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.
Dolly Parton, ‘When Life Is Good Again’
Dolly Parton proffers an unexpected benediction in “When Life Is Good Again.” Modest country mandolin, arena-scale echoing guitars — part U2, part “Boys of Summer” — and a gospelly choir join her feathery voice as she recognizes dire times and promises better ones. JON PARELES
Rosalía featuring Travis Scott, ‘TKN’
A satisfyingly crisp reggaeton-ish collaboration between two artists who approach the genre from the outside — Rosalía, full of vocal elegance, and Travis Scott, teeming with dour flirtations. They’re compatible enough, but really this is an alignment of corpo-cultural interests, a merger as well suited to the Financial Times as to YouTube and Spotify. JON CARAMANICA
Nicole Atkins, ‘Domino’
“I don’t want to play safe and sound/When the world comes tumbling, tumbling down,” Nicole Atkins sings in “Domino,” on her new album “Italian Ice.” There’s a retro yet skittish late-1960s funk vamp behind her, and the tension is contemporary. PARELES
Jimmy Edgar featuring Hudson Mohawke, ‘Bent’
Loud clanging. Digital belches. Military ding-dongs. All of these noises get pressed into a marching pattern by the eclectic Detroit producer Jimmy Edgar and the Scottish thunder-electro specialist Hudson Mohawke on a foot-stomper that’s also a head-twister. CARAMANICA
Thad Cockrell featuring Brittany Howard, ‘Higher’
One of the oldest soul and gospel homilies — “gonna lift you higher” — makes a completely unironic return, but with a twist, in “Higher.” The track’s long, serene intro is a fake-out ended by a decisive drum attack. From there, the song seesaws between desolation and affirmation; Thad Cockrell sings in a quivering tenor about sorrow and heartbreak, but Brittany Howard swoops in to rescue him, harmonizing a vow that grows ever more persuasive: “I’m gonna lift you higher when I’m feeling low.” PARELES
Bright Eyes, ‘One and Done’
Conor Oberst has reclaimed his old Bright Eyes moniker, not for its lo-fi beginnings but for the sonic ambitions of its latter-day albums. “One and Done” is a dirge that sets glum verbal enigmas — “Around here we’ve been wondering what tomorrow’s gonna sing/On the final field recording of the loud anthropocene” — to ever-expanding orchestrations, one can-you-top-this crescendo after another arriving with the most somber excess. PARELES
Esperanza Spalding and Fred Hersch, ‘But Not for Me’
For three enchanted nights in October 2018, Esperanza Spalding sat on a stool onstage at the Village Vanguard without her bass, steps away from the pianist Fred Hersch, singing and speaking and undoing a book of songs, including jazz standards and Hersch originals. On the Gershwins’ age-old “But Not for Me,” Spalding talks to the song as she performs it. “And then some words I don’t really understand, because it’s like, Old English: ‘hi-ho, alas and lackaday’,” she shrugs at one point, replacing the lyrics with her inner monologue. Even as she relishes the tune, Spalding seems almost to be saying to the Gershwins, with a bemused shake of the head, “How are you still here?” Her instigative impulse is contagious, and Hersch — a few decades Spalding’s senior, and one of the finest pianists of his generation — leans into a percussive, playful style, sounding startled and delighted. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
Larry Willis, ‘Climax’
The lengthy studio career of Larry Willis, a versatile jazz pianist who died last year, began when he was in his early 20s, accompanying the eminent alto saxophonist Jackie McLean on a series of sessions at Rudy Van Gelder’s famed studio in 1965. On “I Fall in Love Too Easily: The Final Session at Rudy Van Gelder’s,” recorded last September, things come full circle. Leading a quintet combining musicians from his native New York and his adopted hometown, Baltimore, Willis marches through a catalog of originals and classics, including “Climax,” a zipping modal composition by Jack DeJohnette that was one of the pieces he recorded with McLean at those early sessions, in that same studio, more than 50 years before. RUSSONELLO
NLE Choppa, ‘Different Day (Lil Baby — Emotionally Scarred Remix)’
On this remix of Lil Baby’s “Emotionally Scarred,” the promising and sometimes rowdy young rapper NLE Choppa takes the heart-rending bait of the original and doubles down. Amid lyrics rife with toxicity and trauma, he taps out a tale about a love so intense he’s not sure how to handle it, and unsure what to do when it handles him: “We be scared to open up to each other so we have trouble/Two different worlds, you a queen but I’m coming straight out the gutter.” CARAMANICA
Gabriel Garzón-Montano, ‘Someone’
As Gabriel Garzón-Montano sings about not getting over an ex in “Someone,” the track makes clear just how mired he still is. It has a deliberately sluggish beat punctuated by sticky, squishy clavinet notes, while the vocal line makes jazzy leaps that sound increasingly distraught. By the time the bridge suddenly swells and he reiterates, “I needed you/I don’t know what to do,” it’s already obvious. PARELES
Protomartyr, ‘Michigan Hammers’
Protomartyr is from Detroit, and the band’s songs have always had a hard-nosed Midwestern pragmatism. “Michigan Hammers,” from an album postponed until July 17, races along on chattering, virtually nonstop quadruple-time cymbals and guitars erupting in bursts of syncopated chords. Joe Casey’s lyrics, mostly barked and occasionally sung, are nonlinear, but he’s not offering any reassurance. “What’s been torn down can be rebuilt,” he chants, only to add, “What has been rebuilt can be destroyed.” PARELES
Source: Music - nytimes.com
