Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.
Demi Lovato, ‘Anyone’
Demi Lovato is 27, but has lived much longer. A former Disney star, and the one who consistently had the most conflicted relationship to that enterprise, she emerged in her late teenage years as a pop star with a big voice and unexpected edge. But she also struggled with addiction, and in 2018, she suffered an opioid overdose. “Anyone,” which she premiered at the Grammy Awards on Sunday night, is her first single since then — a pensive eruption, a harrowing peal. It moves slowly and determinedly, and not totally steadily, which is the point — recovery is not a straight line. The pain here is palpable, and Lovato wields it like a weapon and a shield. She’s a torch singer for our modern era, which asks too much of those too young, and doesn’t stop until it breaks them. JON CARAMANICA
Dua Lipa, ‘Physical’
Little Dragon, ‘Hold On’
Let’s have some fun, this beat is sick: There is hope for upbeat pop in 2020. The first song from a Little Dragon album due March 27 is an electro-soul benediction for an undramatic relationship set to a low simmer. The third track from Dua Lipa’s “Future Nostalgia” (out April 3) cleverly threads Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 song “Physical” through Lady Gaga’s album “The Fame.” It’s not as icon-clad as Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now,” but it has enough sizzle to winningly live up to the album’s title. CARYN GANZ
Torres, ‘Good Scare’
Torres — the singer and songwriter Mackenzie Scott — ponders the volatility of romance and the relation between life and art in “Good Scare” from her new album, “Silver Tongue.” Booming percussion and sustained electric guitar tones give her a spacious backdrop as she observes a partner who’s scaring her by “eyeing all the exits”; her reaction is to think about writing a country song. This is not one. JON PARELES
Sturgill Simpson, ‘A Good Look’
Will people learn line-dance moves from an anime? Sturgill Simpson, the insurgent roots-rocker, thinks they might. The underlying structure of “A Good Look” is funky blues-rock, but its sliding synthesizers and nonstop bass line make it feel machine-driven. And while Simpson is singing about all the things that compromise heartfelt songwriting — image, commerce, “you know they don’t like it when you take a stand” — the video clip is all artificial glee. Enjoy the paradox. PARELES
Meek Mill featuring Roddy Ricch, ‘Letter to Nipsey’
An earthy, uplifting tribute to Nipsey Hussle from Meek Mill with Roddy Ricch, one of Nipsey’s protégés. (They premiered it at the Grammys on Sunday.) Meek is in reflective storytelling mode, with scars still fresh: “When we lost you it really put some pain on me/Got me scared to go outside without that flame on me.” And Roddy sings his way through the pain. Even his melancholy is sweet, a balm for a feeling that’s never anything other than terrible. CARAMANICA
Kate Tempest, ‘Unholy Elixir’
“Our songs were spells and our spells were plain facts,” Kate Tempest declares in “Unholy Elixir.” She’s more a poet than a rapper, but her recordings make the music an equal partner. “Unholy Elixir” feels unstable but obstinate from the start, with deep, wavery, not-quite-in-tune synthesizers and a lurching beat; other synthesizer riffs arrive to turn the track into glowering synth-pop. Tempest confronts excuses for apathy — “don’t bother protesting because nobody listens” — but warns, “You better start sowing or there won’t be a harvest.” PARELES
Braids, ‘Young Buck’
Insistent, relentless six-beat patterns run nearly nonstop as Raphaelle Standell-Preston, of the Canadian band Braids, sings about lust overcoming rationality. Her “Young Buck,” she knows, is “the blaring example of what I am drawn towards/and should strongly move away from.” Layers of counterpoint accrue as her better judgment fades; it’s math-rock versus irresistible impulses. PARELES
Jah Wobble featuring Keith Levene, Richard Dudanski, Mark Stewart, Andy Weatherall and Youth, ‘A Very British Coup’
Jah Wobble, the original bass player in Public Image Ltd., and other post-punk alumni — Keith Levene from the early Clash and Public Image Ltd., Mark Stewart from the Pop Group, Youth from Killing Joke — greet Brexit with the fractious “A Very British Coup.” It’s a dense, ever-shifting collage, variously hinting at ska-punk, Britpop, fiddle tunes and “Sympathy for the Devil,” with barbed bits of lyrics like “sordid, sentimental, sick souvenirs” and “Even the devil sold his soul.” In 2020, post-punk disgust and cynicism aren’t dated. PARELES
Destroyer, ‘It Just Doesn’t Happen’
Dan Bejar, who records as Destroyer, has a fey tenor voice perfectly made for easy whimsy. But this is not a playful era, and he knows it. On his new album, “Have We Met,” the idiom he chose is the reverberant, electronics-enhanced, early MTV tone of confidence with hidden misgivings. “It Just Doesn’t Happen” begins, “You’re looking good/in spite of the light,” and that ambivalence persists; it’s a portrait of the artist as winner, loser and lost soul. PARELES
Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (featuring Wayne Shorter), ‘Contemplation’
If Wayne Shorter is something like jazz’s Pablo Picasso — a master composer of the modern era who never abandoned tonality and form, but was constantly finding new ways to turn them upside down — then the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra works as a gilded frame to display his masterpieces. Members of the 15-piece big band, led by the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, wrote arrangements of compositions from throughout Shorter’s career, and the orchestra performed them with him at Rose Hall in 2015. A glorious moment came on “Contemplation,” one of Shorter’s early works, first recorded with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in 1961. Playing it with the orchestra, he takes the tune’s only solo, subtly harking to the hollering style of the early R&B saxophonists he grew up hearing. But his blues phrasing often veers toward abstraction, his notes smearing and disappearing without an alibi — like a nose on a canvas shrewdly misplaced. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
The Westerlies, ‘Eli’
An arty quartet featuring two trumpeters and two trombonists, mixing ideas from jazz, new classical and Appalachian folk, the Westerlies don’t really have the option of doing a straightforward cover of most songs. That’s doubly true when they’re dealing with Arthur Russell, the experimental-pop cellist and vocalist. His music is about melody and counterpoint, but it’s also about the grain of his voice, and treating sound as humid atmosphere. On this rendition of Russell’s “Eli,” the Westerlies smartly lean into the tune’s blend of harmonic splendor and hollering lament — and they’re mindful of the need for some textural play. One of the trombonists folded tin foil across the bell of his horn, creating a restless sibilance underneath the crystal tones and rough growls of his bandmates. RUSSONELLO
Source: Music - nytimes.com
