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      Charli XCX’s Starry ‘Brat’ Remixes, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Victoria Monét, Samara Joy, the Linda Lindas and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Charli XCX featuring Ariana Grande, ‘Sympathy Is a Knife’Now that her “Brat” album has given Charli XCX her long-deserved mass pop audience, she has recharged it with a follow-up album of remixes: “Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat.” On the first version of “Sympathy Is a Knife,” she sang about personal insecurities and a rivalry she couldn’t help feeling, “’Cause I couldn’t even be her if I tried.” The remix has the same two-note synthesizer riff but a new lyric about the vicious precarity of 21st-century stardom: “It’s a knife when you’re finally on top/’cause magically the next step is they wanna see you fall to the bottom.” Ariana Grande, who has been through her own fame roller coaster, makes a natural ally.Obongjayar, ‘Tomorrow Man’Obongjayar, a songwriter from Nigeria who’s now based in London, connects the call-and-response and social exhortations of Fela Kuti’s 1970s Afrobeat to the samples, loops and layering of contemporary computerized African pop in “Tomorrow Man.” Over a deep, thumping beat, he denounces laziness: “If you no work you suffer,” he rasps. Meanwhile, percussion clatters around him and other sounds go whizzing by — flutes, piano, distorted guitar — like career obstacles to be batted away.Victoria Monét, ‘The Greatest’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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      Stevie Wonder Live: A Night of Love and Mischief

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      At 74, the singer and songwriter returns to arenas with a message of healing and understanding. He’s using trademark exuberance and joy to deliver it.It was a little after 9 p.m. Thursday night at Madison Square Garden, and Stevie Wonder was finally getting loose. He’d begun “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” one of his defining anthems, with a hopped-up-hootenanny version of the country standard “You Are My Sunshine.” He almost giggled — it was light work.Then, with fullness and verve, he jerked hard into his song, and the music went from 2-D to 3-D. He wasn’t denigrating the other one, so much as he had a point to make.“I. Feel. Like. This. Is. The. Beginning.”Each word arrived like a rocket whizzing past your ear — propulsive, powerful, so potent you almost tilted your head away ever so slightly to let it zip by. He was singing a love song, a declaration of emotional commitment, but when he really got going, it felt much more like a convocation. This love, we’re all in it together.Much of Wonder’s set list was drawn from the stretch from the late 1960s through the mid 1970s during which he released some of the most indelible entries in the history of American song.The New York TimesSo it went during this performance — part of a brief tour with the extremely chewy title, Sing Your Song! As We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart — which was much of the time a display of unparalleled singing, some of the time a kaffeeklatsch of feel-good utopianism, and in more places than you’d think a showcase for a very serious artist to be very silly.First, the voice: Wonder can do things with it that no popular singer in the five decades since his commercial prime has truly been able to match. It can sound like it’s falling apart while it’s in fact landing with strength and precision. With Wonder, a song is a suggestion, a framework to set up pyrotechnic runs and novel alternate melodic approaches. The song (usually) has a fixed starting and concluding point — everything else is a negotiation.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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      Gustavo Dudamel Visits New York With Promise, and a Warning

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      The superstar conductor will take over the New York Philharmonic in 2026. Is his tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic a preview?Home is a slippery concept in classical music, a global art form of constant travel and jobs that require relocating for months or years at a time.The superstar conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who will become the New York Philharmonic’s next music and artistic director in 2026, is based in Madrid with his family. You could call that home. In a recent interview with The Los Angeles Times, though, he said that he would always think of his native Venezuela as home. And, after 15 years of leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Southern California is home, too.“I am going to New York, of course,” Dudamel said, “but L.A. is home.”Comments like this are a reminder that, for now, New York has little claim on Dudamel. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is still very much his home orchestra: where he has led the premieres of some 300 pieces, founded an immense youth orchestra program and achieved celebrity status in a city of celebrities.There are, perhaps, clues to Dudamel’s New York future in his Los Angeles present, which was on exhilarating display over three evenings at Carnegie Hall this week. He led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in concerts that reflected his gift for must-hear programming and his open-minded disregard for genre, his welcome belief that at a high enough level, all music can be art.But Dudamel is not without his weaknesses. While he can be brilliant off the beaten path, he is less distinct and perceptive in the classics. In that sense, his visit to Carnegie is both a sign of promise and a warning.He has always been a bit uneven. His early Beethoven recordings, with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, hardly rise in a crowded field. Two years ago, he led the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Carnegie in a performance of Mahler’s First Symphony that lacked vision and precision.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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      It’s Touring Season: Chappell, Sabrina and Mk.gee Hit the Stage

