It's impossible to be across all the new music out each Friday. Luckily, PAPER is here to help you out: each week, we round up 10 of our favorite new songs from artists — emerging and established — to soundtrack your life. From the surreal to the sublime, these songs cover every corner of the music world. The only criteria: they all have to absolutely rip.
Nicki Minaj — "Super Freaky Girl"
After teasing it on TikTok for the past few weeks, Nicki Minaj has finally returned with the Rick James-sampling "Super Freaky Girl," a bouncy, bawdy return to pop-rap. Zany and addictive, you can think of it as "Anaconda 2."
Hagop Tchaparian — "Round"
Hagop Tchaparian follows up his superlative July two-track "GL" / "Raining” with “Round," the latest single from his debut album, Bolts. Combining a hard, gritty techno beat with eerie ambient synths, it’s a bracing, beautifully atmospheric piece of dance music.
Santigold — "Shake"
Fresh off getting a shoutout from Beyoncé on her “BREAK MY SOUL” remix, Santigold returns with "Shake," a lithe piece of ketamine-funk produced by SBTRKT. A song about "our resilience as humans," it’s space-age paean to movement.
Megan Thee Stallion — "Her"
This highlight from Megan Thee Stallion’sTRAUMAZINE finds the Houston hip-hop queen rapping over a simmering house beat, explaining, with a particularly sharp tongue, why nobody will ever measure up to her. Facts!
Banoffee — "Angel Girl"
“Angel Girl” is a pop song about grief — about seeing the face of a lost loved one everywhere you go. It’s a heartbreaking conceit, but Banoffee adds a silver lining: Maybe the people you lost are still watching over.
Four Tet — "Mango Feedback"
"Mango Feedback" is a fiendish heater — a warm daytime techno track that should go down perfectly at Four Tet’s all-day party this Saturday in London. Those of us who can’t be there will just have to turn this track up, close our eyes and float away.
M.I.A. — "Popular"
M.I.A. reunites with her longtime collaborator Diplo for the first time in over ten years on “Popular,” a song that expertly flips the language of social media self-love into something sinister and strange.
Thelma Plum — "The Brown Snake"
This highlight from Thelma Plum’s Meanjin EP is as good a love song as they come. It’s not about a person, but a place — Meanjin, AKA Brisbane, and its “Brown Snake,” or the Brisbane river. “If I died and went to heaven, then heaven would be this place,” Plum sings, and you can hear her love for Meanjin in every word.
MØ — "Spaceman"
“Spaceman," a new track from MØ’s deluxe reissue of Motordrome, interpolates Babylon Zoo’s track of the same name, resulting in a track that fuses '90s chic with MØ’s hypermodern sensibilities.
Boyfriend — "Just A Girl"
Hyperpop artist Boyfriend twists No Doubt’s iconic “Just A Girl” into an industrial-tinged electronic banger, adding a layer of sardonic wit to the song’s '90s feminist lyrics.
Photography: Robert Ector (Courtesy of Nicki Minaj)