Music

The three day-festival beginning on Oct. 7 will also include conversations with stars like Ben Stiller, Chloe Bailey and Sandra Oh.The New Yorker Festival returns for its 23rd edition, featuring conversations with Bono, Quinta Brunson, Ben Stiller, Chloe Bailey, United States Representative Jamie Raskin and more, and will run from Oct. 7-9.Bono, the Irish rock star and more recently the motorbike-riding lion in “Sing 2,” will be in conversation with The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, about his new memoir and his decades as an activist and musician. The book, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” will be released in November.“Like so many memoirs that I’ve read, the most intriguing part is how someone becomes himself or herself,” Remnick said in an interview.Quinta Brunson, who plays the chirpy yet clumsy elementary school teacher in “Abbott Elementary,” will speak with the magazine’s television critic, Doreen St. Félix. And Chloe Bailey (of the R&B sister duo Chloe x Halle) will perform live at the festival after a conversation.Remnick said that politically driven conversations can be had by artists, authors and actors, as well as lawmakers. Raskin, a Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Jan. 6 House select committee, along with three of the magazine’s writers, will join a live taping of The New Yorker’s “The Political Scene” podcast.The political conversation will continue with a talk about Asian American culture and representation, with the chef David Chang, the filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung, the writer Min Jin Lee and the actor Sandra Oh. And the climate activists Sara Blazevic and Molly Burhans, and the climate expert Leah Stokes, will delve into the future of the environment.“All of these people in cultural life are also in many ways connected to the political,” Remnick said.The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will return to the festival, where Hari Kunzru, Elif Batuman, Gary Shteyngart, Rachel Kushner and Ottessa Moshfegh will also appear.As for comedy, Molly Shannon and Vanessa Bayer, the actresses and comedians who star in the Showtime series “I Love That for You,” will chat with Susan Morrison, an editor at the magazine. And the comedians Hasan Minhaj, Phoebe Robinson, Billy Eichner and Jerrod Carmichael will also participate in festival conversations, along with the directors Stiller, the duo Daniels, Sharon Horgan and Maggie Gyllenhaal.Remnick said that with the return to theaters and the arrival of vaccine boosters, he feels confident sharing a room with readers, thinkers and performers, and the festival will hold select events virtually.“Part of cultural lifestyle was taken from us, and now it’s bounced back,” he said. More

Spencer Elden, who was pictured as a baby on the cover of “Nevermind,” argued in his lawsuit that the grunge rock group had engaged in “child pornography.”A federal judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit filed by a man who, as a baby, had graced the cover of Nirvana’s seminal album, “Nevermind,” and argued 30 years later that the iconic photo of him drifting naked in a pool had been a form of sexual exploitation.The man, Spencer Elden, 31, accused Nirvana in his complaint of engaging in child pornography after it used a photo of him for the cover of “Nevermind,” the 1991 album that catapulted the Seattle grunge rock band to international fame.The judge, Fernando M. Olguin, wrote in his eight-page ruling that because Mr. Elden had learned about the album cover more than 10 years ago, he had waited too long to file his lawsuit, making his claims untimely.The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against the estate of Kurt Cobain; the musician’s former bandmates, David Grohl and Krist Novoselic; and Mr. Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, among other parties. Bert H. Deixler, a lawyer for the defendants, said in a statement that they were “pleased this meritless case has been brought to a swift conclusion.”Robert Y. Lewis, one of Mr. Elden’s lawyers, did not respond to an email seeking comment on Sunday.The dismissal came after Judge Olguin dismissed the case in January for another reason: Mr. Elden’s lawyers had missed a deadline to respond to a motion for dismissal by the lawyers for Nirvana.Judge Olguin had allowed Mr. Elden’s lawyers to file a second amended complaint to address “the alleged defects” in the defendants’ motion to dismiss.But the dismissal on Friday appeared to end the legal back-and-forth.Mr. Elden, an artist living in Los Angeles County, has gone to therapy for years to work through how the album cover affected him, his lawyers have said, arguing that his privacy had been invaded, according to court records.He had been seeking $150,000 from each of the 15 people and companies named in the complaint.The photo of Mr. Elden, who was then four months old, was picked from among dozens of pictures of babies by the photographer Kirk Weddle. Mr. Cobain envisioned the album cover showing a baby underwater.Mr. Weddle paid Mr. Elden’s parents $200 for the picture, which was later altered to show the baby chasing a dollar bill, dangling from a fishhook.In the years that followed, Mr. Elden’s opinion about the photo changed. Initially, he appeared to celebrate his part in the classic cover, recreating the moment for the album’s 10th, 17th, 20th and 25th anniversaries, though not naked.“It’s cool but weird to be part of something so important that I don’t even remember,” he said in 2016 in an interview with The New York Post, in which he posed holding the album cover at 25.He also expressed anger at the people who still talked about it, telling GQ Australia that he was not comfortable with people seeing him naked. “I didn’t really have a choice,” he said.In their motion to dismiss, lawyers for Nirvana said that in 2003, when Mr. Elden was 12 years old, he acknowledged in an interview that he would probably always be known as the baby on the album cover.According to the lawyers, he said at the time, “I’m probably gonna get some money from it.” More

Prejudice has followed the biracial singer from his earliest days as a performer. Now a proven hitmaker in a range of styles, he’s releasing his third album, “Different Man.”Kane Brown recently hosted a fellow country singer at his Nashville home, then paused to collect himself. “After he left,” Brown recalled, “I was like, Randy Travis really just came over and ate barbecue at my house.”The two first met at a radio station in 2016, when Travis, a Country Music Hall of Famer, surprised Brown, then a largely unknown 23-year-old, midway through a startlingly mature cover of his own 2002 hit “Three Wooden Crosses.” “I have not only become a fan of his voice, his style and talent, but of his heart, his passion and his character,” Travis wrote in an email. “If you listen to the stories his songs tell, you will understand his journey.”Earning the respect and friendship of an anointed country hero like Travis would be significant for any rising talent. But for Brown, who’s grown into a reliable hitmaker in the genre while regularly fending off gripes about whether he — a biracial man who regularly steps across stylistic borders and has worked with collaborators as diverse as Khalid, Marshmello and Becky G — even belongs among its ranks, the co-sign is especially meaningful.“It’s all the validation I need,” said Brown, now 28, as he sat on the terrace of his room at a Soho hotel last month, chewing a lump of tobacco and looking back on his path from a childhood marked by poverty and racism to America’s biggest stages.For anyone inclined to nitpick Brown’s country credentials, his third album — “Different Man,” out Friday — includes a handful of obvious targets: “See You Like I Do,” which sounds like a lost boy-band classic; “Thank God,” a touching folk-pop duet between the singer and his wife, Katelyn; and “Grand,” where Brown slips effortlessly into post-Drake R&B, chronicling life at the top and affirming that he always keeps “it trilly with the fans.”“I released ‘Grand,’ and there’s so many comments that are saying, ‘This isn’t country.’ It’s like, ‘No [expletive],’” Brown said with a mock fed-up chuckle. “I wasn’t trying to make this country.”At last, Brown said, he is done trying to micromanage his public perception. “When I first came in, with how I look — tattoos, biracial, all that stuff — I was already getting perceived as a rapper, and it kept going on for years,” ‌Brown‌ ‌said. So, he reasoned, “I might as well just take on that role.”As willing as he is to step outside country’s boundaries, Brown maintains a deep loyalty to the genre. Much of “Different Man” feels determinedly traditional: “Bury Me in Georgia,” a stomping ode to Brown’s rural Southern roots; “Pop’s Last Name,” the singer’s tender tribute to the maternal grandfather who helped raise him; and “Like I Love Country Music,” a playful, fiddle-accented romp that shows off Brown’s baritone twang and shouts out many of his key influences, including Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and George Jones.Brown’s eclectic approach mirrors his own development as a fan. Moving frequently around northern Georgia and southern Tennessee with his single mother, Brown listened exclusively to country, mainly the ’90s staples she loved, like Tim McGraw, Sugarland and Shania Twain. In middle school, he branched out, checking out everything from Usher and Sisqó to AC/DC and Kid Rock. He even went through a brief pop-punk phase. “Oh, yeah, with the Vans and the skinny jeans,” Brown said. “I had my eyebrows pierced; I had my ears gauged.”Around junior year of high school, Brown started noticing country coming back into vogue. “‘Cruise’ by Florida Georgia Line had just come out,” he recalled, referring to the 2012 bro-country smash, “and you couldn’t escape that song.” He dove back into the genre, taking in work by other artists then on the ascent. Chris Young became his gold standard, thanks to his sturdy songcraft and similar baritone range.