11 Best Songs of the Week: Fontaines D.C., Youth Lagoon, Perfume Genius, Lael Neale, and More
Feb 21, 2025
Welcome to the fifth Songs of the Week of 2025. This week Andy Von Pip, Caleb Campbell, Matt the Raven, and Scotty Dransfield helped me decide what should make the list. We considered over 30 songs and narrowed it down to a Top 11.
Issue 73 is still out now. It features Maya Hawke and Nilüfer Yanya on the two covers and can be bought from us directly here.
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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. Fontaines D.C.: “It’s Amazing to Be Young”
Irish five-piece Fontaines D.C. released a new album, Romance, last August via XL. Today they released a brand new single, “It’s Amazing to Be Young,” via a cinematic seven-and-a-half-minute music video. The song itself is only three-and-a-half minutes long, but the video also features moments for dialogue and plot. Below is both the video and the audio-only YouTube video for the song.
As he did Romance, James Ford produced “It’s Amazing to Be Young.” The song will be released on limited edition 7-inch vinyl featuring the new B-side “Before You I Just Forget.”
Fontaines D.C. features Grian Chatten (vocals), Carlos O’Connell (guitar), Conor Curley (guitar), Conor Deegan (bass), and Tom Coll (drums).
Deegan had this to say about the new song in a press release: “‘It’s Amazing to Be Young’ is a song that was written in the presence of a newborn child—Carlos’ child. It sounded more like a lullaby or a music box then, but with the same lyric—‘it’s amazing to be young.’ The feeling of hope a child can give is profound and moving, especially for young men like us. That sense of wanting to create a world for them to grow up in happily. It’s a feeling that fights against the cynicism that can often overtake us in the modern world. So we wanted to declare which side we were on—it really is amazing to be young. We are still free, and want to make that feeling spread. We want to protect it for the others around us, and maybe in doing that, can also help protect it for ourselves.”
Director Luna Carmoon had this to say about making the new video: “I love this new track—it’s one of my favorites Fontaines have done and I love that I got to complete the trilogy of videos for it. It was all natural and kind of a surprise that the three videos came together. I’ve got to work with such a beautiful team and was really given the space and breath to create the worlds that automatically came to me when hearing the music. I feel like we’re living in this weird time where romantic love is being pushed to the side, and sex and love is unvirtuous and no longer what people want to see. I don’t believe that at all. I love that these two people have fallen in love with themselves, and I wanted to see them fall in love with each other. I planted the seed after I did the carjitsu video (‘In the Modern World’) and then I had a couple of days to write the video for ‘It’s Amazing to Be Young.’ There are a lot of odes to Santa Sangre it. It also reminds me of my first short film Shagbands.”
Fontaines D.C. are interviewed about Romance in our current print issue (Issue 73). Check out our in-depth interview and photo shoot with the band by buying the issue directly from us.
Romance is the band’s fourth album, the follow-up to 2022’s acclaimed Skinty Fia (which was #1 on both the UK and Irish album charts), 2020’s Grammy-nominated A Hero’s Death, and 2019’s Mercury Prize-nominated Dogrel. It finds them working with producer James Ford for the first time.
The band was formed in Dublin but is now based in London. Ideas for the new album started to form while they were touring the U.S. and Mexico with Arctic Monkeys. Then the band members went their separate ways for a while, before reconvening for a three weeks of pre-production in a North London studio and one month of recording in a chateau near Paris.
In 2023 Chatten released his debut solo album, Chaos For the Fly. Read our interview with him about it here. By Mark Redfern
2. Youth Lagoon: “Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)”
“Someone said my music makes them feel like they died in the forest, and I’ve honestly never heard a better compliment,” Powers says of the new song in a press release. “I don’t think I have a song that’s more suited for that description than ‘Gumshoe.’ I usually write out of pure love, delirium, or just to get the devil off my back, and this one checks all three boxes…it may be the closest I’ve come so far to finding real freedom in music.”
Powers adds that the song is “a love letter to my 1990s small-town boyhood—taking all of those fragments of memory and stitching them into a present-day folktale. I grew up homeschooled in a house full of brothers where there was enough mischief and make-believe to make any mother crack. Our world was whatever we wanted it to be, and I don’t think that ever changed for me.”
Powers says the video is “a stew of home movies, family archive, and footage I took just a few months ago around my current neighborhood.”
Rarely Do I Dream is the fairly quick followup to Heaven Is a Junkyard, released in June 2023 via Fat Possum.
The album was inspired by home videos of his childhood that Powers found in the fall of 2023 in a shoebox in his parent’s basement.
“When I took the tapes home and popped in the first one, it was my brother Bobby and I at the state fair. I was 4 years old choking on a corn dog,” Powers said in a previous press release. “If anything’s a summary of life, that is.”
He then started recording moments from the home movies off the TV and sampling some of the audio to work it into songs. “What I was really consumed with was how much I could zoom in on my actual history,” said Powers. “I wanted to really make someone feel like they were inside my living room in 1993, but rearrange the furniture a bit. Something about combining that level of hyperreality with fairytales of devils and detectives weirdly felt like the truest way to immortalize these pieces of my family.”
