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      8 Upcoming Albums to Get Excited About

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      Sample songs from LPs by Waxahatchee, the Smile, Helado Negro and more.Waxahatchee’s “Tiger’s Blood” is due on March 22.Molly Matalon Dear listeners,Now that 2023 and all of its best-of-the-year lists are finally in the rearview, it’s time to look ahead to the music being released in 2024.Some marquee pop stars — Ariana Grande, Dua Lipa, Lil Nas X — are likely to put out their next albums in the near future, but for today’s playlist I wanted to spotlight some slightly lesser-known artists with fresh releases on the horizon.Sure, you’ll probably see some familiar names among the track list (including two members of Radiohead) but I hope this mix also introduces you to at least one artist you haven’t heard before, whether that’s the pop-minded neo-classical composer Julia Holter, the atmospheric indie artist Helado Negro or the kinetic rock band Sheer Mag. Without further ado, here are eight reasons to be excited about 2024 — musically speaking, at least.Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. Waxahatchee featuring MJ Lenderman: “Right Back to It”It’s been a slow, gradual joy to witness Katie Crutchfield, the founder of Waxahatchee, come into her maturity as a songwriter across the past decade or so. Her debut, “American Weekend,” a piercing, acoustic guitar-driven album released in 2012, announced her as a major talent, but she seemed to unlock a new level of confidence on her breakout 2020 album “Saint Cloud,” which melded laid-back country-rock with Crutchfield’s self-searching lyrics. Its follow-up, “Tiger’s Blood,” finally comes out on March 22, and its leadoff single “Right Back to It” finds Crutchfield in fine form, duetting with the guitarist and singer MJ Lenderman and contemplating a relationship that continues “like a song with no end.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Sheer Mag: “Playing Favorites”The punky, energetic rock band Sheer Mag has been a staple in the Philadelphia indie scene for years thanks in part to its reputation as a stellar live act. But the group’s recorded output is great, too — a streak it will hopefully continue on “Playing Favorites,” its third LP, out March 1. This jangly, driving title track showcases, among other things, the power of the lead singer Tina Halladay’s vocals. (Listen on YouTube)3. Brittany Howard: “Red Flags”A few months ago, I recommended Brittany Howard’s blisteringly funky “What Now,” the title track of the Alabama Shakes frontwoman’s second solo album. The next single, “Red Flags,” delves into the moodier and more meditative side of her versatile sound — at least until she lets it rip and hits a screaming high note that takes the song ever higher. “What Now” comes out on Feb. 9. (Listen on YouTube)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?  More

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      Morgan Wallen’s Latest Album Reclaims No. 1 for a 17th Time

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      “One Thing at a Time,” the country star’s 2023 release, tops the Billboard chart in a slow sales week.So far in 2024, the Billboard album chart is looking a lot like 2023.For the first two weeks of the year, Taylor Swift held at No. 1 with her “1989” remake. Now, the country star Morgan Wallen returns with “One Thing at a Time,” which dominated the chart for 16 weeks last year and now logs its 17th time in the top spot.“One Thing at a Time,” which had a blockbuster opening last March and remained a steady hit for months, rose to No. 1 with the equivalent of 61,000 sales in the United States, including 80 million streams and 2,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate.Luminate’s recent year-end report named “One Thing at a Time” the most popular album of 2023 in the United States, logging the equivalent of about 5.4 million sales, largely from streaming.With no major new releases to challenge it, “One Thing” has the lowest weekly sales number for a No. 1 album in almost two years, since Pusha T’s “It’s Almost Dry” logged 55,000 in May 2022. Swift’s total on last week’s chart was also notably low, at just 64,000 equivalent sales.Also this week, Drake’s “For All the Dogs” is No. 2, Swift’s “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” falls two spots to No. 3 and Nicki Minaj’s “Pink Friday 2” is No. 4.“Stick Season” by the Vermont pop-folkie Noah Kahan is in fifth place, that album’s highest chart position yet in the nearly year and half since its release. Kahan, who has scored streaming hits and has a major arena tour coming this year, is in contention for best new artist at the Grammys on Feb. 4. More

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      Winter Jazzfest Has Company: Unity Jazz Festival

