Aurelia Butler

Hear tracks by Dua Lipa, Water From Your Eyes, Ichiko Aoba and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at [email protected] and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Taylor Swift featuring Ice Spice, ‘Karma’Mutual appreciation or celebrity damage control? Taylor Swift’s apparent new boyfriend — Matty Healy, from the 1975 — mocked the Bronx rapper Ice Spice and made other offensive comments on a since-deleted podcast that may (or may not) have been ironic comedy; social media flared. Now, proclaiming admiration and good feelings all around, Ice Spice gets her moment on a remixed Swift track that predicts karmic revenge on all the singer’s antagonists and obstacles. Ice Spice seizes the opportunity in her verse, warning, “Karma never gets lazy.” JON PARELESBeyoncé featuring Kendrick Lamar, ‘America Has a Problem’Beyoncé has now handed over the opening minute of her song “America Has a Problem” to Kendrick Lamar — the Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper who has previously collaborated with her. His verses use multiple voices and registers to pick fights with corporations (Universal) and technology (artificial intelligence) while acknowledging hip-hop history by praising Jay-Z. It’s a commercial nudge to the “Renaissance” album that also deepens its sense of layered traditions and lore. Somehow the new track’s timing adds up to 4:20. PARELESDua Lipa, ‘Dance the Night’“I don’t play it safe,” Dua Lipa insists on her gleaming, disco-kissed “Dance the Night,” the first single from the soundtrack to the upcoming “Barbie” movie. But the song itself — a rehash of the trusty “Future Nostalgia” formula with a little “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” thrown in — makes the opposing argument. Though disappointingly self-serious and light on “Barbie Girl” camp, “Dance the Night” is a blandly fun summer jam that shows off Lipa’s easy confidence: “Ooh my outfit’s so tight,” she sings, “you can see my heartbeat tonight.” LINDSAY ZOLADZWater From Your Eyes, ‘Everyone’s Crushed’The title track from the Brooklyn art-rock duo Water From Your Eyes’ excellent new album “Everyone’s Crushed” is a kind of lyrical Rubik’s Cube, finding Rachel Brown twisting and rearranging a few deadpan phrases until they click into new meanings. “I’m with everyone I love, and everything hurts,” Brown declares, prompting Nate Amos to blurt out a caustic, angular guitar riff. The song makes space for both a collective feeling of generalized malaise and also the relief of sharing it with others: “I’m with everyone I hurt,” Brown concludes, “and everything’s love.” ZOLADZSquid, ‘The Blades’Squid is one of the British bands that’s reconfiguring prog-rock in the wake of post-punk, mingling musicianly technique and caustic attitude. In “The Blades,” Squid sets up a tense 7/4 beat and a gnarled counterpoint of guitars, drums and horns, as Ollie Judge sings, insinuating and eventually yelping, about surveillance and callousness. The song peaks with a dire vision of crowds that look like blades of grass, “begging to be trimmed,” then tapers down to a quietly alienated coda. PARELESJeff Rosenstock, ‘Liked U Better’The Long Island punk lifer Jeff Rosenstock’s knack for writing shout-along choruses is on full display in “Liked U Better,” a one-off single that’s as blistering as it is catchy. Racing thoughts and a palpitating heartbeat set the song’s antic tempo, before he shrugs them all off in a cathartic refrain: “I liked you better when you weren’t on my mind.” ZOLADZJess Williamson, ‘Time Ain’t Accidental’A dinky drum-machine beat from a cellphone app ticks behind “Time Ain’t Accidental,” a song about a brand-new romance with a longtime friend from a rarely visited town. Jess Williamson, born in Texas but well-traveled, has lately collaborated with Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee) as the countryish indie-rock band Plains; this will be the title song of her next solo album. “I have a life somewhere real far away,” she sings, and later, with guitar and banjo joining her, “Look me in the eyes, I know it’s experimental.” But the song revels in staying smitten. PARELESBlk Odyssy featuring Kirby, ‘You Gotta Man’The situation is clear — “You gotta man, I gotta girlfriend” — but the music is blurry and dazed, as the R&B songwriters Blk Odyssy, from Austin, and Kirby, from Memphis, trade impressions and rationalizations about an infidelity that was fueled by “dopamine and Hennessy.” Above a slow, woozy beat, amid a welter of echoey voices and electric sitar, Blk Odyssy’s delivery is disbelieving and hesitant, answered by Kirby’s high whisper, both of them uncertain and then amorous; “See you next lifetime,” they vow before parting. PARELESIchiko Aoba, ‘Space Orphans’“Space Orphans” joins Ichiko Aoba’s extensive catalog of quiet, skeletal, soothing songs, often accompanied only by her