“When I found out about him, I studied every song, from his first album all the way down to what he has now,” Brown said in his deep drawl, “and that’s where I found myself wanting to sing.”Brown battled long odds to realize his dream. When he was young, he and his mother endured bouts of homelessness, often living in their car. (As Brown mentions in “Pop’s Last Name,” his father has been incarcerated since 1996; he said he visited him twice as a teenager but they had not stayed in touch.) Later on, he saw friends and relatives fall into severe drug addiction. There was one year, he said, “where I had six or seven of my friends overdose.”Brown played sports and worked a steady string of retail jobs but stayed focused on music. Inspired by his middle-school friend Lauren Alaina — with whom he’d later notch his first country No. 1, the 2017 duet “What Ifs” — he tried out for singing shows and eventually made the cut for “The X Factor.” He quit when the producers tried to funnel him into a boy band and started posting country covers to Facebook. Some went viral, as did “Used to Love You Sober,” a tear-in-your-beer original that he self-released in 2015. Soon, Brown had a deal with RCA Records Nashville.He started scoring country-chart hits and eventually teamed up with his early idol Young, on the 2021 single “Famous Friends,” one of Brown’s 21 songs to reach Billboard’s Hot 100. But his path to country success has been marked by very different obstacles than that of his white heroes. As a child, Brown only learned he was half Black when schoolmates started labeling him with a racial slur, and when he got up to sing at a high school talent show, he endured similar barrages.Now speaking as one of the few Black marquee names in country, along with Darius Rucker, Mickey Guyton and Jimmie Allen, Brown says racism is still a daily reality for him. “Even today, I walked in somewhere and they were like, ‘Oh, my God, you did so good on ‘Dancing With the Stars,’” he said. “I’m like, ‘That wasn’t me; that was Jimmie Allen. That’s the other Black guy.’”The plight of Black artists in country, and the genre’s deep-seated history of racism, is now the subject of a very public conversation, which accelerated last year when the country star Morgan Wallen was filmed using a racial slur. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Brown released “Worldwide Beautiful,” a call for unity, but he still feels constant pressure to act as a spokesman. “I guarantee you every artist probably got asked about it,” he said of the Wallen incident. But, he added, when he, Allen or Guyton were asked the question, it “was completely different than when they asked somebody else,” he said. “It’s like, they want an answer.”After staying quiet until now, he’s ready to give his take. “This is the first time I’ve ever even talked about this, but I personally know Morgan,” Brown said of Wallen, who helped write one track on his 2016 debut. “I texted him that day. I told him he shouldn’t have said it, but also knowing Morgan, I knew that he didn’t mean it in the way that the world thought that he meant it.” He’s quick to add that if he’d detected racist maliciousness in the remark, he would have taken action. “I think if it was in a different context,” he said, “I probably would have been fighting.”Brown is optimistic about country’s turn toward greater inclusivity, and ‌he recently signed the Black songwriter Levon Gray — a writer on his recent single “One Mississippi” — to a publishing deal. But he knows he’ll always have his detractors. Looking ahead to the album’s release, he’s focusing on the allies he can count on: artists who have his back, like Travis and Young; and the support system he shouts out on “Grand,” whether that’s the fans who have been helping him sell out basketball arenas nationwide on his recent Blessed & Free Tour, or his wife and two young daughters.“I used to always be nervous about what people were going to think, and I was kind of scared — I didn’t want people to think that I was leaving country music because that’s my heart,” Brown said. “But now, it’s just to the point where it’s like, I’m a dad now, two kids; I care what they think. So I’m just not that scared kid anymore.” More

His song “Took the Children Away,” inspired by his childhood, shook Australians into confronting a grim era when their government tore apart Aboriginal families.One day in 1970, Archie Cox’s high school English class in Melbourne, Australia, was interrupted by a voice from the intercom: “Could Archibald William Roach come to the office?”An uncanny feeling took hold of 14-year-old Archie: This name, which he had no recollection of, he somehow knew to be his own.A letter to Archibald William Roach awaited him. It announced that Nellie Austin, a name he had never heard, was his mother, and that she had just died. His father and namesake was dead, too, the letter said. It was signed by Myrtle Evans, who identified herself as his sister.Within a year, Archie had dropped out of school, abandoned Dulcie and Alex Cox — who, he realized, were only his foster parents — and embarked on a quest to discover who he really was.He spent years without a home. He was imprisoned on burglary charges twice. He tried to kill himself. All the while, he kept bumping into revelations about his family and why he had been taken away from them.When he left home, there was not a name for what Archie was. But today people like him are considered part of the Stolen Generations — Indigenous Australians seized from their families as children to be assimilated into white society.This history is known thanks in no small part to Mr. Roach, who turned his wayward life into the material for a career as one of Australia’s best-loved folk singers, and who in doing so dramatized the plight of his people.He died on July 30 at a hospital in Warrnambool, a city in southeastern Australia, his sons Amos and Eban announced on his website. He was 66.The announcement did not cite the cause, but Mr. Roach had struggled with lung cancer and emphysema, requiring him to perform while breathing through a nasal cannula.His rise to prominence began in the late 1980s and early ’90s, on the strength in particular to one autobiographical song: “Took the Children Away.” He performed it at Melbourne Concert Hall when he opened for the popular Australian rock singer Paul Kelly.“There was this stunned silence; he thought he’d bombed,” Mr. Kelly recalled to The Guardian for a 2020 article about the song’s impact. “Then this wave of applause grew and grew. I’d never heard anything like it.”Mr. Kelly was a producer of Mr. Roach’s first album, “Charcoal Lane,” released in 1990. When the two toured together, Aboriginal audience members approached Mr. Roach, saying they, too, had been taken from their families.“He started to realize it was a much broader story,” Mr. Kelly said.The song became a national hit. “When he sings ‘Took the Children Away,’ or any of the tracks on ‘Charcoal Lane,’ it cuts through like great blues should,” Rolling Stone Australia wrote in 1990. “The experience becomes universal.”In a 2020 article commemorating the 30th anniversary of “Charcoal Lane,” Rolling Stone Australia credited “Took the Children Away” with helping to inspire a landmark 1997 government report estimating that as many as one in three Indigenous children were seized from their families between 1910 and 1970.Fourteen more albums followed “Charcoal Lane,” ranging in style from blues to gospel, while Mr. Roach’s wife, Ruby Hunter, gained renown of her own as a musical partner of Mr. Roach’s, and as a songwriter in her own right.The Aboriginal singer and songwriter Emma Donovan told The Guardian that when she was growing up, “we’d see Archie and Ruby on TV.”“They were our royalty, our king and queen,” she said.Archibald William Roach was born in the Framlingham Aboriginal Reserve, in southwestern Australia, on Jan. 8, 1956. When he was older, he recovered a memory of a tall man with long limbs and curly hair reaching toward him while police officers were grabbing him. That man, he realized, was Archibald, his father.He was raised largely by the Coxes. The implications of the fact that he was Black and that the Coxes were white dawned on Archie only gradually.His foster father, who was Scottish, longed for his homeland, and at night tears came to his eyes as he sang ballads around the family’s organ. “For years I thought I missed Scotland,” Mr. Roach wrote in “Tell Me Why,” his 2019 memoir. “I took great joy in sharing those songs with Dad Alex, because I wanted to be close to him, and I also wanted to understand the power that the songs had over him.”Mr. Cox gave Archie his first guitar. After Archie left home at 15, he never saw his foster parents again.He took a circuitous path to the return address on the letter he had received, in Sydney; by the time he arrived, his sister had left, without informing her neighbors of her next destination.A homeless one-armed Aboriginal man named Albert took care of Archie, showing him where in Sydney to sleep free of charge and teaching him how to panhandle. Archie began drinking with his new Aboriginal friends from morning till night.“I look back now and see the darkness that would have touched every moment unless we numbed it with beer and port and sherry,” he wrote in his memoir. “We were part of an obliterated culture.”He built a life from openness to chance and the coincidences that ensued. Archie found his family by running into one of his sisters at a bar in Sydney. On a coin flip, he decided to visit the South Australia city of Adelaide, where he met Ms. Hunter, who would become the love of his life. She, too, was an Aborigine who had been taken from her parents.Chance also granted Mr. Roach knowledge about his past. In 2013, he stumbled across the first photographs he had ever seen of his father as a boy, and of his grandmother.He learned that there were dangers in trying to recover tradition. He and his peers sought approval from elders before going on dates with other Aboriginal people, to ensure that they were not related. Taking up the old profession of his father and brother, Mr. Roach became an itinerant boxer. He realized in the middle of one bout that he was fighting his own first cousin.At other times he earned a living by picking grapes, pushing sheep up kill runs at an abattoir and doing metalwork at a foundry. He often lost jobs in a blur of drunkenness. The binges induced seizures. During one bender, overcome with despair at his prospects as a father and husband, he tried hanging himself with a belt. After more than a decade of patience, Ms. Hunter left him.Mr. Roach was jolted into sobriety. He found work as a health counselor at a rehab center in Melbourne. He rejoined Ms. Hunter and their two sons, and he threw himself into writing songs.“Like my daddy before me/I set ’em up and knock ’em down/Like my brother before me/I’m weaving in your town,” he wrote in “Rally Round the Drum,” a song from the early 1990s about his boxing days.“Have you got two bob?/Can you gimme a job?,” he wrote in the 1997 song “Beggar Man.”