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      The decision to place another festival right on top of Jazzfest highlighted how much has been flipped upside-down in jazz over the past 20 years.Back in 2005 — when the first NYC Winter Jazzfest was held at the Knitting Factory in Lower Manhattan, and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s multimillion-dollar facilities had recently opened on the Upper West Side — it was clear which represented the establishment, and which was proposing an alternative. Today, it’s not such an easy distinction.Steered by its artistic director, the Pulitzer Prize-winning trumpeter and retro jazz philosopher Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center was cultivating an older and affluent audience, adjacent to the opera-going crowd. Marsalis’s bookings proudly held the line for what he considered jazz’s defining virtues. Two decades later, those things are still true.Winter Jazzfest was geared toward disruption. The mid-2000s were lean years for the music: Online file sharing hit jazz musicians especially hard, and the fallout from the Sept. 11 attacks left many live-music venues closed throughout New York City.Brice Rosenbloom, Winter Jazzfest’s founder, positioned it as both an infusion of crucial life support and a challenge to some of jazz’s passively dominant trends. The festival’s biggest target, perhaps, was the idea that you could draw any stark dividing lines through music: Pop-friendly, fusion-driven, acoustic and tradition-revering improvisers coexisted on the festival’s bill, which in that first year unfolded across three stages on a single night at the Knit.New York jazz lost its flagship summertime festival in 2009, leaving Winter Jazzfest as the biggest game in town; since then it has grown into more than a week of concerts and satellite events. Every year, it offers a full buffet of the current flavors in jazz at a mix of theaters, rock halls and small rooms.The 20th annual Winter Jazzfest marathons took place over the weekend, in Lower Manhattan on Friday night and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Saturday. From the sound of things, no matter how dark things may look in the wider world, the state of improvised music appears strong.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?  More

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      Leon Wildes, Immigration Lawyer Who Defended John Lennon, Dies at 90