acoustic guitar; they are akin to bossa novas, American folk-pop and Japanese koto melodies. A string arrangement — warmly sustained and sometimes harmonically ambiguous — opens up the track as her Japanese lyrics speak of an otherworldly romance, where “We go to sleep each night/In some quiet place, that’s neither land nor sea.” In an initiative led by Brian Eno called EarthPercent, the Earth is credited as a co-writer and gets royalties for environmental programs. PARELESAnjimile, ‘The King’There are clear echoes of the minimalism of Philip Glass, Meredith Monk and Steve Reich in “The King.” The track progresses from a complex, wordless chorale into a keyboard-arpeggio whirlwind as Anjimile sings biblical allusions and sensible advice: “What don’t kill you almost killed you,” he observes. PARELES More

The musician, who died on Wednesday at 83, was a radical interpreter of other artists’ material. Listen here.Charlie Gates for The New York TimesDear listeners,As the great Tina Turner told it in the wrenching 2021 documentary “Tina,” when she began to envision a solo career finally liberated from her abusive ex-husband, Ike, in the early ’80s, she told her new manager, Roger Davies, “My dream is to be the first Black rock ’n’ roll singer to pack places like the Stones.”Turner — who died on Wednesday at 83 — didn’t need to become a rock singer; she’d been one of the most raucous around since the early 1960s. (And Ike’s 1951 single “Rocket 88” is considered by some to be the first ever rock song.) As rock ’n’ roll entered its fourth decade, though, this genre that owed its existence to unsung Black pioneers was still dominated, at the top and too often in the public imagination, by white men. One of whom, legend has it, Tina herself had taught to dance.By the mid-1980s, Turner’s dream became a reality. Buoyed by the enormous success of her 1984 album “Private Dancer,” she was then headlining those very arenas that the Stones played, all over the world. She bested them (and every other musician on the planet) during her triumphant 1988 concert in Rio de Janeiro, which set a Guinness World Record for the largest attendance for a ticketed concert — more than 180,000 people screaming her name.But Turner was a rock star long before that, as you can hear on her many blistering and visionary interpretations of rock hits from the 1960s and ’70s. Turner wrote some of her own songs (like the great, autobiographical 1973 hit “Nutbush City Limits”), but she was also a radical interpreter of other people’s material — an electrifying vocalist who could torch a familiar song with fire and then weld it into something entirely new.The most famous example, of course, is her and Ike’s reimagining — “cover” almost seems like too reverent a word — of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s mid-tempo Southern rocker “Proud Mary.” The 1970 recording begins with Turner’s declaration that, despite what audiences might want from them, “we never ever do nothin’ nice and easy.” She then issues a warning, as if that galloping tempo change in the middle of the song would have been too shocking without one: “We’re gonna take the beginning of this song and do it easy, but then we’re gonna do the finish rough. That’s the way we do ‘Proud Mary.’”That was also the spirit behind her versions of “Help!,” “Come Together” and “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” — to name just a few of the Beatles songs she positively Tina-fied. Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones got the treatment, too, and so did “Louie Louie,” with a sultry, little-known rendition which — I’m not even making this up — louielouie.net (“The blog for all things Louie Louie”) called “one of the essential Louie Louie recordings!” with some all-caps emphasis. Amen to that.Tina Turner was a seismic, once-in-a-lifetime musical force, but I don’t need to tell you that; I’ll let this playlist do the talking. And I’ll let my colleague Wesley Morris, who wrote an appraisal worthy of the queen, do some of it too: “They’re saying she was 83? Nobody’s buying that. The ingredients made her seem immortal. For seven decades of making music, it all sizzled in her. That energy. It shot from her — from her feet, thighs, hands, arms, shoulders, out of her hair, out of her mouth.”Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. “Come Together”Released as a single in December 1969, just two months after the Beatles’ own version, this soulful take on the leadoff track from “Abbey Road” shows off the raspy intensity and melodic control of Turner’s voice. (Listen on YouTube)2. “Honky Tonk Women”In late 1969, Ike and Tina toured with the Rolling Stones — an opening gig forever immortalized in an unforgettable scene in the documentary “Gimme Shelter,” when Turner unleashes a transcendent “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” Around the time of the tour, the duo started playing their own revamped “Honky Tonk Women,” in which Tina flips the titular character from object to subject. Especially in Stones songs about sexual conquests, Mick Jagger wasn’t exactly known for writing nuanced female characters (“Some Girls,” ahem), but here, brilliantly, Tina turns mildly chauvinistic source material into an impassioned demand for equal partnership: “I’m a honky tonk woman,” she sings, hungrily. “Gimme, gimme, gimme a honky tonk man.” (Listen on YouTube)3. “Whole Lotta Love”This is a wild one. In 1975, Turner released “The Acid Queen,” technically the second and final solo album she recorded while still married to Ike; its title was inspired by her character in the rock opera “Tommy.” On this funky, disco-inflected standout, she slows down a Led Zeppelin heater to an unhurried tempo that makes the song unfurl like a slow, slinky seduction. (Listen on YouTube)4. “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window”Lennon and McCartney’s lighthearted ode to the petty larceny of Apple Scruffs transforms, in Turner’s telling, into something more urgent, and adult: “He said he’d always been a hustler, said he worked about 15 hours a day,” she sings, her gravelly holler rivaling even Joe Cocker’s. (Listen on YouTube)5. “Louie Louie”I’ve already told you: “one of the essential Louie Louie recordings!” (Listen on YouTube)6. “Let It Be”On this closing number from Ike and Tina’s 1970 album “Working Together,” Tina turns Lennon and McCartney’s universal prayer into something more personal (“When I find myself in times of trouble, evil thoughts they come to me, taking away my wisdom”) and political (“When prejudiced people finally agree, open their eyes and they will see”). (Listen on YouTube)7. “Help!”Recorded for her triumphant hit album “Private Dancer,” Turner’s “Help!” teases the pathos out of a jaunty Beatles tune by reimagining it as a gut-wrenching, showstopping ballad that became a staple of her live shows. Tina’s maturity and well-known history bring an added depth to certain lines: “When I was younger, so much younger than today,” she sings with palpable weariness, “I never needed anybody’s help in any way.” Now, she’s ready to testify — and, so vulnerably, to ask for the help she’s always needed. (Listen on YouTube)8. “Proud Mary”Performing a song someone else wrote and recorded this transformatively can become its own form of authorship. This is one of the clearer examples in pop music history: John Fogerty wrote “Proud Mary” but Turner embodied it, rolling, rolling, rolling like that accelerating riverboat, grabbing the wheel and gunning straight for rock ’n’ roll ecstasy. (Listen on YouTube)Big wheel keep on turning,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Tina Turner’s Greatest Rock Covers” track listTrack 1: “Come Together”Track 2: “Honky Tonk Women”Track 3: “Whole Lotta Love”Track 4: “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window”Track 5: “Louie Louie”Track 6: “Let It Be”Track 7: “Help!”Track 8: “Proud Mary”Bonus tracksLet me repeat: Wesley Morris on Tina Turner!Also, in 2019, my colleague Amanda Hess interviewed Turner at her Swiss chateau for this absolutely delightful profile. I will forever be thinking about Turner’s deep love of Coldplay and her admirable indifference toward the Chainsmokers.If you’re looking for the hits, Ben Sisario did a great job putting together this playlist of Turner’s 11 essential songs.And if you’re looking for new music, as ever, our Friday Playlist has you covered. This week features songs from Dua Lipa, Jess Williamson, and my favorite album out this week, “Everyone’s Crushed” by the Brooklyn art-rock band Water From Your Eyes. More

Claire Chase’s “Density 2036,” an undertaking to commission a new flute repertoire, reached its 10th installment with a multi-concert retrospective.The flutist Claire Chase is a community builder. You can see this in “Density 2036,” her 24-year project to commission a new repertoire for her instrument. And you can sense a communal spirit when she offers gratitude to audiences who show up to several gigs in a row.This week, Chase voiced her appreciation to those who had attended multiple concerts in her recent 10th-anniversary “Density” retrospective at the Kitchen’s temporary location, in the Westbeth complex, and Zankel Hall.“It’s a lot of flute,” she acknowledged on Wednesday at the Kitchen. (Listeners beyond New York can experience something similar, with most of “Density” available to hear in recordings gathered on Chase’s Bandcamp profile.)True. But across two programs that night, Chase offered a generous spread of composers and their respective approaches to the flute family. As a result, the music never felt staid. You could enjoy the breathy qualities of pieces by Matana Roberts and Ann Cleare, as well as the harder-grooving material of works by Wang Lu and Craig Taborn.