“At 15 I left my foster home/Looking for the people I call my own/But all I found was pain and strife/And nothing else but an empty life,” he wrote in “Open Up Your Eyes,” which was not released until 2019.Mr. Roach at Carrara Stadium on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, in 2018. His songs helped uncover the history of the Indigenous Australians known as the Stolen Generations.Dita Alangkara/Associated PressComplete information about his survivors was not available, but in addition to his sons, Mr. Roach and Ms. Hunter unofficially adopted 15 to 20 children. The impetus in some cases was simply encountering a young person on the street looking “a little worse for wear,” he told the Australian newspaper The Age in 2002.Ms. Hunter died suddenly in 2010 at the family home in Gunditjmara country, in southeast Australia, the ancestral land of Mr. Roach’s mother.As “Took the Children Away” grew in fame, even to the point of overshadowing Mr. Roach’s other work, he was often asked whether he got sick of singing it.“I say, ‘Never,’” he told ABC News Australia in 2019. “It’s a healing for me. Each time I sing it, you let some of it go.” More

The band Heilung performs on replica instruments to recreate the sound world of pre-Christian Europe and bring it into the modern age.BORRE, Norway — “We have vegan potato salad in the medium cauldron,” Maria Franz announced to the 17 members of Heilung, her folk metal band, as they gathered around a campfire here recently. The band was celebrating the release of its third album, “Drif,” at Midgardsblot, a festival that takes place on a Viking burial ground and also includes seminars on Viking culture for an audience of campers, many of whom were dressed up in tunics and cloaks. Earlier that day, festivalgoers joined the band to listen to the new album while sitting on the floor of a replica Viking feast hall rigged up with a speaker system.It was the perfect setting for Heilung, whose work over the past eight years has put a heavy metal twist on the music of pre-Christian Europe. Working with a team of researchers and performing on replica instruments from the period, Heilung produces music that its members describe as “amplified history.” Heilung takes its lyrics from historical texts, like runic inscriptions on archaeological finds, and uses sound sources that would have been available to early European civilizations, such as stones, bones and crude metal objects struck together.Clockwise from top left; Kati Liiri and Jussi Aspivaara at the Midgardsblot festival, in Borre, where Heilung played; Faust, a Heilung band member; a festival attendee; a homemade patch on a vest.David B. Torch for The New York Times“Drif,” for instance, combines throat singing, spoken word, chanting, battle sounds and field recordings from nature. One of Heilung’s songs, “Hakkerskaldyr,” was used in a trailer for a recent Robert Eggers film, “The Northman,” another artistic imagining of ancient Scandinavia.“We’re not claiming that we are doing the exact same thing as our ancestors did, because no one knows,” Franz said. “But it’s our interpretation of how it might have felt.”Heilung has three core members — Franz, Christopher Juul and Kai Uwe Faust — who are supported by a large cast of onstage performers, including actors dressed as Viking warriors, backing singers and drummers.Franz said the band’s project was about more than just focusing on the Viking era, though. Its members want to tap into what they see as a shared ancient history that goes beyond European borders and encompasses all of humanity. For instance, “Marduk,” the last track on the new album, is a recital of 50 names of the highest god of the Mesopotamians. Franz sometimes plays a primitive instrument she brought back from India: a stick, half a coconut, some goat skin and strings. If you look back far enough into history, Juul said, you find that most cultures share similar instruments, and similar myths.Fans of Heilung listening to its new album, “Drif,” inside a replica Viking hall.David B. Torch for The New York TimesThere are other bands in the subgenre of folk metal that draw on pre-Christian history, like the Norwegian group Wardruna. But Heilung stands out for the depth of its historical engagement and the scale of its live performances. The band’s self-released debut album, “Ofnir,” was well-received in folk metal circles, but it was not until the band’s first live shows, in 2017, that Heilung became popular in the broader metal scene.“It was a phenomenon,” said Jonathan Selzer, a music journalist at Metal Hammer magazine. He remembered seeing the band at Midgardsblot, in 2017, when it played the penultimate slot. The set incorporated elaborate costumes, including antlers and animal furs, battle cries and half-naked actors dressed as warriors charging around the stage. This performance set the blueprint for all of Heilung’s stage shows since. “You could just see this realization going through the crowd in real time, from incomprehension to wonder,” Selzer said. “The whole field turned into Viking rave.”Michael Berberian, who signed Heilung after that show to Season of Mist, a metal label he runs, said it was “a band that popped out of nowhere with a complete concept.” He added that “the visual aspects, the costume, the unique music, the production values were all there, fully ready.”Heilung onstage at a concert in Denver last year. The band stands out for the depth of its historical engagement and the scale of its live performances.Maurice NunezFranz, Faust and Juul first met through the Viking re-enactment scene, in which enthusiasts gather to dress up as Vikings, learn about their history and practice their traditions, such as sword fighting and cooking over an open fire. Runa Strindin, Midgardsblot’s founder, said the popularity of Viking re-enactments had exploded over the past five years in northern Europe, spurred by TV shows like “Vikings” and movies like “The Northman,” as well as the inclusion of Norse gods in the Marvel movies.