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      Leon Wildes, a New York immigration lawyer who successfully fought the United States government’s attempt to deport John Lennon, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 90.His death, at Lenox Hill Hospital, was confirmed by his son Michael.For more than three years, from early 1972 to the fall of 1975, Mr. Wildes (pronounced WY-ulds) doggedly battled the targeting by the Nixon administration and immigration officials of Mr. Lennon, the former Beatle, and his wife, Yoko Ono, marshaling a series of legal arguments that exposed both political chicanery and a hidden U.S. immigration policy.Uncovering secret records through the Freedom of Information Act, he showed that immigration officials, in practice, can exercise wide discretion in whom they choose to deport, a revelation that continues to resonate in immigration law. And he revealed that Mr. Lennon, an antiwar activist and a vocal critic of President Richard M. Nixon, had been singled out by the White House for political reasons.Mr. Wildes was ultimately vindicated by the stinging decision of a federal appeals court in October 1975, which said that “the courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds,” and which halted the effort to kick Mr. Lennon out of the country.Mr. Lennon and Mr. Wildes addressing reporters about the case, which centered on Mr. Lennon’s 1968 London conviction for marijuana possession.via Wildes Family ArchivesThe Beatles had broken up in 1970, and Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono moved to New York the next year. Mr. Lennon had been convicted of marijuana possession in London in 1968; that record would normally have barred him from entry, but he had obtained a waiver. The waiver was coming to an end, and the Lennons received a deportation notice.“It was a very frightening moment,” Ms. Ono said in the 2007 documentary “The U.S. vs. John Lennon.”When the Lennons engaged Mr. Wildes to represent them, he had barely heard of his famous clients. In his book about the case, “John Lennon vs. the USA,” published by the American Bar Association in 2016, he wrote that he was vaguely aware of the Beatles — it was nearly impossible not to be — but that the names of its members had escaped him.“I think it was Jack Lemmon and Yoko Moto,” he recalled telling his wife after meeting them in their apartment on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. She quickly corrected him.In the 2007 film, Mr. Lennon is seen telling reporters about Mr. Wildes: “He’s not a radical lawyer. He’s not William Kunstler.”Mr. Lennon had publicly opposed the Vietnam War — he recorded the antiwar anthem “Give Peace a Chance” in 1969 — and he had been involved in protests on behalf of figures in the New Left movement, which campaigned against the war.Nixon administration officials feared that he had outsize influence among the young, who would be allowed to vote in greater numbers in the 1972 presidential election, the first after the voting age had been lowered to 18 from 21. In the paranoid atmosphere then prevailing in the White House, that was enough for administration officials and their allies, notably the conservative South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, to go after Mr. Lennon.Their case centered on the London marijuana conviction. But the appellate court judge, Irving Kaufman, ultimately ruled that the crime was insufficient to make Mr. Lennon an “excludable alien.”The real reasons for the quixotic pursuit of Mr. Lennon, Mr. Wildes argued, lay elsewhere, as he was able to show thanks to his relentless digging through records. Early in 1972, Mr. Thurmond had drafted a letter recommending that Mr. Lennon be thrown out of the country, which Attorney General John N. Mitchell forwarded to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency then in charge of visas. Of particular concern was the fact that Mr. Lennon had performed at a rally in support of a New Left figure, the poet John Sinclair, who had been jailed on a marijuana charge.“If Lennon’s visa is terminated it would be a strategic countermeasure,” the South Carolina senator wrote.Ten days later, “a telegram went out to all immigration offices in the United States instructing that the Lennons should not be given any extensions of their time to visit the United States,” Mr. Wildes wrote in his book.For the next three years, the government continued to press its case, in efforts that appeared increasingly ham-fisted as public support for Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono grew. In letters and testimony, many of the era’s cultural celebrities spoke up for them, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Leonard Bernstein, the artist Jasper Johns and the authors John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Joseph Heller, as well as Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York.“The sole reason for deporting the Lennons was President Nixon’s desire to remove John and Yoko from the country before the 1972 election and a new, much younger electorate getting the vote,” Mr. Wildes wrote. “To ensure his grip on power, any ‘dirty tricks,’ including the abusive misuse of the immigration process, were acceptable.”Mr. Wildes, seated, consulted with his partner, Steven Weinberg, at their immigration law office in 1983.via Wildes Family ArchivesThe whole time, the F.B.I. was keeping a close watch on Mr. Lennon. “Surveillance reports on him ran to literally hundreds of pages,” Mr. Wildes wrote.When Mr. Lennon learned of the skulduggery, he was infuriated. “They’re even changing their own rules because we’re peaceniks,” he said in a television interview.The 1975 ruling allowed him to remain in the country. He was killed in front of the Dakota, the Upper West Side building where he and Ms. Yoko lived, five years later.In another breakthrough, Mr. Wildes found that immigration officials had the discretion to deport or not, depending on whether there were extenuating circumstances. The revelation of this policy continues to aid immigration lawyers battling the deportation of noncitizens today.“As part of his legal strategy, Wildes conducted groundbreaking research on the ‘nonpriority’ program, and eventually filed an application for ‘nonpriority status’ for Lennon,” the immigration expert Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia wrote in her 2015 book, “Beyond Deportation.” “Wildes learned that I.N.S. had for many years been granting ‘nonpriority’ status to prevent the deportation of noncitizens with sympathetic cases, but I.N.S. had never publicized the practice.”Throughout what Mr. Wildes acknowledged was the all-consuming job of representing the Lennons, he kept a bemused and friendly eye on his famous clients, sometimes encountering them, as others did, in what he called the “wonderful upright bed” in their Bank Street apartment.“One could meet half the world around that bed,” he wrote — “radical types like Jerry Rubin or Bobby Seale, oddball musicians like David Peel, poets like Allen Ginsberg, actors like Peter Boyle, television personalities like Geraldo Rivera, or even political operatives like the deputy mayor of New York.”Mr. Wildes at his office in 2015. “He’s not a radical lawyer,” John Lennon said. “He’s not William Kunstler.”via Wildes Family ArchivesLeon Wildes was born on March 4, 1933, in Olyphant, Pa., a small coal-mining town near Scranton. His father, Harry, was a clothing and dry goods merchant, and his mother, Sarah (Rudin) Wildes, worked in his store. Mr. Wildes was educated at public schools in Olyphant and earned a bachelor’s degree from Yeshiva University in 1954 and a law degree from New York University in 1958.He quickly gravitated toward immigration law, working for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a refugee aid organization, and helping two Americans who had gone to Israel establish their U.S. citizenship. He founded the immigration law firm Wildes & Weinberg in 1960 and went on to write numerous law review articles on immigration law and to teach at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.In addition to his son Michael, he is survived by another son, Mark; his wife, Alice Goldberg Wiles; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.Immigration law had “biblical import to him,” Michael Wildes, who is also a lawyer, recalled in a phone interview. “My father drew value from helping others achieve their American dream, as he had done — the golden grail of a green card, or citizenship.” More