Density 2036: Part VIII (2021) by Claire ChaseEach installment of “Density” has a running time of about an hour. Some programs feature multiple pieces; some focus on just one. When the latter happens, there is an added sense of risk-taking, for listeners as well as for Chase. If a composition doesn’t hit strongly — well, that’s the whole hour.That was my experience on Thursday night, when Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Ubique” premiered at Zankel. This work, like many in “Density” more than a mere flute solo, drew on the instrumental talents of Chase, the pianist Cory Smythe and the cellists Katinka Kleijn and Seth Parker Woods. (As was often the case during the retrospective, Levy Lorenzo steered the use of electronic sounds, and Nicholas Houfek provided subtle lighting design.)At Zankel Hall, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Ubique” featured, from left, the cellist Katinka Kleijn, the pianist Cory Smythe, Chase and the cellist Seth Parker Woods.Jennifer TaylorIn the early going of “Ubique,” Thorvaldsdottir writes ear-catching passages: flurries of rhythmically dynamic piano-and-flute passages, and some winning two-cello drones. But as these elements were reprised in the second half, it sounded like the material was being stretched, without much new added to the bargain.At the other end of the spectrum, Chase’s willingness to give a composers an entire hour also paid dramatically satisfying dividends in the premiere of the improvising pianist and composer Craig Taborn’s “Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms” at the Kitchen. It was one of the best shows I’ve experienced this season.Taborn is storied in contemporary jazz, with pianism of delicacy, intricacy and power. His 2011 debut solo recording for ECM, “Avenging Angel,” is among the best piano works of this century, and in recent compositions for his Junk Magic ensemble, he has also been edging into chamber-like arrangements.So, Chase was wise to ask Taborn for a program-length “Density” piece. “Griefs” placed him in a quartet alongside Chase, the clarinetist Joshua Rubin and the percussionist Susie Ibarra. (Ibarra, also a key presence on jazz stages, has also recently performed the works of Pauline Oliveros with Chase.)“Griefs” begins with chiming synth figures on a digital loop, plus some thick, doleful acoustic piano harmonies; as is his regular practice, Taborn manipulated a small electronic manual that rested atop his piano. After Rubin entered on bass clarinet, Taborn’s articulation of the opening material accelerated, though the somber mood remained intact.It took five minutes for Chase to enter on a flute — but once she did, Taborn’s piece moved from its griefs to its charms. Across the hour, Chase was given space to partner with every other player in duos, all of which took advantage of Taborn’s invitations to improvise. With Rubin, she steered unison lines that gradually branched into rhythmically independent cries; the sneaky effect had the quality of Taborn’s own pianism. With Ibarra, she reveled in funk-laced passages. And with Taborn, she collaborated on long-lined melodies and freer sounding improvisations.Taborn himself took a few dramatic solos of his own, which were rambunctious and lyrical in equal measure. But he was also silent for significant stretches, listening closely to the other musical partnerships he’d set in motion. There was always something to savor.After the concert, I asked Taborn whether I’d missed out on any other similar chamber music of his. He mentioned some two-piano pieces that he has developed with Smythe — the pianist in the Thorvaldsdottir premiere — but said that “Griefs” was the first such piece of his at that scale. (And on June 24 at National Sawdust, Taborn will premiere the first part of a work in progress, for string quartet and his own piano.)

