Aurelia Butler

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    6 (Genre-Smashing) New Songs You Should Hear Now

    Hit play on Sleep Token, Cortisa Star, Bon Iver and more.Sleep TokenAndy FordDear listeners,This is Joe Coscarelli, a music reporter at The New York Times and Lindsay’s colleague on the Culture desk, filling in for this Amplifier. Luckily, I’ve had playlists on my mind recently, because I had the pleasure of hosting a workshop called “How to Make the Perfect Playlist” at The Times’s annual Take Our Kids to Work Day celebration last week.As a group, we talked about the importance of mood, flow, genre and discovery when it comes to making a good mix, but I (mostly!) followed the kids’ lead when it came to actually choosing what was on our perfect, themed playlists. (You can check out the results of our two sessions here and here; they’re pleasantly deranged.) The truth is, despite having spent a decade in this music-intensive job and the previous decade as an obsessive fan and collector, I’m not super into making a bunch of playlists to suit my every vibe or situational need.Instead, I tend to just keep a quarterly depository of all the songs I find myself returning to throughout a given season, so I can easily time-travel back to any chunk of my recent life and have the relevant and transporting — if disjointed — soundtrack all in one place.Now that the weather is finally turning for good in New York (… right?), I have a new one going for spring that trends loosely toward a spirit of renewal and release. Here are some new songs that are original, addictive and hopeful enough to fit.xoxo,JoeListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Liked ‘Havoc’? Here are Five Movies to Stream Next

    Gareth Evan’s action film starring Tom Hardy delivers a fire hose of action. If you want the punches to keep coming, we recommend these five movies.The new action extravaganza “Havoc” debuted on Netflix over the weekend with a bang — or, more accurately, nonstop bangs, a flurry of gunfire, spurting blood and breaking bones. It’s the latest effort from the writer and director Gareth Evans, who has established himself as a master action stylist in only a handful of features and shorts (and the first series of the British television show “Gangs of London”). If you’ve watched “Havoc” and are up for more — more of Evans’s distinctive aesthetic, more breathless action, more police corruption, or more of its star — here are a few suggestions.‘The Raid: Redemption’ (2012)Stream it on Netflix; rent or buy it on major platforms.Evans first came to international prominence with this fast, furious action epic, made in Indonesia and spotlighting the talents of its star, Iko Uwais, who also served (along with his co-star Yayan Ruhian) as the choreographer for the stunning fight scenes. The narrative is lean and mean, focusing on an elite team of paramilitary police — including the rookie officer Rama (Uwais) — who mount an ambitious raid on a crime-infested apartment block. Their target is the kingpin Tama Riyadi (Ray Sahetapy), but he’s populated the building with an assortment of underlings, henchmen and small-time crooks that stand between him and these would-be invaders.This simple setup echoes the structure of countless video games, where the heroes must take out level after level of various middlemen before coming face to face with the “final boss.” Approaching the “Raid” films like video games is wise, particularly in understanding how the bruised and beaten Rama manages to take a licking and keep on ticking. The Welsh-born Evans met the martial artist Uwais while working on a documentary about pencak silat, an Indonesian form of fighting that combines multiple styles (kicking, punching, grappling, throwing and makeshift weapons) into a ferocious, all-or-nothing assault. Evans ingeniously incorporates that spirit into his filmmaking, coming up with an electrifying mixture of cop yarn, kung fu movie and U.F.C. match.‘The Raid 2: Berandal’ (2014)Stream it on the Roku Channel; rent or buy it on major platforms.Gareth Evans narrates a sequence from his film.Akhirwan Nurhaidir and Gumilar Triyoga/Sony Pictures ClassicsWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Boston Pops’ Keith Lockhart Has the Ear of the Red Sox and Classical Fans