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      Jay Clayton, Vocal Innovator in Jazz and Beyond, Dies at 82

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      She sparred with avant-garde instrumentalists and used electronics to alter and extend her vocal palette. She was also at home in more conventional settings.Jay Clayton, a singer whose six-decade career encompassed freewheeling improvisation, lyrical songs and poetry, and the prescient use of electronics, died on Dec. 31 at her home in New Paltz, N.Y. She was 82.Her daughter, Dejha Colantuono, said the cause was small-cell lung cancer.Ms. Clayton established herself as an innovator in the 1970s and ’80s, sparring with instrumentalists in avant-garde settings and using electronics to alter and extend her vocal palette well before the practice became common. She worked frequently with other singers — she formed an especially close bond with Sheila Jordan, an early mentor — and she sang in playfully aerobatic vocal groups with peers like Jeanne Lee, Ursula Dudziak, Norma Winstone and Bobby McFerrin.“She works in the familiar avant-garde terrain of wordless, spontaneous improvisations in duo and group settings,” the critic Jon Garelick wrote of her work in The Boston Phoenix in 1990. “But Clayton is also a warm, gracious interpreter of lyric standards, and this lyricism pervades all her work.”Ms. Clayton in 1969. She fell in with the downtown jazz scene after moving to New York in 1963.via Clayton familyShe performed for a decade with the composer Steve Reich, participating in the development and recording of breakthrough pieces like “Drumming,” “Music for 18 Musicians” and “Tehillim.” She also worked closely with dancers and choreographers early in her career, and she maintained an enduring collaboration with the tap dancer Brenda Bufalino.A prominent and influential teacher, Ms. Clayton held positions at the City College of New York, the Peabody Institute and Princeton University. She developed a vocal program for the Banff Center in Alberta, Canada, where she taught with Ms. Jordan. The two further collaborated in training programs in Massachusetts and Vermont and ran a celebrated retreat for singers at Willow Lane Farm in Berne, N.Y., near Albany.Prominent among Ms. Clayton’s students are the composer Karen Goldfeder and the protean vocal improviser Theo Bleckmann. But through her widespread pedagogy — including a book, “Sing Your Story: A Practical Guide for Learning and Teaching the Art of Jazz Singing,” published in 2001 — her progeny are legion.She was born Judith Theresa Colantone on Oct. 28, 1941, in Youngstown, Ohio. Her father, William Colantone, was a carpenter and construction worker; her mother, Josephine (Armeni) Colantone, had sung professionally during the big-band era.Ms. Clayton took up the accordion and later had several years of piano lessons. After high school, she attended a summer program at the St. Louis Institute of Music and then enrolled at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she received a bachelor’s degree in music education in 1963. Since jazz courses were not available, she studied classical repertoire while quietly polishing her improvisational skills on weekend dates with a local trombonist.A prominent and influential teacher, Ms. Clayton was the author of what she called “a practical guide” to the study of jazz singing/No creditAfter moving to New York City in 1963, Ms. Clayton fell in with the downtown jazz scene and formed an early association with the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. Through him, she met the drummer Frank Clayton, with whom she began a relationship in 1965. In 1967, the couple started a concert series, “Jazz at the Loft,” in their home on Lispenard Street, in the neighborhood later called TriBeCa, presenting performances by the saxophonist Sam Rivers, the pianist Joanne Brackeen and others. They married in 1968.Not long afterward, Ms. Clayton was introduced to Mr. Reich by the singer Joan La Barbara, who was her student. What he sought, he said in a phone interview, was a “modern-day equivalent” of Ella Fitzgerald: someone who could perform his music with spontaneity as well as precision.Ms. Clayton fit the bill. “Her pitch was dead-on, and her rhythm was a lift to the spirit,” Mr. Reich said. “She grasped what had to be done, and she did it to perfection.”Flourishing among her fellow innovators and iconoclasts, Ms. Clayton led educational workshops with Jeanne Lee and performed with the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams at the Public Theater in 1979. That same year, she consulted on the first Women in Jazz festival, produced by Cobi Narita (who died in November).In 1981, Ms. Clayton released her first album, “All-Out,” a wide-ranging statement with an ensemble that included Mr. Clayton, the pianist Larry Karush, the saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, the vocalist Shelley Hirsch and others. On several tracks Ms. Clayton sang swooping, soaring lines in tandem with Ms. Bloom, a recent arrival from New Haven, Conn., whom Ms. Clayton had taken under her wing.“From the minute she and I met, we had this linear synchronicity,” Ms. Bloom said in an interview. “There’s something about the combination of her sound and my sound: We played lines together, and it was like this other instrument.” They collaborated for decades.In 1982, Ms. Clayton, her husband and their two children moved to Seattle, where she taught at the Cornish School, now Cornish College of the Arts. When she and Mr. Clayton divorced in 1984, she remained in Seattle, developing a new circle of collaborators that included the drummer Jerry Granelli, the trombonist Julian Priester, the bassist and the saxophonist Briggan Krauss.Ms. Clayton, center, in the 1980s with, from left, the pianist Larry Karush, the bassist Harvie Swartz, the drummer Frank Clayton and the saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom.via Clayton familyShe recorded works by the experimental composer John Cage in the late 1980s and returned to Mr. Reich’s music on occasion. Her jazz recordings from those years include “Beautiful Love,” a 1995 album devoted to vintage popular standards with the pianist Fred Hersch.“I always think that doing standard material lets you know where somebody’s coming from,” Mr. Hersch said in an interview, likening the practice to a painter rendering a still life or a nude. “In Jay’s case, a lot of it is very hauntingly beautiful, and pretty fierce in terms of improvising.”Ms. Clayton moved back to New York in 2002, re-establishing a local presence both alone and in collaboration with Ms. Jordan. She made a stream of recordings for the Sunnyside label, ranging from a lyrical tribute to the songwriter Harry Warren to an adventurous electronic fantasia involving poetry by Emily Dickinson, made with the composer and pianist Kirk Nurock.She was diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer in December 2022. Her final recording, “Voices in Flight,” a collaboration with the singer Judy Niemack, was released in June.In addition to her daughter, Ms. Clayton is survived by her brother, William Colantone Jr.; her son, Dov Clayton; and two grandchildren.To the end, Ms. Clayton remained devoted to her students. “She was always just exactly herself, personally and musically,” Ms. Goldfeder wrote in a Facebook post; “it’s one of the many ways she was a great teacher.” More

