14 Best Songs of the Week: caroline, Japanese Breakfast, Alan Sparhawk, Deradoorian, and More
Mar 25, 2025
Welcome to the ninth Songs of the Week of 2025. This week Andy Von Pip, Caleb Campbell, Issa Nasatir, Matt the Raven, Scotty Dransfield, and Stephen Humphries helped me decide what should make the list. We considered over 50 songs and narrowed it down to a Top 14.
Recently 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 14 best the last seven days had to offer, followed by some honorable mentions. Check out the full list below.
1. caroline: “Total Euphoria”
London-based eight-piece caroline returned this week with their first single and video in three years and a new UK tour to boot. “Total Euphoria” is out now via Rough Trade. Check out the tour dates here.
This is their first release since “peak chroma,” a claire rousay cover they released in late October of 2022, after their self-titled debut in February of that year.
In a press release, caroline collectively explained the origins of “Total Euphoria,” saying: “The first iteration of this song was played as a three (Mike, Casper, and Jasper) in 2020 while we were writing our first album. It was a similar style to the guitars in the back half of ‘Natural Death’ (from their first album)—off-kilter/syncopated—but played much wonkier and messier, and then with a broken rock beat kind of erupting at different moments. It somehow didn’t quite fit with the music we were writing/recording at the time but there was a kernel in there of something we felt we would want to explore later.”
The waves of build ups and dissipations captures the title of the new single perfectly, and the inspiration for their newly infused electronic elements can be traced back to the influence of claire rousay and the cover they first experimented with.
The video, directed by Injury Reserve’s Parker Corey, displays a longing for disconnection and rural life, lamenting the slog and stress of living in urban settings.
“Eventually it became one of many things that we’ve happened upon that felt good to play for 20 mins straight,” says the group. “This one felt especially good as it was very consistently ‘loud’ and full on which was maybe a bit unusual for us at the time, and also everyone was playing these three different rhythms simultaneously which made it feel endlessly cyclical. Jasper then took the main chords and wrote a load of really nice top line stuff for singing, then we put together all the other parts with the rest of the band and finalised a structure. We realized the golden potential of how good it sounded with Jasper and Magda singing in unison also as a style, and they wrote some extra vocals and harmonies together.”
Caroline’s founding members—Casper Hughes, Jasper Llewellyn, and Mike O’Malley—began playing together in 2017 after meeting at university in Manchester. The band continued to expand, eventually becoming an eight-piece completed by trumpeter and bassist Freddy Wordsworth, violinists Magdalena McLean and Oliver Hamilton, percussionist Hugh Aynsley, and flute, clarinet, and saxophone player Alex McKenzie.
Caroline are embarking on an eight date UK tour beginning April 6th at Rewire Festival and continuing in early June. ByIssa Nasatir
2. Japanese Breakfast: “Honey Water”
Japanese Breakfast (aka Michelle Zauner) released a new album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), today via Dead Oceans. Today she also shared a new video for the album’s “Picture Window” and while we like that song, our favorite track from the album not yet released as a single is “Honey Water.”
Stream the new album here. Read our rave review of the LP, which we posted yesterday, here.
Zauner had this to say about For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) in a press release: “Over the course of promoting this new album I’ve often been asked to clarify the difference between melancholy and sadness. I think of melancholy as a kind of anticipatory grief, one that comes from an acknowledgment of the passage of time, from the recognition of mortality and finitude. In some way, too, I think it marks the artist’s condition, constantly observing through that lens. ‘Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy,’ Virginia Woolfe writes. I wanted this album to capture the moments where that knife slips. When people want too much, when they cede to temptation, when they are seduced and punished.”
For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is the follow-up to Jubilee, which was our #1 album of 2021 and landed Japanese Breakfast on the cover of our print magazine (buy a copy directly from us here or read our cover story interview here). In 2021 Zauner also put out her acclaimed debut memoir, Crying In H Mart, on Knopf. The book debuted at #2 on The New York Times’ Hardcover Nonfiction Best Sellers List.
Speaking of all the success she had with her last album and memoir and how it impacted the new album, Zauner says in a press release: “I felt seduced by getting what I always wanted. I was flying too close to the sun, and I realized if I kept going I was going to die.”
Blake Mills produced For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), which was recorded at Sound City in Los Angeles, where classic albums such as After the Gold Rush, Fleetwood Mac, and Nevermind were also made. One song on the album features legendary actor/musician Jeff Bridges.
Sparhawk and Trampled By Turtles are both from Minnesota and had discussed working together for several years, but finally the timing worked out. “When the opportunity seems right,” Sparhawk says in a press release, “you jump.”
The album was recorded at the end of 2023 at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. Trampled By Turtles were already recording there and Sparhawk came in towards the end of their session there, armed with songs looking for a home (including some that hadn’t seemed right for Low).
Pick up last print issue (Issue 73) to read our in-depth interview with Sparhawk on White Roses, My God. By Mark Redfern
4. Deradoorian: “Any Other World”
Deradoorian (full name Angel Deradoorian) is releasing a new album, Ready for Heaven, on May 9 via Fire. This week she released its third single, “Any Other World,” via a music video. James Thomas Marsh directed the video.
“This album is partly about watching humanity erode,” Deradoorian says in a press release. “It’s about mental struggle, and it’s avowedly anti-capitalist. I mean; would we have all these identity labels we have to live by, if we didn’t live in a capitalist world?”
In regards to her process, she adds: “I love the production more than the songwriting…. In fact, I don’t even feel like a songwriter at times, I feel like someone who is just inspired by so much music. And I want to try it all out! Like Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Mingus, or ESG and Silver Apples, or making weird Krautrock and industrial music. I love dub, and Sly and Robbie. I love the productions of those records and the collective energies released by their creators in the studio. It’s just a weird thing to do it by yourself!”
This is Deradoorian’s first album for Fire, but the British label is already home to Decisive Pink, Deradoorian’s project with Russian musician Kate Shilonosova (aka Kate NV). They released their debut album together, Ticket to Fame, in 2023 via Fire. The album’s single, “Dopamine,” which satirizes consumerism and online shopping addiction, was #1 on our Songs of the Week list.
In 2020, Deradoorian released the album Find the Sun via ANTI-. She was formerly the bassist/vocalist for Dirty Projectors.
A press release describes the song as such: “Mostly is about being annoyed by other people, and then at some point realizing that everyone else is as equally annoyed by you, then meeting in the middle and sharing a profound and unified sense of enjoyment at a world’s impending doom.”
Ill at Ease is the band’s fifth album and the follow-up to 2022’s Arrangements and 2018’s amusingly titled New Material.
Preoccupations is Matt Flegel (vocals, bass), Scott Munro (guitar, synth), Daniel Christiansen (guitar), and Mike Wallace (drums).
Flegel had this to say about the new album in a previous press release: “The well of dark things to write about seemingly has not dried up, and lyrically, it’s where I still tend to draw from. Draining all my anxieties into a song is often the only way I can get through a day. Some songs exist in a world with barren plains of burnt earth, covered in a dust of shame, dread, death, where all the things I love are things that kill me. Some come from the perspective of another distant world, looking skyward into a science fiction ocean of space, solitude, slight hope. Sometimes I’m looking around at the world that we live in now with incredulity, hilariously dissatisfied with how it’s all turned out, and assuming that it can’t be long before it’s all over. Some songs are just a reflection of me looking down at my feet while I trudge along wondering what I’m doing with myself, and if the ground is going to fall out from underneath me at any given moment.”
