Hear tracks by Blood Orange, Madison Cunningham, Yeat and others.
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.
Björk, ‘Atopos’
Multiple Björks converge in “Atopos,” the first single from her album due Sept. 30, “Fossora”; “atopos” is Greek for “out of place” or “amiss.” There’s the brash, declarative Björk, calling for unity and belting, “Thank you for staying while we learn/To find our resonance where we do connect.” There’s the beat-heavy Björk, who collaborated with Kasimyn — an Indonesian disc jockey who is in the duo Gabber Modus Operandi — on a stark, elemental kick-drum syncopation that turns to fierce battering at the end. There’s the nature-loving Björk, who surrounds herself in the video with close-ups of fungi. And there’s the modern chamber-music Björk, who chooses a family of instruments — on this track, six clarinets from bass on up — and writes gnarled, harmonically ambiguous arrangements for them. The song is equally cerebral and visceral — and, in its own way, jolly. JON PARELES
Blood Orange, ‘Jesus Freak Lighter’
A skittish electronic beat collides with a low, morose guitar riff on Blood Orange’s “Jesus Freak Lighter” — which is to say it’s a little bit New Order, a little bit Joy Division. Though Dev Hynes remains Blood Orange’s creative nucleus, as usual he’s brought on some new collaborators to orbit him on “Four Songs,” a new EP coming out next week; Ian Isaiah, Eva Tolkin and Erika de Casier will all be featured. “Jesus Freak Lighter,” though, is all Hynes, fitting since it conjures a mood of digital-era solitude: “Got carried away,” he sings with a kind of muffled melancholy, “Living in my head, photo fantasy.” LINDSAY ZOLADZ
Phoenix featuring Ezra Koenig, ‘Tonight’
Phoenix harkens back to 2009 on the sleek “Tonight,” not just in the way the group recaptures the sound of the excellent record it released that year, “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix,” but in the cameo appearance from another late-aughts indie-pop luminary, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig. “I talk to myself and it’s quite surprising,” Thomas Mars quips on the chorus; by the second iteration, Koenig adds some backing vocals to keep him company. ZOLADZ
Deerhoof, ‘My Lovely Cat’
What if the spiky San Francisco art-rock band Deerhoof decided to write a Rolling Stones song? “My Lovely Cat” might be as close as they get, with a rowdy, distorted 4/4 guitar riff, a more-or-less march beat and a slide guitar that veers between teasing the rhythm guitar and shadowing the vocal. Satomi Matsuzaki sings, in Japanese, about bonding with her cat in the internet era: “Let’s monitor on pet-cam!/Shall I start Instagram or TikTok?” Of course Deerhoof skews things, with sudden silences, sneaky shifts of key and meter and a final minute of obsessive repetition. But there’s a Stones swagger lurking underneath. PARELES
Madison Cunningham, ‘Our Rebellion’
Opposites attract, and perplex, in “Our Rebellion” from “Revealer,” the new album by Madison Cunningham. As she tries to defuse a lovers’ quarrel by recognizing differences — “You speak in numbers/I sing in metaphor” — she insists “I’m not trying to simplify you.” That certainly applies to the music: a perpetual-motion weave of deftly picked guitar lines in a brisk 7/4 meter, stacking up and realigning, jabbing and easing off, sometimes running backward, as the crafty wrangling goes on. PARELES
Jordana, ‘Is It Worth It Now?’
Perky synthesizer arpeggios, a confident guitar line and a broad-shouldered drumbeat promise something cheerful. But “Is It Worth It Now?” is actually a snap-out-of-it pep talk for someone deeply depressed: “Disinterest in the things that made you wanna live is sad enough itself, isn’t it?” She has advice — “Swim right into the center of all your doubt” — but the song ends with a question, not a cure. PARELES
The Waeve, ‘Can I Call You’
Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall are former members of two very different, if quintessentially British, bands: Blur and the Pipettes. They recently joined forces to form a new duo, the Waeve, and announced that a debut album will be coming next year. The first single, “Can I Call You,” is full of unexpected and sonically adventurous twists and turns: Just when it seems that the song has settled into its groove as a plaintive, folky piano ballad sung by Dougall, a screaming guitar solo from Coxon propels it into a different, and much antsier, register. “I’m tired of being in love, I’m sick of being in pain,” they chant together in a punky cadence, shouting to be heard over a cacophony that now includes Coxon’s blaring saxophone. “Can’t you just kiss me, then kiss me again?” ZOLADZ
Yeat, ‘Krank’
One of several space jams from the new Yeat EP, “Lyfë,” “Krank” is woozy, circular, lewd, lightly dystopian, and 10 percent less inscrutable than the average Yeat song to date. It’s something like growth. JON CARAMANICA
Bryson Tiller, ‘Outside’
Bryson Tiller sings with gymnastic verve, never letting the potential power of a lingering note get in the way of a slickly assembled cluster of syllables. Here, he prances and slides atop a beat that borrows heavily from the Ying Yang Twins’ signature salacious hit, “Wait (The Whisper Song).” CARAMANICA
Lewis Capaldi, ‘Forget Me’
The yowling prince Lewis Capaldi has made hay from singing himself hoarse, his hits filled with raw eruptions of schlock so potent they transcend past corn into something far more cooked. Unlike his biggest hits, “Forget Me,” his first new song in about three years, has a slight tempo to it — you aren’t bathing in his pathos quite the same as you once were. The verses amble by amiably, and there’s just the faintest echo of “Man in the Mirror” as the song begins to build. But Capaldi unleashes the full catharsis at the chorus: “I’m not ready/to find out you know how to forget me/I’d rather hear how much you regret me.” The only catch is that the song feels as if it’s rushing him along, urging him not to wallow. And wallowing is where Capaldi thrives. CARAMANICA
Marisa Anderson, ‘The Fire This Time’
When the 21st-century folk-primitive guitarist Marisa Anderson — no stranger to electric instruments, home recording or multitracking — learned about George Floyd’s death in May 2020, she spent the day recording ‘The Fire This Time’ and quickly put it on Bandcamp for a month as a benefit single. She has re-edited it for her coming album, “Still, Here.” Anderson places steady, mournful fingerpicking behind searching, keening slide-guitar lines and, at the 30-second mark, a police siren that passed by her window as she was recording. It’s a musician working out emotions physically, instinctively, with her fingers on the strings. PARELES
Makaya McCraven, ‘The Fours’
Jazz, minimalism and a rich sense of unfolding mystery suffuse “The Fours” by Makaya McCraven, the drummer, composer and producer whose next album, “In These Times,” arrives Sept. 23. The track begins with muffled drums and a patient bass vamp, but other instruments keep arriving, slipping into the mix almost surreptitiously and then adding their own layers of counterpoint: cello, viola, piano, harp, saxophone, trumpet, flute, even some flamenco-like handclaps from McCraven. The players collude as sections — strings, horns — or peek out with their own bits of melody; loops mingle with live instruments. The track undulates and thickens, then dissolves before revealing too many secrets. PARELES
Source: Music - nytimes.com