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      Phill Niblock, Dedicated Avant-Gardist of Music and Film, Dies at 90

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      Making music with no melody or rhythm and films with no plot, he became a darling of New York’s experimental underground.Phill Niblock, an influential New York composer and film and video artist who opened new sonic terrain with hauntingly minimalist works incorporating drones, microtones and instruments as diverse as bagpipes and hurdy-gurdies, often accompanied by his equally minimalist moving images, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 90.His partner, Katherine Liberovskaya, said he died in a hospital of heart failure after years of cardiac procedures.Mr. Niblock had no formal musical training. Nevertheless, he came to be hailed as a leading light in the world of experimental music, not only as an artist himself but also, beginning in the 1970s, as the director, with the choreographer Elaine Summers, of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for dance, avant-garde music and other media. He served as the foundation’s sole director from 1985 until his death, and he was also the curator of the foundation’s record label, XI.His loft on Centre Street in Lower Manhattan served as a performance space for the foundation. It was also a social nexus for boundary-pushing musicians and composers like John Cage, Arthur Russell, David Behrman and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.In an Instagram post on Tuesday, Mr. Moore wrote that Mr. Niblock’s work summoned a “collective consciousness which gave it its own genuine engagement with listener and performer alike.”Mr. Niblock’s music was marked by densely layered sound textures consisting of tones, close to one another in pitch, that made only very small movements for extended durations. “Minimalism to me is about stripping out things, and looking at a very small segment — to get rid of melody and rhythm and typical harmonic progressions,” Mr. Niblock said in an interview with Frieze magazine last summer. He added that his pieces “don’t really ‘develop,’ as that word is used in music.”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?  More

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      7 Great Songs From Great 7th Albums

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      Inspired by Ariana Grande’s return, hear tracks from U2, Sleater-Kinney, Guided by Voices and more.U2’s seventh album, “Achtung Baby,” was a triumph.Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,The music video for “Yes, And?,” Ariana Grande’s first new solo single in more than three years, opens with a tight shot of a ruby-red business card bearing the phrase “ag7.” In modern pop parlance, this is a way of hinting that her seventh album is coming soon.I’ve long felt that the seventh album — if an artist is lucky enough to get that far — is a pivotal moment. Sometimes it’s the perfect time for a sonic and aesthetic reinvention, à la U2’s glammy 1991 album (and my favorite in its discography) “Achtung Baby.” It can also be an opportunity for a pop star to show off newfound maturity, as Madonna did on her great seventh studio album, “Ray of Light.” The seventh album is often when the most brilliant artists shift gears into a level of mastery that seems newly effortless: Consider Bob Dylan’s seventh album, none other than “Blonde on Blonde.”Will Grande’s seventh LP deserve mention among those classics? Who can say? All I know for now is that the thought of one of our major pop stars preparing to join the Septet Club got me thinking about some of my all time favorite seventh albums. Naturally, this called for a seven-track playlist.The aforementioned legends each make an appearance, along with a few of my indie darlings, Guided by Voices and Sleater-Kinney. Plus, one of pop’s reigning superstars, who released a particularly imperial seventh album in 2022 — everybody’s on mute until you guess who.Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. U2: “Until the End of the World”After its polarizing sixth album, “Rattle & Hum,” U2 retreated from ’80s overexposure and re-emerged with a fresh ’90s rebrand on “Achtung Baby,” a Brian Eno-produced triumph that added some needed irony to the band’s outlook and made the Edge’s guitar glisten like a newly invented form of synthetic crystal. It is my professional opinion that this song rules. (Listen on YouTube)2. Madonna: “Nothing Really Matters”Madonna was a new mother about to turn 40 when she released “Ray of Light,” a midcareer commercial smash that got her back on the radio (alongside devotees half her age), and also netted her (somehow) her first Grammy in a music category. “Ray of Light” is a deeper, stranger album than its titular hit suggests; this underappreciated sixth single is more representative of its searching electro-pop sound. (Listen on YouTube)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?  More