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicGrand-sized tours are everywhere you look right now. Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan, young pop stars who’ve experienced sudden jolts of attention that reshaped their careers this year, are playing arenas and amphitheaters. In rooms slightly smaller, you can see the rising guitar hero Mk.gee, who’s become one of this year’s most unlikely breakout successes. Vampire Weekend, Cash Cobain, Bleachers and more are all on the road.On this week’s Popcast, a roundup of some of the bigger tours making their way around the country at the moment, and a discussion of what it takes, creatively, to fill up a very large room, and how some musicians demonstrate parts of their personalities onstage that their albums can’t fully capture.Guest:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterConnect 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.Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts. More

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      Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Sex Trafficking Trial Is Set for May 5

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      The music mogul, wearing tan jail clothes at a court hearing, waved and smiled at six of his children and his mother in the gallery.Sean Combs, the embattled music mogul, is scheduled to stand trial next May in New York, a federal judge said at a hearing on Thursday.Judge Arun Subramanian of Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, who was recently assigned to the case, set May 5 as the start of Mr. Combs’s trial on charges of racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution.Mr. Combs, 54, has been held in a federal detention center in Brooklyn for the past three weeks after being arrested at a New York hotel and then twice denied bail. He will remain in jail until the trial, pending another appeal that his lawyers filed this week.Mr. Combs was present at the hearing on Thursday. Wearing tan jail clothes, he walked into the courtroom waving and smiling at his family assembled in the gallery, including his mother and six of his children, and he embraced some of his lawyers.The hearing had been set as a routine scheduling matter. But it came one day after Mr. Combs’s lawyers filed a motion in which they accused government agents of leaking footage of Mr. Combs assaulting his former girlfriend Cassie to CNN. Without citing direct evidence, the lawyers theorized in court papers that the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that raided Mr. Combs’s homes in March, had been behind the leak. They said they might ask for the video to be barred as evidence at the trial.Emily A. Johnson, one of the prosecutors, commented briefly at the hearing about the defense’s accusation of leaks, saying, “The government believes the motion is baseless and it is simply a means to exclude a damning piece of evidence.” She said the government would be filing a response to the defense’s motion.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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      With a ‘Ring,’ the Dallas Symphony Becomes a Wagner Destination

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      Fabio Luisi, a seasoned “Ring” conductor, will lead Wagner’s four-opera epic over a week in concert, breaking new ground for American orchestras.Richard Wagner conceived his four-opera “Ring” as a Gesamtkunstwerk: a marriage of poetry and music, for voices and orchestra, with coordinated sets, costumes and action. It’s a huge, expensive challenge even for top opera companies, calling for powerful singers, an accomplished conductor and orchestra, and a stage director and designer who can enliven a convoluted epic of family dysfunction, greed, destruction and rebirth.How much of Wagner’s impact remains if you subtract scenery and costumes, and most of the action — with neither water nor fire, sword nor spear, celestial palace nor subterranean smithy?Those questions will be put to the test by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which is alone in the American classical music and opera scene this season by presenting a complete “Ring,” over four evenings at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center beginning on Sunday.At the podium will be Fabio Luisi, the orchestra’s music director since 2020, who led the “Ring” at the Metropolitan Opera a dozen years ago. In Dallas, he began to roll out the cycle last spring, presenting “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre”; “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung” followed earlier this month, semi-staged by Alberto Triola, who collaborated with Luisi and the Dallas symphony on “Salome” and “Eugene Onegin.”A concert staging of the “Ring,” Luisi said in a video interview from his home near Zurich, does not compromise the work.“In Wagner’s time the acting was extremely reduced,” he said. “We cannot compare the acting in the ’60s and ’70s of the 19th century with acting now. Even after the war, in Bayreuth, the stagings by Wieland Wagner were pretty much static.”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 Viral Choreographer Changing the Way Women Move

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      In February 2023, Rihanna took the field during the Super Bowl LVII halftime show for her first performance in five years. As the opening notes of “Rude Boy” played, a group of dancers in identical puffy white suits and sunglasses gathered in the middle of the stage, moving with forceful precision, gathering speed as the […] More