Songs You Need In Your Life: April 23, 2025

Each week, The FADER staff rounds up the songs we can’t get enough of. Here they are, in no particular order. Listen on our Spotify and Apple Music playlists, or hear them all below.

The new single from the 100% Electronica co-founder’s upcoming album She Comes From Nowhere is danceable dream-pop that takes the shape of an internal soundtrack playing when a particularly enchanting stranger crosses your path. Almost instantly, every detail takes outsized importance: her lilac perfume, her Mary Jane shoes, the way her gaze never seems to meet yours. Traces of house music float through breezy melodies as Neggy Gemmy sings, “She’s only gonna break your heart.” As usual, the fantasy is much prettier than reality. — Jordan Darville

Moin are a London-based trio who have slowly reinvented themselves from making moody and austere electronic music into a group that unpicks the expectations of a guitar band. Their music has an inbuilt grit that is often offset by the use of hooky vocal samples. It’s a trick they’ve used since their 2021 debut Moot! and continue with their new song “X.U.Y.” A chanted vocal is looped over a crystalline synth and Valentina Magaletti’s clipped drums to create a glitch-like moment that feels as indebted to footwork as it does an indie rock band. Moin’s trick is never planting their flag anywhere for too long. —David Renshaw

A sequel to Pinball, MIKE and Tony Seltzer’s 2024 project, should not come as a surprise. On that project, with its party-starting flexes and rowdy beats, MIKE sounded not just at home, but invigorated. “Prezzy,” the first song from Pinball II, starts off with a blistering intro of Florida fast music (shout out 454) then settles into a looser mode, synths twinkling like street lights as mixtape drops explode and chatter around MIKE’s dismissive, ruminative bars, as tight and sharp as barbed wire. It sounds, well, presidential. —JD

The influence of Addison Rae working with Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjard, two Max Martin protégés, has never sounded more obvious than on “Headphones On,” a song that sounds like it was swiped directly from Martin’s ‘00s hard drive. Breathy sighs and flexy synth work cushion lyrics about escaping into music when things get hard. “Wish my mom and dad could’ve been in love,” she admits. Rae has a unique talent of creating layers in otherwise simplistic concepts, even when its so banal as putting “my headphones on, listen to my favorite song.” —Steffanee Wang

U.K. rapper BXKS has been quietly blowing up this year, dropping new music and appearing on a recent Dazed cover alongside Jim Legxacy and YT. “Flashing Lights” is a moment of reflection amid the rise, with BXKS opening up about her discomfort with some elements of becoming well known. “Lights camera action, I must be the latest attraction,” she raps with a sigh over a soulful beat. It’s delivered not as a complaint but as someone adjusting to a new life in the spotlight. Ironically for a snapshot of an artist who wants a little privacy, her talent suggests far more attention will be coming down the line. —DR

“I could come up to your place,” Fine Glindvad Jensen sings suggestively on her first solo release since last year’s excellent Rocky Top Ballads. Like her Copenhagen peers ML Buch and Astrid Sonne, Fine finds warmth in dissonance and buries this hazy and seductive ballad underneath a wave of distorted guitar chords. The heaviness echoes the longing in Jensen’s voice, which cuts through the digitized clang like a ray of light. —DR

Listening to “MTV’s Pimp My Ride” is like driving windows up through nighttime traffic in the 2000s with a scratched mix CD called “Smooth R&B” in the stereo. If Usher had ADHD and a malfunctioning 404, Confessions might sound something like this. Over a cleverly glitched beat made with an assist from Keem the Cipher, zay croons, raps, and self-harmonizes, tossing off unsubtly horny and logically delirious double entendres like sonar signals meant for someone who might match his freak. —Raphael Helfand

Black Moth Super Rainbow has always lived in the doorways between dreams and reality. On “Unknown Potion,” the band drifts deep into a muffled dreamscape where kicks and snares hit like padded feet, and distant synths bounce past wispy cotton-candy cloud vocals. It’s one of those songs that‘s almost too easy to sink into, so soft and pillowy it’s hard to get back up when the final notes fade out.— RH

If Maria Somerville’s music is dream pop, it’s the final dream you have before waking up, its warmth lingering pleasantly on your eyelids as you stretch and yawn. It stands to reason: Somerville works a biweekly morning shift at NTS, gently rousing the Irish artist’s devotees by accompanying them via headphones or car speakers on their commute to work. “Spring,” true to its title, is a similar awakening, evoking fresh-cut grass, the slow blooming of flowers, the end of hibernation. —Raphael Helfand

What do you get when you merge Florence + The Machine with pop music in the post-Brat era? Erin LeCount’s “Godspeed” might be a close approximation. The rising TikTok-viral singer’s grand vocals make for a fascinating foil against the metallic, club-lite soundscape of her latest single. It’s for dreamers who also want a night out to lose themselves. —SW

A pretty guitar pop song has been fed through a distorting machine on “Harmony,” a three-part conversation between claire rousay, Pink Must, and the Brooklyn singer-songwriter Grumpy. They trade verses reflecting on a budding relationship: “Ask for what you want, I’ll double it back,” Grumpy sings. “You’re the only thing that keeps me sane,” Pink Must answers back. Rousay, in the background, drums up a whir of fuzzy emotions. —SW