    It’s hard to fathom what the Boston Pops gets itself into with its annual Holiday Pops marathon, which takes up most of December at Symphony Hall. Last year, this orchestra played essentially the same program, with a few tweaks for family shows, 42 times in a bit less than three weeks. Santa Claus attended every concert.Boston audiences have come to expect that certain items will appear on the bill: Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride,” for example, and a dramatic reading of Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” The best of them, at least for wit, is David Chase’s monstrously inventive arrangement of “The 12 Days of Christmas,” which quotes Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “Oklahoma!” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Sung with gusto, usually by the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, it surprises every time you hear it.Lockhart conducts nearly all the beloved Holiday Pops concerts throughout December.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesThen again, the whole Holiday Pops enterprise is something of a surprise. In the performances last December, the musicians of the Pops — essentially the Boston Symphony Orchestra without most of its principals — never seemed to look bored, and some had enough ho, ho, ho in them to wear a seasonal hat or even dance onstage. Musical standards remained admirably high.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Resurrection of Rilo Kiley

    When the Rilo Kiley singer and guitarist Blake Sennett wrote them 25 years ago, he concurred with the lyrics of “Pictures of Success,” a song about longing to arrive at a destination despite, or because of, the inability to fully imagine it.“I’m ready to go / Ready to go / Ready to go,” he howls on the track’s refrain, harmonizing with the song’s co-writer and the band’s lead singer, Jenny Lewis, over a bed of chiming guitars.But the words hit him differently now.“I’m not as ready to go as I was then,” joked Sennet, 51, on a recent video call from Los Angeles with his bandmates: Lewis, 49; the drummer Jason Boesel, 47; and the bassist Pierre “Duke” de Reeder, 52.“You already went,” Boesel quipped.“We should license that song to, like, Cialis, or something,” Lewis suggested. “Ready to go!”Life comes at you fast. Since the release of the first Rilo Kiley EP in 1999, the band has survived affiliation with Hollywood, straddled mid-aughts indie exuberance with its third album, “More Adventurous” (2004), graduated to mainstream popularity with a follow-up, “Under the Blacklight” (2007), split up under tense circumstances and — after the marriages, children and self-reflection of early middle-age — found its way back together again.Rilo Kiley, from left: Pierre “Duke” de Reeder (lying down), Jenny Lewis, Blake Sennett (seated) and Jason Boesel (standing in foreground).Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How Blondshell Became an Alt-Rock Supernova

    With songs about addiction and sobriety, praise kink, friend breakups, familial strife, body dysmorphia and, as she put it, “choosing to be in relationships with bad dudes,” Sabrina Teitelbaum has quickly earned a reputation for putting it all out there. But for a while, the singer and songwriter who records as Blondshell kept her career ambitions under wraps.A born-and-raised New Yorker, Teitelbaum, 28, spent her high school years stomping around downtown Manhattan, singing original songs at open mic nights under a slew of aliases. Her musical life was “kind of private,” she said, waxing nostalgic during a walk along the High Line on a brisk but sunny March afternoon. “I didn’t really talk to people in my family about it. I didn’t talk to my friends about it.”In town from her current home in Los Angeles, and braced for the elements in a zipped black anorak and Saint Laurent shades, Teitelbaum flew under the radar amid throngs of tourists in Chelsea. Her era of performing anonymously, however, at venues like Pianos and the erstwhile incubator Sidewalk Cafe, is over.In 2022, her first single as Blondshell generated buzz that hearkened back to an earlier, blog-fueled era of indie-rock, and her subsequent self-titled debut earned fans and spots on many critics’ 2023 year-end lists for its grungy rock and frank, self-implicating lyricism. Now, on the cusp of releasing her second album, “If You Asked for a Picture,” on Friday, Teitelbaum is working out just how much more of herself to reveal to her growing audience.“If You Asked for a Picture,” out May 2, builds on the themes Teitelbaum explored on her self-titled debut.Ariel Fisher for The New York Times“All the things I was saying in the songs were things that I didn’t feel comfortable saying to people in conversation,” she said. “And I think that’s kind of still the case.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    For His Met Opera Debut, a Director Takes On ‘Salome’