Craig Taborn and Cory Smythe – X’s and Y’s | International Contemporary Ensemble from Digitice on Vimeo.When Chase gets around to recording and releasing this part of “Density,”, Taborn’s work deserves to be a big event in multiple music circles. For now, the premiere is emblematic of the kind of concert that Chase knows how to ask for, before any other classical music presenter. It’s the kind of piece that can only be commissioned by a soloist who is a close listener to the broad community of living American composers. And that’s a trait for which audiences are rightly grateful. More

The jazz composer wrote a new concerto for the New York Philharmonic’s principal trombonist, Joseph Alessi, but died before its U.S. premiere.There are not exactly a wealth of great concertos written for the trombone, that largely unheralded stalwart of the brass section. (Insert sad trombone sound here.) If anyone is going to change this state of affairs, it’s Joseph Alessi, the principal trombone of the New York Philharmonic. He’s an idol of legions of brass players for his rich tone, exemplary phrasing and virtuosic precision.In 1992, Alessi premiered Christopher Rouse’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Trombone Concerto. Almost three decades later, Alessi asked the widely loved jazz keyboardist and composer Chick Corea, who was enmeshed with classical music throughout his life, to create a trombone concerto. That work received its U.S. premiere at the Philharmonic on Thursday evening, performed by Alessi under the baton of Marin Alsop, another artist who easily code switches between jazz and classical idioms.The premiere was originally scheduled for the orchestra’s 2020-21 season. But with the onset of the pandemic, those plans were abandoned. Corea died of cancer in February 2021, and the concerto stands as his last finished work. (A recording, with Alessi as soloist, is scheduled for release this November on the Parma record label.)The four-movement work features a huge battery of percussion instruments — including gongs, marimba, xylophone and African cowbells — that lend a new palette of shimmering colors to the orchestra. And it shows off the marvel of Alessi’s technique and musicianship: in the first movement’s bluesy slides, in the lyrical tenderness of a second-movement waltz, and in devilish 16th-note runs in “Hysteria,” the third movement, which Corea wrote as pandemic lockdowns were just beginning. A final tango draws together the soloist and orchestra, before allowing Alessi to finish triumphantly on a series of high F sharps, venturing into trumpet territory.Corea had intended to play the prominent piano part in early performances. Instead, John Dickson, who orchestrated the concerto, is performing it with the Philharmonic. As an encore, Alessi introduced Dickson and they played a brief homage to Corea written by Dickson. It was a heartfelt adieu to their mutual friend and collaborator.The program opened with Samuel Barber’s Symphony No. 1. Written when Barber was just 25, it’s a mature wonder of a work, woefully under-programmed. (The last time the Philharmonic played it was during the Clinton administration.) Among its pleasures are declarative brass, crisp percussion, richly colored string writing and an exquisitely lyrical third movement.The New York Philharmonic musicians have finally relaxed into trusting the acoustics in David Geffen Hall. Gone is their urge to push hard to be heard — a necessity before the renovation. Instead, they now luxuriate in the chance to sculpt sound in space.Alsop celebrated that ability in 12 selected movements from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” Suites Nos. 1, 2 and 3, beginning with the fiery opening blasts of “The Montagues and the Capulets” and ending with the tear-stained “Death of Juliet.” Alsop drew out all the sharp accents and quick turns in “The Death of Tybalt,” and made the most of the silvery charm of the “Aubade.”Her vivid sense of color and rhythmic clarity framed Prokofiev’s ballet music as an exciting complement to the Barber Symphony, written the same year as some of the Prokofiev selections. This kind of creative juxtaposition, in which one piece illuminates another, is the essence of good concert programming.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More