so long, that I can just have a vague sketch of a concept and I know Jaleel or Kyp will have five brilliant ideas on where it can go,” he says. “But for Thee Black Boltz, I didn’t have that scaffolding to hang on. That was both terrifying and exhilarating.”
Adebimpe is also an actor, having appeared in last year’s blockbuster Twisters, as well as in Rachel Getting Married and the recent Disney+ show Star Wars: Skeleton Crew.As a solo musician he’s also collaborated with Massive Attack, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Run the Jewels.
After several years of inactivity, last September TV on the Radio resurfaced with plans to put out a 20th anniversary reissue of their debut album, Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes, as well as the announcement of their first shows in five years. The reissue includes five bonus tracks and in September they shared one of them, “Final Fantasy.”Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes (20th Anniversary Edition) came out in November via Touch & Go. The band’s last album, Seeds, came out a decade ago in 2014.
We first interviewed TV on the Radio in Issue 5 of Under the Radar in 2003, in honor of their debut EP, Young Liars. That article isn’t online, but you can revisit our 2008 interview with the band.
4. Tune-Yards: “Limelight”
This week,Tune-Yards announced a new album, Better Dreaming, and shared a new song, “Limelight,” via a video for the single. They also announced some new tour dates. Better Dreaming is due out May 26 via 4AD.
Tune-Yards is Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner, who are also married. “Limelight” was inspired by the family dancing to George Clinton music and their 3-year-old can be heard singing on the song. “This one almost didn’t make it onto the album because it felt trite, especially given multiple genocides across the globe and the particular impact on children (the kids are not ‘alright’),” says Garbus in a press release. “But it kept coming back as people kept responding positively to it, in particular our own kid. Who am I to talk about getting free, about us all getting free? Fannie Lou Hamer said, ‘Nobody’s free until everybody’s free’ and it feels vulnerable but important to see myself as part of that ‘everybody.’”
Cabral had this to say about the new single in a press release: “I wanted to have some moments on this album like on [the 2021 SPELLLING album] The Turning Wheel that honor my love of strings and the whimsical, romantic Stevie Wonder Secret Life of Plants-style synth theatrics. I’m really happy those elements of SPELLLING get to shine on this track. ‘Destiny Arrives’ kind of acts as this sweet moment of purity and optimism amongst the more punchy and aggressive songs on Portrait of My Heart.”
Of the video she adds: “I was thinking about courage and how scary it can be to accept change and to follow your true path in life. In the video we are making these subtle allusions to a werewolf transformation to show this idea of Destiny as being an affliction or curse when you are resistant to your true calling. Embracing the danger of the unknown becomes a euphoric state by the end of the song.”
SPELLLING’s last regular album was 2021’s The Turning Wheel, although in 2023 she released SPELLLING & the Mystery School,a collection of re-envisioned versions of songs from her previous albums re-recorded with her touring band. Said band is featured on Portrait of My Heart: Wyatt Overson (guitar), Patrick Shelley (drums), and Giulio Xavier Cetto (bass). The album also features Chaz Bear of Toro y Moi (who sings on the duet “Mount Analogue”), Turnstile guitarist Pat McCrory, and Zulu’s Braxton Marcellous. Cabral worked with three producers on the new album—The Turning Wheel mixing engineer Drew Vandenberg, SZA collaborator Rob Bisel, and Yves Tumor producer Psymun.
England’s Black Country, New Road are releasing a new album, Forever Howlong, on April 4 via Ninja Tune. This week they released its second single, “Happy Birthday,” via a stop-motion animated video. Lesley-anne Rose directed the video.
The band’s lineup is Georgia Ellery (acoustic guitar, mandolin, tenor recorder, violin, vocals), Lewis Evans (alto saxophone, bass clarinet, clarinet, flutes, tenor recorder), Tyler Hyde (acoustic guitar, bass guitar, clarinet, harmonium, piano, tenor recorder, vocals), May Kershaw (accordion, harpsichord, piano, vocals), Luke Mark (acoustic guitar, baritone guitar, electric guitar, lap steel, tenor recorder), and Charlie Wayne (banjo, drums, percussion, tenor recorder, tuned percussion).
Ellery wrote “Besties,” whereas Hyde wrote “Happy Birthday.” Hyde had this to say about the song in a press release: “When I wrote ‘Happy Birthday’ I had Georgia’s song ‘Besties’ in my head. Therefore, the structure of it is heavily influenced by it.”
When Black Country, New Road’s former frontman, Isaac Wood, announced that he was leaving the band in 2022 only days before the release of their sophomore album, Ants From Up There (also on Ninja Tune), the band vowed to continue on and to not perform any of the material from Ants From Up There without Wood and so they wrote all new songs to perform live. That resulted in the 2023 live album, Live at Bush Hall, and concert film of the same name.
Forever Howlong is thus the band’s first studio album recorded without Wood. Vocal duties, as well as the bulk of the songwriting, is now split between Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery, and May Kershaw. “It created a real through line for the album, having three girls singing,” says Ellery in a press release. “It’s definitely very different to Ants From Up There, because of the female perspective—and the music we’ve made also complements that.”
“Besties” was the band’s first studio single to feature lead vocals from Ellery. James Ford (Fontaines D.C., Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode, Blur) produced Forever Howlong.