“People are searching for an identity to come closer to something that is missing in their modern lives,” Strindin said, “and they are attracted to the Norse mythologies because it’s so easily adaptable. Whatever suits you, you will find it there.”Norse mythology also resonates with some far-right groups that see it as an endorsement of their ideology, but Heilung’s members strongly reject that worldview. For at least a century in Scandinavia, extreme nationalists have adopted the visual language of ancient runes to suggest an imagined, pre-modern era of racial purity, and neo-Nazis have used the symbols to identify themselves to one another.The connection between Nordic runes and white supremacy is still strong. Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian extremist, marked the weapons he used in a 2011 massacre with runes, and the perpetrator of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque terrorist attack in 2019 emblazoned a sonnenrad — a rune symbol that was appropriated by the Nazis to embody their ideal vision of an Aryan identity — on his backpack.Selzer, the music journalist, said that, outside the metal scene, many people were wary about bands in the folk metal subgenre, whose merchandise and visual branding features runic symbols or who go to runic inscriptions for lyrics.A Viking battle demonstration at Midgardsblot. Heilung’s core members met through the Viking re-enactment scene.David B. Torch for The New York TimesBarbara Welento, 32, traveled from Poland to hear Heilung.David B. Torch for The New York TimesRunic windchimes at the Midgardsblot.David B. Torch for The New York TimesReclaiming Viking culture, particularly the runes, from neo-Nazis was a central part of Heilung’s mission, Strindin said. Each of the band’s live shows opens with a recited poem that emphasizes the audience’s shared humanity. “Remember that we all are brothers, all people, and beasts and trees and stone and wind,” reads one line.Strindin said that when she was growing up in Norway, in the 1990s, taking an interest in runes was discouraged by teachers and parents, because of their far-right associations. Heilung, she said, was “helping to take those symbols back, and put new meaning to them,” one that emphasized their original, spiritual intentions.“We see music as a cup,” Faust said. “You can have a beautiful cup, but a cup is supposed to transport something. So I was always more interested in the content: What am I doing with these frequencies? What is my intent, with these songs?”At the album listening session in the replica Viking hall, there was a quiet, respectful atmosphere, like a church. People closed their eyes to listen, or read through a booklet of explanatory notes the band had provided to accompany each track.The next day, Heilung played the festival’s headline slot to a crowd of fans who had come from all over the world. Lindsey Epperson, 32, from Tucson, Ariz., who had left the United States for the first time to be there, said the band’s music was “familiar, even though I wasn’t from that time,” adding, “It sounds like home to me.”A hush fell over the crowd as the show began. A performer wafted incense out over the audience, and the rest of the band gathered in a circle to recite the opening poem. They left a break after each line, so the crowd could chant it back with one voice.A couple on a Viking burial mound at dawn at Midgadsblot. “People are searching for an identity to come closer to something that is missing in their modern lives,” said the festival’s founder.David B. Torch for The New York Times More

Hear tracks by Shygirl, Ava Max, Horse Lords and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. 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.Romeo Santos and Justin Timberlake, ‘Sin Fin’Ever the canny collaborator, Justin Timberlake joins Romeo Santos — formerly of the Dominican-rooted boy band Aventura, now a stadium act on his own — to pump up a typically imploring bachata. Both of them are sleek high tenors who can always sound like they’re eager for romance; both also know what it’s like to sing answered by ecstatic screams. “Sin Fin” (“Endless”) is a bilingual pop promise with a stalking undercurrent. Timberlake sings, “Can’t escape my love ’cause it’s yours/Even if you walk out the door it’ll chase you down.” It opens with cathedral-choir harmonies, then buttresses the bongos and syncopated guitar of bachata with pop’s synthesizers and hip-hop’s hype-man cheers. Melding bachata and power ballad, it still begs for love with high drama. JON PARELESAva Max, ‘Million Dollar Baby’Ava Max is partying like it’s 2000 and 2004 on the thumping “Million Dollar Baby,” a sleek, calisthenic pop song that name-checks Clint Eastwood’s Best Picture winner and interpolates “Can’t Fight the Moonlight,” LeAnn Rimes’ once-inescapable “Coyote Ugly” theme song. (Who said Y2K nostalgia was dead!) While Max still hasn’t quite carved out a distinct persona in the pop sphere, she’s proven herself to be a satisfying practitioner of aughts-pop pastiche — there’s even a stuttering echo of “Bad Romance” on the bridge. “She broke out of her chains,” Max sings of her titular, diamond-encrusted heroine, “Turned the fire into rain.” LINDSAY ZOLADZAlex Lahey, ‘Congratulations’On the booming power-pop track “Congratulations,” the Australian singer-songwriter Alex Lahey attempts to process the news that an ex is getting married: “Congratulations,” she sings, dripping with sarcasm, “so happy for your perfect life.” There’s pathos in her voice during the verses — “If I don’t care then why do I still think about you all the time?” — but the chorus is volcanic and cathartic, as Lahey’s colossal guitar tones swell like a sudden surge of inner strength. ZOLADZShygirl, ‘Nike’“Peri-peri, too hot to handle,” the London-based Shygirl boasts with cool confidence on “Nike,” the latest single from her forthcoming debut album, “Nymph.” While the previous songs she’s released from the record have been glitchy and ethereal — think hyperpop crossed with “Visions”-era Grimes — “Nike” is all woozy low-end and spotlit swagger. “He tell me, ‘Nike, just do it,” Shygirl intones on the track (which was produced by the British electronic artist Mura Masa), her delivery full of winking, sensual charisma. ZOLADZHorse Lords, ‘Mess Mend’The instrumental “Mess Mend,” by the Baltimore band Horse Lords, starts out skewed — with chords from a slightly detuned piano hitting unevenly on offbeats — and gets nuttier from there, with a tricky 7/4 meter, a guitar melody that suggests a non-Euclidean hoedown and a gradual devolution into a funky electronic drone, not to mention a final twist. It’s a brainy lark. PARELESVDA, ‘Môgô Kélé’VDA — short for Voix des Anges — is a vocal duo from Ivory Coast that has become a consistent hitmaker in the Ivorian pop style called zouglou, which floats suavely sustained vocals over brisk polyrhythms and glossy synthesizers: airborne tracks that often hold sociopolitical messages. Above the speedy six-beat rhythms of “Môgô Kélé” — a hyperactive mesh of drums, marimbas, flutes and call-and-response vocals — VOA sings about easing tensions that have risen lately between Mali and Ivory Coast, citing their longstanding historical ties. The video shows jailed soldiers; it also gives the VDA a backdrop of both countries’ flags and words like “la paix,” “fraternité” and “union,” while the music sparkles and bounds ahead. PARELESDanielle Ponder, ‘Only the Lonely’“Love is lost and I must walk away,” Danielle Ponder sings, with mournful resolution, in “Only the Lonely,” a ballad that fights back any regrets with the certainty that “You don’t love me, you just lonely.” As the track rises from hollow keyboard tones to grand orchestral melancholy, Ponder’s voice opens up to reveal its bluesy power, with ghosts of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. By the end she finds herself, once again, nearly alone. PARELESCarm featuring Edie Brickell, ‘More and More’CJ Camerieri, who records as Carm, plays brass instruments in yMusic, a contemporary chamber ensemble he co-founded; he has also backed Bon Iver and Paul Simon. In his own music, he often multitracks his trumpet and French horn into a supportive brass choir, as he does in “More and More,” a collaboration with Edie Brickell as a topliner. She sings about love, almost diffidently, amid sustained swells of brasses and strings. an electronic drumbeat and some echoing trumpet calls raise tensions, only to dissolve them in the undulating warmth of Carm’s orchestrations. PARELESWild Pink featuring Julien Baker, ‘Hold My Hand’John Ross, who leads Wild Pink, went through extensive cancer treatment between the band’s 2021 debut album and its coming one, “ILYSM.” He has explained that “Hold My Hand” came from a moment of “lying on the operating table where a member of the surgical team held my hand right before I went under.” As he whisper-sings to ask, “Will you be there when I come around,” joined by Julien Baker sounding delicate and fond, the band rolls through four rising chords again and again, promising nothing but reassurance. PARELESDawn Richard and Spencer Zahn, ‘Vantablack’The ever-evolving, impossible-to-pigeonhole Dawn Richard once again introduces a new side of herself on the first movement of “Pigments,” an upcoming collaborative album she made with the experimentalist Spencer Zahn. Each track on the album is named for a specific hue: “Coral,” “Sandstone,” “Indigo,” and “Vantablack” make up “Movement 1,” which the pair released in full this week. The culmination “Vantablack” is a tranquil, abstract, and utterly gorgeous contemporary classical soundscape populated by lilting clarinet, Zahn’s airy bass playing, and above it all Richard’s fluttering vocals, which profess a deep and radical comfort in her own skin. ZOLADZSteve Lehman and Sélébéyone, ‘Poesie I’In the hip-hop-jazz-avant-electroacoustic group Sélébéyone — which means “intersection” in the West African language Wolof — the saxophonist, composer and producer Steve Lehman collaborates with rappers from New York City (HPrizm from the Antipop Consortium) and Dakar (Gaston Bandimic), a saxophonist from Paris (Maciek Lasserre) and a drummer based in Brooklyn (Damion Reid). The group’s second album, “Xaybu: the Unseen,” pushes its previous ambitions further. “Poesie I” knocks its rhythms around with piano clusters, drumming that keeps moving the downbeat, hopscotching saxophone lines and a rap from HPrizm that keeps switching up its flow: “These words don’t fit so I’m forcing ‘em in/smashing the edges,” he declares. PARELES More