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      Ariana Grande’s House-Groove Kiss-Off, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Lil Nas X, Waxahatchee, serpentwithfeet 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 sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Ariana Grande, ‘Yes, And?’Ariana Grande returns with a thumping, crimson-lipped kiss-off on “Yes, And?,” a feather-light confection safely — but still enjoyably — in her comfort zone. Grande has been filming the movie version of the smash musical “Wicked” since her 2020 album “Positions,” so this comeback single lets her have some fun with the house-music revival (à la Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul”) that has become popular in her absence. The most obvious sonic reference that Grande and her fellow writers and producers Max Martin and Ilya Salmanzadeh are conjuring here is Madonna’s “Vogue,” and though the song does its best to seem like a communal rallying cry (“Boy come on, put your lipstick on/Come on and walk this way through the fire”), its most pointed lyrics are about the particular and seemingly vexing experience of being Ariana Grande. “Don’t comment on my body, do not reply,” she intones on a suddenly serious spoken-word bridge. “Your business is yours and mine is mine.” It’s a relief when the beat returns and she once again ascends, blithely resuming her dance on air. LINDSAY ZOLADZLil Nas X, ‘J Christ’Lil Nas X has returned using what’s worked for him before: an evangelical-baiting song title and a video that twists biblical imagery, with the rapper and singer being crucified and then reappearing as Noah. (He also goes one-on-one with the devil on a basketball court and shimmies as a cheerleader with a skirt and pompoms.) The underlying song is solid but secondary: a piano lick, a percussive melody and a blunt attempt at notoriety. The hook is “Bitch, I’m bad like J. Christ,” but another line is the point: “Is he ’bout to give ’em something viral?” Let the algorithms decide. JON PARELESJeymes Samuel, D’Angelo and Jay-Z, ‘I Want You Forever’Jeymes Samuel, Jay-Z and the elusive D’Angelo are in no particular hurry on “I Want You Forever,” a loose, sprawling nine-and-a-half-minute reverie from the soundtrack of Samuel’s new film “The Book of Clarence.” “All I want to say is that I love you so much, I don’t want to be without you,” D’Angelo croons repeatedly, until his language seems to liquefy. Under such hypnosis, even Jay sounds uncharacteristically chill, but his laid-back flow can’t hide the heartbreak in his words: “Slept on the couch, ’cause the bed ain’t a bed without you.” ZOLADZserpentwithfeet, ‘Safe Word’Trust is an aphrodisiac in “Safe Word.” Josiah Wise, who records as serpentwithfeet, promises that “The safe word is me” and “I’m your shelter,” while adding that he’s “insatiable,” in “Safe Word.” Plucked guitar notes, sparse percussion and whistling accompany the high croon of his voice, which insists on intimacy even when it gets some Auto-Tuned flourishes. PARELESWaxahatchee featuring MJ Lenderman, ‘Right Back to It’Katie Crutchfield, Waxahatchee’s singer and songwriter, marvels at long-term love by admitting how much she tests it. “I let my mind run wild/Don’t know why I do it,” she sings, “But you just settle in like a song with no end.” The track is easygoing and countryish, complete with homey banjo picking, and MJ Lenderman provides supportive harmony vocals and electric guitar. But the scratchy tension in Crutchfield’s voice betrays her continuing self-doubts. PARELESFaye Webster featuring Lil Yachty, ‘Lego Ring’The indie-folk crooner Faye Webster and the iconoclastic rapper Lil Yachty have been friends since middle school, and their easy chemistry makes “Lego Ring,” a single from Webster’s upcoming album “Underdressed at the Symphony,” sound more cohesive than expected. Amid crunchy guitars and percussive hits of piano, Yachty’s Auto-Tuned warbles provide textured backing vocals for Webster, singing an ode to one of the cheaper pieces of jewelry ever coveted in a pop song. “Me and you, the dream team,” Yachty sings, playfully, when he takes the lead, “always together like string beans.” ZOLADZSheryl Crow, ‘Evolution’Sheryl Crow ponders artificial intelligence in “Evolution.” She hears her music deep-faked on the radio; she wonders, “Where are we headed in this paradise?/We are passengers and there’s no one at the wheel.” The song is a broad-shouldered rock anthem, bolstered by strings and a squealing lead-guitar solo. It posits the superiority of human feelings and hopes for a “grand solution,” but the best odds Crow can offer are “maybe.” PARELESJhené Aiko, ‘Sun/Son’Can love be renewable energy? “You charge me up,” Jhené Aiko coos in “Sun/Son,” as she connects the warmth of an embrace to “solar power.” She’s surrounded with cascading vocal harmonies over a purring, melodic bass line, luxuriating in the romance; an alternate piano-centered version turns the same sentiments into a hymn. PARELESBrhyM, ‘Deep Blue’Bruce Hornsby collaborated with the contemporary chamber group yMusic on the coming album “Deep Sea Vents,” billing their merger as BrhyM. “Deep Blue” touches on Minimalism, psychedelia and traditional jazz, with a steady backbeat, a polytonal piano lick, electric sitar and back-talk from trumpet, clarinet and violin. It’s casually philosophical. “I said to the universe, ‘Sir, I exist,’” Hornsby sings. “The universe replied, “The fact does not create in me a sense of obligation.’” PARELESBen Frost, ‘The River of Light and Radiation’The composer Ben Frost chops up brutally distorted electric guitars and programmed kick drums to propel “The River of Light and Radiation,” which starts as ominous pummeling and grows ever more dire, adding jolt after jolt. PARELES More