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.
The Rolling Stones, ‘Living in a Ghost Town’
A song the Rolling Stones had worked on last year, “Living in a Ghost Town” turned out to be unexpectedly timely. It’s a muscular, minor-key reggae-rocker that harks back to “Miss You” (along with the Specials’ 1981 “Ghost Town” and a brief nod to Jimi Hendrix’s “Crosstown Traffic”). The video has studio shots of the Stones together pre-pandemic, but the lyrics were revised in isolation, and Mick Jagger yowls them with commitment. “Life was so beautiful — then we all got locked down,” he sings, and concludes, annoyed and rueful, “If I wanna party, it’s a party of one.” JON PARELES
Evanescence, ‘Wasted on You’
The first song from the first new Evanescence album of original music in nine years is cathartic and familiar. There is Amy Lee’s voice, somewhere between ferocious and hymnal. And there is the arrangement, part understated hard rock and part power soul ballad. And there is the rendering of melodramatic subject matter with power and quasi-Christian grace: “I don’t need drugs/I’m already six feet low/wasted on you.” JON CARAMANICA
Juice WRLD, ‘Righteous’
Juice WRLD was 21 when he died in December from an accidental overdose of oxycodone and codeine. In his first posthumous single, he sings about pills and codeine, “Takin’ medicine to fix all of the damage/my anxiety the size of a planet,” over the kind of minor-key guitar picking he also used in his megahit “Lucid Dreams.” (He adds, “We may die this evening.”) Although it may be a studio illusion, the song sounds like it was largely finished; Juice WRLD saw his self-destructive path. PARELES
Ideas from The Times on what to read, cook, watch, play and listen to while staying safe At Home.
Jónsi, ‘Exhale’
Jónsi, whose androgynous voice was at the center of the sustained, endless-horizon soundscapes of Sigur Ros, chose an unlikely co-producer for his first solo release in a decade: A.G. Cook from the PC Music circle, who tends to prize brittle, glitchy sounds. For its first minutes, “Exhale” lingers at a near-motionless tempo over open-ended piano chords, disrupted at times by taps, thuds and electronic stutters, intrusions from a more chaotic realm. Near the end, a beat appears and the song starts to suggest some abstract gospel, with a message of absolution. “This is the way it is/It isn’t your fault.” PARELES
Onyx Collective featuring duendita, ‘Glad to Be Unhappy’
The Onyx Collective is less concerned with doing something startlingly new than they are with mixing their nostalgias; the result is a hybrid that feels as jumbled and personal as memory. Onyx’s proclivities run from funk to free jazz; their centering obsession is Manhattan. Even before the coronavirus threw the world into stark disarray, the collective’s music seemed to ask what would become of their beloved island — as a repository of myth and memory — now that everything feels digitized, capitalized, ephemeral. On “Manhattan Special,” their newest LP, the group revisits jazz standards and other songs from the past 100 years of American music, flipping through styles like pages in a picture album. On Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s “Glad to Be Unhappy,” over a bed of groggy digital synths, the young vocalist duendita sings in a quietly disarming alto, sometimes deadpanning like Nico, sometimes confiding like a classic jazz crooner. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
iLe featuring Natalie Lafourcade, ‘En Cantos’
iLe, from Puerto Rico, and Natalia Lafourcade, from Mexico, trade verses about a “crazy” infatuation. First, they’re accompanied mostly by harmonized humming. But behind them, a rhythm gathers, mixing traditional drums and programmed beats as the lust comes to a serious simmer. PARELES
Rufus Wainwright, ‘Alone Time’
“Alone Time” starts like some other Rufus Wainwright songs, solo with steady piano chords and a long-breathed melody. He asks for “alone time” but quickly adds, “Don’t worry, I will be back.” But as he offers extravagant promises for his return, his backup vocals sweep in like a tsunami; their entrance is hair-raising before they enfold him in reassurance. PARELES
Delanila, ‘It’s Been a While Since I Went Outside’
Delanila — the songwriter and film composer Danielle Eva Schwob — wrote “It’s Been Awhile Since I Went Outside” during a period of self-isolation before the pandemic quarantine. It turned out to be oddly prescient: “Tried to climb my way out of this dark hole of doubt/but I’m not going anywhere,” she sings, over a moody, retro-flavored mix of orchestral strings and distorted guitars, a slice of self-amplified cabin fever melodrama PARELES
Earl Sweatshirt featuring Maxo, ‘Whole World’
The affect is flat and dead-eyed for both Earl Sweatshirt and his guest rapper Maxo in “Whole World”; “I got the whole world ’round me crumblin’,” goes the refrain. The track slowly alternates two chords, neither a secure place to rest, and Earl Sweatshirt raps about catacombs, a funeral and feeling “anxious, moving at a pallbearer’s pace.” It’s as if ceaseless dread has ground down any other response. PARELES
X, ‘Free’
The foundational Los Angeles punk band X has suddenly reunited to release “Alphabetland,” its first new album in 35 years after decades of solo projects and partial regroupings. It fully reclaims the sound it had in 1977, with a rowdy punkabilly rhythm section carrying the voices of John Doe and Exene Cervenka, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in collision. “Free” is a slamming rumba-rocker with slicing, twanging guitar leads from Billy Zoom, as Doe and Cervenka warn, “My words are fire, my fist is raised.” PARELES
Mike Campbell, ‘Lockdown’
“Ain’t nobody else around/I’m in a lockdown,” Mike Campbell — formerly and obviously from Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers band — moans in “Lockdown.” Luckily he’s in a lavishly equipped recording studio where he can be a one-man band — socking out drumbeats, stacking up guitar parts, recording low-res video of the whole process — to build this wry, pithy, Rolling Stones-style stomp, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” going stir crazy. PARELES
Fivio Foreign, ‘Drive By’
Of all the hits emerging from Brooklyn’s drill scene, the most unhinged has been Fivio Foreign’s “Big Drip,” a chaotic slapfest of exclamations and yelps. On the opening track from his debut EP, “800 BC,” Fivio tries a slightly more sober approach. “Drive By” never bubbles over — the menace is measured, pointed, ice-cold. CARAMANICA
nothing,nowhere., ‘Death’
Scabrous, immensely satisfying emotional expurgation from Joe Mulherin (who records as nothing,nowhere.) that deploys early Beastie Boys drums and Rage Against the Machine bark-rapping in service of a rap-rock revival bathed in righteousness. CARAMANICA
GRID, ‘Nythynge’
If you’ve heard the doom-jazz of Harriet Tubman or the sludge metal of Harvey Milk, maybe you think you’re ready for GRID, a trio of young, experimental improvisers who make music as if kneading waves of acid. Nominally, Matt Nelson plays the saxophone in this group, Tim Dahl handles the bass and Nick Podgurski is on drums, but in practice what you hear is a heaving, thundering squall, with distortions of differing frequency and depth rising and combining. More than in other bands with a similar method, the drummer falls right into the flow: Far from serving as a steady shoreline against which those waves can crash, Podgurski can roll and fold along with them, protean and unsettled as ever. RUSSONELLO
Source: Music - nytimes.com