“The more I rewind the tapes of my life, the more I can hear the voice of my soul,” Powers added. “This isn’t nostalgia. Life’s much more messy than that. It’s a dedication to all the parts of who I was, who I am, and who I’m going to be.”
Powers recorded the album with co-producer/mixer/engineer Rodaidh McDonald (Weyes Blood, The xx, Gil Scott-Heron).
As Youth Lagoon, Powers released three albums: 2011’s The Year of Hibernation, 2013’s Wondrous Bughouse, and 2015’s Savage Hills Ballroom. Then he retired the name in 2016 and released two albums simply as Trevor Powers: 2018’s Mulberry Violence and 2020’s surprise-released Capricorn. All before returning to Youth Lagoon for Heaven Is a Junkyard.
3. Perfume Genius: “No Front Teeth” (Feat. Aldous Harding)
Perfume Genius (aka Mike Hadreas) is releasing a new album, Glory, on March 28 via Matador. This week he released its second single, “No Front Teeth,” which features New Zealand singer/songwriter Aldous Harding. It was shared via a music video for the song directed by Cody Critcheloe (who also directed Perfume Genius’ “Queen” video). Hadreas and Harding both star in the video, alongside longtime Perfume Genius band member and co-writer Alan Wyffels.
Glory once again finds Hadreas teaming up with long-time producer Blake Mills and keyboardist/co-writer/life partner Alan Wyffels. The album also features other previous collaborators, including guitarists Meg Duffy (aka Hand Habits) and Greg Uhlmann, drummers Tim Carr and Jim Keltner, and bassist Pat Kelly.
On Glory, Hadreas says in a press release that he was more open to input from his band and collaborators. “I’m more engaged with the band and the audience,” he says. “I’m still on some wild tear, but there’s more access and it’s more collaborative, in a way that makes it better, but also scary—because it feels more vulnerable.”
This week minimalist singer/songwriter Lael Neale announced a new album, Altogether Stranger, and shared its first single, “Tell Me How to Be Here,” via a self-directed video. She also announced some tour dates. Altogether Stranger is due out May 2 via Sub Pop.
Altogether Stranger finds Neale returning to Los Angeles after three years of living in rural Virginia. She was born and raised in Virginia before moving to Los Angeles then back to VA during the pandemic and now back to LA again. The video for “Tell Me How to Be Here” superimposes images of LA on top of a double exposed Neale as she sings the song.
“On returning to Los Angeles I felt like an extraterrestrial landing on a dystopian planet so I’m writing from the perspective of a being from another realm witnessing the peculiarities of humanity,” says Neale in a press release.
“In the course of writing this record there was one song I could never finish. The main line was, ‘I don’t belong here, I am an altogether stranger.’ I meant ‘stranger’ as a noun, not an adjective. Even though I abandoned the song, the lost chorus stuck with me & became the unspoken motif of the record,” says Neale of the album’s title.
Blondshell (aka Sabrina Teitelbaum) has unveiled “Two Times,” a delicate new single that marks a striking departure from her usual sound. The track, accompanied by a lyric video, showcases an intimate arrangement built around acoustic guitar and piano, revealing a more vulnerable side of the acclaimed artist.
This release follows the bold, arena-ready “T&A” from last month, which announced her sophomore album If You Asked For a Picture, scheduled for release on May 2, 2025 via Partisan Records. “T&A” was #1 on our Songs of the Week list. The new album, produced by Yves Rothman, promises to build on the foundation laid by Blondshell’s self-titled 2023 debut, which established her as one of music’s most compelling new voices.
Reflecting on “Two Times,” Blondshell shares: “I feel like I’m always seeing movies and shows where conflict is the only way love is expressed. It’s a lot of stories where someone has to work really hard to get somebody else to love them, and that’s what seems to make the relationship valuable. This song was basically like, what if it’s just solid? What if it’s just good and the relationship’s healthy? Does that mean it is less valuable? I think that’s a painful question because it’s essentially asking how capable you are of being in a decent relationship. But it’s also a love song in that way.”
You can grab our print issue (Issue 71) to read our exclusive interview with Blondshell. Read our review of her last album here. By Andy Von Pip
6. Samia: “Lizard”
7. Snapped Ankles: “Pay the Rent”
8. Wishy: “Fly”
9. Hannah Cohen: “Draggin’”
10. The Horrors: “Ariel”
11. Mamalarky: “#1 Best of All Time”
Honorable Mentions:
These songs almost made the Top 11.
Brian D’Addario: “Till the Morning”
King Hannah: “Leftovers”
James Krivchenia: “Probably Wizards”
The Murder Capital: “A Distant Life”
The Null Club: “Slip Angle” (Feat. Valentine Caulfield)
Oslo Twins: “I Wake Up Slowly”
Porridge Radio: “The Machine Starts to Sing”
Sleigh Bells: “Bunky Pop”
Sunday 1994: “Doomsday”
Triathalon: “RIP”
Here’s a handy Spotify playlist featuring the Top 11 in order, followed by all the honorable mentions:
