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      Eminem Loses the Magic, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Clairo, Nathy Peluso, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds 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.Eminem, ‘Houdini’Eminem attempts to recapture past glories on his exhausting new song “Houdini,” the first single from his upcoming 12th album, “The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce).” Atop a garish, carnivalesque beat that interpolates a sample of the Steve Miller Band’s “Abracadabra,” the M.C.’s crass alter ego Slim Shady surveys the current cultural moment and strings together some stiltedly rapped jokes, desperate to offend at every turn. Oldest trick in the book. LINDSAY ZOLADZTwenty One Pilots, ‘Navigating’“Clancy,” the new album by the two-man band Twenty One Pilots, is the fourth installment in a series of concept albums. But “Navigating” doesn’t necessarily need a back story. It’s a psychological crisis, as Tyler Joseph sings about feeling dazed and disassociated, unable to speak but desperate for connection: “Pardon my delay — I’m navigating my head” is his closest explanation. The track is a buzzing, galloping, pumping merger of punk-pop and electro, opening with an arena-sized “Hey-oh” chant and trying to get through the crisis on sheer momentum. JON PARELESGirl Scout, ‘I Just Needed You to Know’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 End of a Maestro’s Era Approaches at the Philharmonic

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      Jaap van Zweden returned to the New York Philharmonic to lead some of his final programs as the orchestra’s music director.When the conductor Jaap van Zweden was hired for his short-lived tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, he was seen as someone who could bring some punch to heavyweight symphonies by Beethoven and Mahler.As if to hold on to that idea, Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony will be performed at van Zweden’s farewell next week. But when I look back on his six seasons with the Philharmonic, the shortest stay for a maestro since that of Pierre Boulez in the 1970s, what I’ll remember most, and most fondly, is not any 19th-century warhorse but Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.”Performed last season, van Zweden’s “Passion” was one of the great surprises of his time in New York. Gone was his tendency to bulldoze and flatten a score; instead, he gave shape to nearly three hours of music, sensitively making room for reflection amid drama in an interpretation that was exquisitely clear and genuinely moving.That night felt like a glimpse of what van Zweden’s tenure might have looked like if he had been able to truly settle in — if his second season with the Philharmonic hadn’t been cut short by the pandemic; if the orchestra hadn’t returned with a nomadic season as its hall was being renovated; if, when he got back inside David Geffen Hall, he didn’t have just two years left.Unfortunately, van Zweden’s time with the Philharmonic will probably be remembered less for his conducting than for those disruptions and milestones, as well as for the overshadowing coup of the starry, charismatic Gustavo Dudamel being poached from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to succeed him.That move looked like a pendulum-swinging reaction to van Zweden’s personality as a reserved technician, which hasn’t paid off: The orchestra sounds more or less the same as when he started, evidence of a relationship that never deepened. It can be difficult to explain why musicians and conductors aren’t compatible; a maestro might thrive with one group and flop with another. For whatever reason, the Philharmonic never developed a clear identity as his ensemble.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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      Going Behind the Scenes of ‘Popcast (Deluxe)’

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      The weekly culture roundup show, hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, celebrates its first anniversary on May 31.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.When you walk into the “Popcast (Deluxe)” recording studio on the second floor of the New York Times office in Manhattan, the first thing you notice is two colorful chairs in the center of the room with black microphones perched on the seat backs.“We were thinking ‘elevated basement,’” said Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The New York Times and a host of the show, a weekly culture review on YouTube. “It’s a little ‘Wayne’s World.’”Mr. Caramanica and his co-host, the Times pop music reporter Joe Coscarelli, picked out the furniture for their studio at Horseman Antiques on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. The chairs are among many quirky personal touches they’ve added to the space — books, photography from their work at The Times, lots of junk food — that, like the show, blend a highbrow and lowbrow aesthetic.Both Mr. Caramanica and Mr. Coscarelli were treading new ground when they began hosting “Popcast (Deluxe),” The Times’s first video podcast, together one year ago. The show is a spinoff of “Popcast,” a weekly pop music podcast that Mr. Caramanica has hosted since 2016. For the “deluxe” version with a broader view of pop culture, the idea was to take something that was already working — the easy and playful rapport between Mr. Caramanica and Mr. Coscarelli, a frequent “Popcast” guest — and adapt it for YouTube, a video platform that podcasts were increasingly moving into.“We want to go where smart, curious, pop-culture-interested people are living,” Mr. Coscarelli said. “YouTube was the obvious next place.”The pair records on Mondays and releases segments of the conversation throughout the week on YouTube, as well as a full audio episode on Wednesdays. For the week of May 13, Mr. Caramanica and Mr. Coscarelli had decided to cover the feud between the hip-hop giants and rivals Drake and Kendrick Lamar, as well as Zendaya’s star turn in the tennis film “Challengers,” and they allowed a Times Insider reporter to observe.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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      How A.I. Has Changed Music, and What’s Coming Next

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicWhether you know it or not, you’ve likely encountered A.I. — artificial intelligence — in your music consumption over the past year. Maybe it was Ghostwriter releasing a song with a fake “Drake” and “the Weeknd” in collaboration that took over the internet last year. Or maybe it was Drake himself rapping as “Tupac” and “Snoop Dogg” during the recent Kendrick Lamar beef. Or maybe it was a new track by the country superstar Randy Travis, who suffered a stroke in 2013, and hasn’t sung a song since.In these ways and more, A.I. has become the dominant disrupter to music creation and distribution. And those use cases are merely the tip of the iceberg — A.I. is being used in playlisting, demo recording, and in the case of two hyped startups, Suno and Udio, consumer-level music-making.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the ways in which A.I. has been deployed by musicians, the legal and philosophical questions it generates, and the sub rosa ways A.I. companies hope to weave their products into the music production and consumption of the future.Guests:Rachel Metz, who covers A.I. for BloombergKristin Robinson, who covers the music business for BillboardConnect 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. More

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      John Lennon’s Guitar From ‘Help!’ Is Sold for $2.9 Million at Auction

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      After appearing in multiple albums by the Beatles, the instrument was forgotten for more than 50 years before it turned up in the attic of a British countryside home.A recently discovered guitar that John Lennon used to record multiple Beatles songs in the 1960s before it went missing for 50 years has sold at auction for $2.9 million, becoming one of the most valuable pieces of memorabilia from the band.The 12-string acoustic guitar, called the Hootenanny, was believed to be lost after Mr. Lennon and his bandmate George Harrison used it to record the 1965 Beatles albums “Rubber Soul” and “Help!” and the soundtrack to the band’s film of the same name, said Julien’s Auctions, the Los Angeles-based auction house that handled the sale on Wednesday.Later that year, Mr. Lennon gifted the 1964 guitar, made by the German instrument manufacturer Framus, to Gordon Waller, a member of the British pop duo Peter & Gordon. Mr. Waller passed it on to one of his road managers, who took the guitar to his home in the rural British countryside and tossed it in the attic, the auction house said.More than 50 years later, a man in Britain discovered the guitar in his parents’ attic as they were moving out of the house, Darren Julien, a co-founder of Julien Auctions, said in a video. After they found it — along with its original guitar case — they alerted the auction house in March, Mr. Julien said.“The son told us that he had always heard his dad talk about this guitar, but he’d believed that it was lost,” said Martin Nolan, another co-founder of Julien’s Auctions, in the video.The auction house consulted with Andy Babiuk, a Beatles expert who has authenticated the band’s memorabilia in the past, to verify the guitar. After comparing the instrument’s wood grain and the wear patterns to those in archival images, Mr. Babiuk determined that the guitar was the one played by Mr. Lennon, the auction house said.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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      Sarah McLachlan Is Resurfacing

