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.
Justin Bieber featuring Chance the Rapper, ‘Holy’
The earnest, restrained “Holy” doesn’t exactly announce the arrival of Justin Bieber as a Christian pop star — he’s more doing devotional R&B, blending themes of loyalty and faith with those of romantic commitment. (For example, “I don’t believe in nirvana, but the way that we love in the night gave me life, baby.”) These are lines that are already fuzzy in gospel and contemporary Christian music (CCM), but Bieber’s turn in this direction — amplified by a squeaky, nimble, praise-adjacent verse from Chance the Rapper — signifies both Bieber’s ongoing journey away from his tumultuous teen years and also the increasing visibility of spirituality in secular spaces. Did you have Justin Bieber-goes-Amy Grant on your 2020 bingo card? JON CARAMANICA
Sam Smith, ‘Diamonds’
Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” morphing from ballad to club propulsion, has been a durable template for songs by resentful exes. The latest is Sam Smith’s “Diamonds,” a denunciation of a mercenary partner that starts as a lament but gradually takes on a 4/4 disco thump and busily scrubbing rhythm guitar. “You’re never gonna hear my heart break,” they (Smith’s pronoun) declare, adding, “Take all the money you want from me.” But there’s anguish in their voice, even as the beat pushes Smith toward freedom. JON PARELES
Blood Orange and Park Hye Jin, ‘Call Me (Freestyle)’
The pandemic has fostered the kind of web-surfing that leads to unexpected, long-distance collaborations. For “Call Me (Freestyle),” Devonte Hynes, a.k.a. Blood Orange, places his melody and lyrics atop the hazy, looping piano refrain and drum-machine beats of “Call Me,” a 2018 track by the South Korean singer, songwriter and producer Park Hye Jin. Her vocal in Korean, from the original track, chants, “Don’t answer my phone. It’s just a depressing story anyway.” Above her serenely melancholy piano, Hynes — sometimes harmonizing with himself — sings in quick triplets about bicycling late at night and poses questions: “How do you feel?” “When was the last time that you cried?” Mood: suspended, isolated, wondering. PARELES
Steve Arrington, ‘Love Knows’
The first album in a decade from Steve Arrington, “Down to the Lowest Terms: The Soul Sessions” is the sound of an artist savoring the fruits of his own influence. The sort of velvet-gloved funk that Arrington made with Slave in the 1970s and ’80s — first as the group’s drummer, then as lead vocalist — has become a guiding influence for a new generation of musicians, particularly in Los Angeles. (Thundercat featured Arrington on his latest album.) On his own new album, partnering with younger musicians, Arrington embraces a nouveau sound, while demonstrating how durable the old tools were: On “Love Knows,” the ropes of distorted guitar and the unswayable backbeat would be right at home on a Slave LP, but they sound just as timely today. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
Salem, ‘Starfall’
More than a decade ago, Salem claimed its own murky subgenre: “witch house,” which involved a massively distorted low end and drum-machine spatters (by way of Southern hip-hop), stately synthesizer melodies and vocals likely to be pitch-shifted and/or buried in the mix. Salem all but vanished not long after releasing its debut album in 2010 — until this week, when it reappeared with a cryptic 40-minute mixtape and now this sepulchral but surprisingly legible song. It’s a majestic dirge framed by sustained bass tones and electronic air horns and twinkles up above, as the verses envision destruction and alienation — “I don’t have anything for you” — with desolate calm. PARELES
Baby Keem, ‘Hooligan’
A whole dollop of just-got-famous anxiety from Baby Keem, whose “Die for My Bitch” was one of last year’s most original hip-hop albums. On “Hooligan,” no one is to be trusted, and the weighty piano-driven production is a constant reminder of gloom. CARAMANICA
Sasha Sloan, ‘Is It Just Me?’
Here’s a neoconservative take on the present musical and cultural moment: “Modern art is boring, politicians are annoying/I don’t think of last forever, and old music was better,” Sasha Sloan whisper-sings in “Is It Just Me?,” later claiming, “People my age make me nauseous.” She’s backed by sounds that mix old music — electric-guitar arpeggios with finger-squeaks on the strings — with what sounds like a programmed drumbeat, even if it’s a march. She’s trying so hard to have it both ways. PARELES
Joan Osborne, ‘Trouble and Strife’
The title track of Joan Osborne’s new album, a set of bluesy new songs of her own, is “Trouble and Strife.” It goes barreling through assorted predicaments — romantic, footloose, violent, absurd — with amusement buttressed by grit. PARELES
Tyler Childers, ‘Long Violent History’
From a surprise Tyler Childers trad-fiddle album comes its title track, “Long Violent History,” a sliding-doors take on police abuse that’s meant to incite discomfort and underscore just how tenuous safety can be:
How many boys could they haul off this mountain
Shoot full of holes, cuffed and laying in the streets
’Til we come into town in a stark raving anger
Looking for answers and armed to the teeth?
CARAMANICA
Ambiance, ‘Into a New Journey’
The Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Daoud Abubakar Balewa and his wife, Monife, a vocalist, self-released a smattering of albums in the late 1970s and ’80s with a collective called Ambiance. None of those albums became widely known, but “Into a New Journey” — a high-water mark, from 1982 — has just been reissued, and it’s worth revisiting. Mixing instruments and rhythms from West Africa and Brazil into a bedrock of jazz and funk, each of the album’s seven songs unfolds like a short story of its own, with a different cast of sonic characters from the last. On the title track, with Monife Balewa singing high, open tones in the distance, the chords of the pianist Kino Cornwell balance up against a tumbling flow of percussion. RUSSONELLO
Dan Weiss’s Starebaby, ‘A Taste of a Memory’
“Natural Selection” is the second LP by Starebaby, a band of jazz-trained musicians who play the drummer Dan Weiss’s meticulous, metal-inspired compositions. While the goal is to consume your attention — exerting a pull heavier than gravity, as a metal band might — Weiss also seems aimed at organizing your thoughts, not overwhelming you. He showcases each component part, leaving vast amounts of empty space, inviting listeners to visualize each instrument one by one in their mind’s eye. “A Taste of a Memory” opens with minutes of solitary piano before a synthesizer starts to echo its tones. Not until close to minute four does a quivering, distorted guitar enter, hesitantly at first. Even after Weiss’s drums finally crash in, each element remains distinct and stark: This is music that wants to be consumed ear-first, flowing from the mind into the body. RUSSONELLO
Source: Music - nytimes.com