    The director Claus Guth, wearing a scarf and coat, was pacing the frigid auditorium of the Metropolitan Opera during a recent rehearsal of Strauss’s “Salome,” going over lighting and visual cues. It was only a few days before opening night, and he was optimistic.“New York can carry you on an enormous, beautiful energy,” he said. “It’s an adrenaline — not a stressful feeling, but a sensation of being alive.”Guth, 61, who was born in Germany and has spent most of his career in Europe, has won acclaim for his experimental, exacting approach to operas new and old. Now, he is bringing those sensibilities to his Met debut, directing a new production of “Salome” that opens on Tuesday.Elza van den Heever, in black, and Peter Mattei in “Salome,” an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s decadent play in which the title character demands the head of John the Baptist.Scott Rossi for The New York TimesInspired partly by Stanley Kubrick’s film “Eyes Wide Shut,” Guth has infused the opera, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s decadent retelling of the biblical story, with elements of a psychological thriller. Menacing figures walk around in ram masks on a black-and-white stage. A naked woman appears and disappears. A girl strokes a doll’s hair before pulling out its arms and hitting it violently against the ground.Guth said he wanted to highlight the suffocating rules of the Victorian society portrayed in Wilde’s play. He focuses on telling the back story of Salome, the 16-year-old princess and stepdaughter of King Herod, portraying her as a victim of abuse and trauma who becomes obsessed with John the Baptist, eventually demanding his head.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Yunchan Lim Plays Bach’s ‘Goldberg’ Variations at Carnegie Hall

    The 21-year-old pianist turned the great set of variations into the story of a young man’s maturation from innocence to experience.The gentle Aria at the start of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations can be inward looking, aching with loneliness. But in the pianist Yunchan Lim’s hands, on Friday at Carnegie Hall, the music sounded brisk and bright. In its early going, Lim’s rendition of the “Goldbergs” was studious and polite, for an effect that was a little like a gifted child giving a recital.Just 21 and boyish, Lim even looked the part on Friday, in white tie and tails — throwback attire for today’s young pianists — as if playing dress-up in his father’s tux.When he announced that he would be touring with the “Goldbergs,” I thought it might be a kind of dress-up, too. While the work, which consists of the Aria and 30 variations on its bass line, has moments of extroverted virtuosity, mostly it requires preternatural reserve and concentration over some 75 minutes.It’s not usually the province of rising dynamos like Lim, who soared to fame after winning the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2022 with a barnburner Rachmaninoff concerto. But as he has shown again and again, while he has the technique to offer speed and power, his true gift is for restrained poetry.At first, that poetry felt hard to come by on Friday. During repeats of sections in the early variations, the ornamentation had a look-what-I-did showiness rather than deepening the musical line. The fourth variation’s crispness had a certain stiffness, and the fifth was taken at such a clip that its rush of hand-crossing notes was murky.But from then on, the fast variations were exhilaratingly precise. Subtle use of the sustaining pedal helped Lim explore the shadowier harmonies in the sixth variation. He began to use distinctions in repeated material — as, in the 10th variation, taking the first section more quietly the second time — to give a sense of thinking things over, of evolving.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Sinners,’ the Blues and Fighting for Artistic Control

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeFor the second weekend in a row, the box office was dominated by “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s horror-drama musical about the tension between the ground-level cultural revolution of the blues and the parasitic music industry, depicted here as literal vampires.For Coogler, it’s a return to original content following a long detour making extremely lucrative intellectual property films. “Sinners” reunites him with Michael B. Jordan, who plays a pair of twins, known as Smoke and Stack, whose creative, emotional and instinctual tugs lead them down deeply fraught and unclear pathways.On this week’s Popcast, hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, a conversation about the box office success of “Sinners,” and the ways in which its treatment of the music of a century ago is firmly connected to the present.Guests:Wesley Morris, a culture critic at The New York TimesReggie Ugwu, a culture reporter at The Times, who interviewed Coogler and Jordan about “Sinners”James Thomas, a software engineer at The Times, who created a blues playlist inspired by the film for the Amplifier newsletterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More