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      Sarah McLachlan was just 30 hours from beginning her first full-band tour in a decade, and she could not sing.She was in the final heave of preparation for eight weeks of shows stretching through late November that commemorate “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy,” the sophisticated 1993 album that turned her into an avatar for the sensitive, mysterious singer-songwriters of ’90s radio. But three days into a string of seven-hour rehearsals, her voice collapsed, the high notes so long her hallmark dissolving into a pitchy wheeze.So onstage in a decommissioned Vancouver hockey arena, a day before a sold-out benefit for her three nonprofit music schools, McLachlan only mouthed along to her songs, shaking her head but smiling whenever she reached for a note and missed.“It only goes away when I project, push out,” she said backstage in a near-whisper following the first of the day’s mostly mute run-throughs. She slipped a badge that read “Vocal Rest” around her neck and winked. “Luckily, that’s only a third of what I do.”For the last two decades, McLachlan, 56, has contentedly receded from the spotlight and the music industry she helped reimagine with the women-led festival Lilith Fair. Since 2008, she has been a single mother to India and Taja, two daughters from her former marriage. With rippling muscles that suggest a lean triathlete, she is now a devoted surfer, hiker and skier who talks about pushing her body until it breaks. Though she writes every morning, waking up with a double espresso at the piano in her home outside Vancouver, she has focused on motherhood and the Sarah McLachlan School of Music, offering free instruction to thousands of Canadian children since 2002.A few years ago, she finished a set of songs about a pernicious breakup but reckoned the world didn’t need them; she hasn’t released an album of original material since 2014. “What do I want to talk about?” she said months earlier during a video interview from her home, swaying in a hammock chair. “I’m just another wealthy, middle-aged white woman.”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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      Popcast (Deluxe): Did Dua Lipa Flop? + Miserable Pop Music Films

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes discussion of:The imperfect rollout of Dua Lipa’s latest album, “Radical Optimism,” and how the narrative around it became poisoned before it was even releasedDua Lipa’s career of smooth and frictionless popThe current pop marketplace favoring eccentricity, humor and meme-abilityWhat it will take for Dua Lipa to break free of her cycleThe struggle of making movies about pop music, including “Back to Black,” the new biopic about Amy Winehouse and “The Idea of You,” about a divorced woman who falls for an aging boy band starSnack of the weekConnect 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. More

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      Amid Orchestral Waves, the Sound of Cultures Conversing

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      “Natural History,” performed in Cincinnati, is a collaboration between the composer Michael Gordon and the Native American ensemble Steiger Butte Drum.Eleven members of Steiger Butte Drum sat in a circle around a large elk-hide drum at the front of the stage of Cincinnati’s Music Hall last Thursday. Washes of sound from the orchestra behind them built and receded in grand waves.The group was the concerto soloist, of a kind, in “Natural History” by Michael Gordon, one of the Bang on a Can composers who infused Minimalism with rough, rebellious energy in the 1980s. A few times over the course of the 25-minute piece, Steiger Butte Drum, a traditional percussion and vocal ensemble of the Klamath Tribes of Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, broke out in a ceremonial song, the members beating the drum in fast, dramatic unison as they made a piercing, tangily pitch-bending, wordlessly wailing chant.They were joined by a full chorus, placed in the first balcony: the men on one side of the hall, the women on the other. Percussion in the upper balcony evoked woodland animals; brasses, also up there, let out joyful, squealing bits of fanfare that seemed to tumble down and join lines coming from the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra onstage — eventually rising to a powerful, churning finale, with all these sprawling forces, conducted by Teddy Abrams, going at once.Unsettled and unsettling, both celebratory and threatening, imposing and ultimately harmonious, this was the sound of a cultural conversation that is still, after centuries, in its nascent stages.Native American composers and performers are slowly gaining more visibility after having long been largely ignored by institutions associated with the Western classical tradition. Raven Chacon, a Diné composer and visual artist, won the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2022. In March, the New York Philharmonic premiered an orchestral version of the Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s “Pisachi.”And yet Native music, kaleidoscopically varied across the country and its many tribes and heritages, remains only rarely heard, and so only vaguely understood and appreciated, by non-Natives. This is hardly surprising, given the country’s more general neglect of a full, sustained reckoning with its history with — and its often stunningly cruel treatment of — Native Americans.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