MEMPHIS — Moneybagg Yo — Bagg to his friends — doesn’t get back to his Memphis hometown as much as he’d like anymore, so when he returned one Friday in July, he was primed for the occasion. His top, shorts and sneakers: Louis Vuitton. His chains and earrings: weighty and bright. His nails: freshly buffed to a shine. His Cadillac Escalade: bulletproof.He had arrived for an appearance at the eighth annual Birthday Bash, a concert organized by the Memphis rap stalwart Yo Gotti. “I feel like Michael Jackson at home,” Bagg said of the performance at FedExForum, home of the Memphis Grizzlies. “This is who created you.”Over the past few years, Bagg — born DeMario DeWayne White Jr. — has been steadily reaching audiences well beyond his home city. His last album, “A Gangsta’s Pain” from 2021, opened at the top of the Billboard album chart, his first No. 1, following two debuts in the Top 5. He placed five consecutive singles in the Top 20 of the Billboard rap chart, two of which, “Said Sum” and “Wockesha,” became pop hits, reaching the Top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100.He’s a sneakily lyrical rapper — bursting with pugnacious talk but also wry. His flow is syrupy, often swallowing syllables but not the vérité imagery and frisky, conversational tone that make some of his best lyrics sound like direct, mettle-testing addresses. “Wockesha,” a 2021 track that samples DeBarge’s “Stay With Me” (à la the Notorious B.I.G.’s “One More Chance”), showed that Bagg could record songs that leaned more melodic and tender, broadening his appeal.“I’m glad ‘Wockesha’ took off and did what it did ’cause now people accept me in that melodic vibe,” he said. “Bagg can do that now, we don’t look at him crazy.”Moneybagg Yo has been releasing music for a decade. With “Federal” in 2015, his mixtapes started garnering wider attention.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesThis fall, he’ll release his fifth studio album. Even though he primarily lives in Atlanta now, the day’s itinerary encapsulated how deep his hometown roots still run. “I’m still most definitely connected around here,” he said. “When I’m not at home, I’m at home.” His first stop was the nail salon, the next an overgrown 28.8-acre plot of land bought for him last year as a 30th birthday gift by his girlfriend, Ari Fletcher, a social media influencer. Driving alongside the property, he laughed as he pointed out the property’s boundaries: “Still going. Still going. Still going! Still going!”Eventually, he wants to host a community center, dirt bike paths, a paintball course and more there: “This for my neighborhood,” he said. After a brief meeting with a contractor to discuss the costs for the first wave of beautification, he headed to the nearby Walker Homes neighborhood in South Memphis, where he grew up, to pick up his 4-year-old son, Mari — one of his eight children — who was dressed for a day with dad in an all-white Polo outfit.“I just started being able to make my kids’ birthdays,” Bagg said of the long, unforgiving road he faced early in his career. “Until three years ago, I sacrificed me some birthdays, holidays, football games, doughnuts with dad. Now the world know me and the money gonna come, but I was trying to get the money and provide for them the whole time. There’s no excuse now.”Bagg has been releasing music for a decade — first, mixtapes that gained him renown locally, then beginning with “Federal” in 2015, ones that garnered much wider attention. His first major label album came in 2018. (His music is released by Interscope in partnership with Yo Gotti’s CMG Records and N-Less Entertainment.)“Every time I ever dropped a project, something always happen before I ever elevate, like a hardship,” Moneybagg Yo said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesWhen he began having broader success, Bagg said he was surprised to learn that many established stars, like Future, were longtime fans: “A lot of people was really riding, listening to my music, that you wouldn’t expect.” Pharrell produced a track on “A Gangsta’s Pain.” Bagg formed a strong bond with the rapper Kevin Gates, who facilitated his conversion to Islam in 2018; he travels with an $8,000 prayer mat, a gift from Gates.Now more than ever, regionally specific rap can make it to the top of the charts in relatively unvarnished form, and Bagg’s wins have largely been on his own terms. Even though he’s beginning to collaborate more widely, he still prefers working with his own set of producers rather than those who are better-known.Since Bagg has grown into the biggest rap star to emerge from Memphis in a generation, he needs to be mindful, even at home. Throughout the day, he was accompanied by two oversized security guards with evident military training.“They had to get me to understand it, like, bruh, you need that, that’s what make you a superstar,” Bagg said. “It don’t just come with you being scared, it comes with you moving smart.”He’d just arrived at the Crystal Palace, a skating rink where a teenage Bagg and friends would while away weekend nights. The rink has been closed for years, but Bagg has been in contact with city officials about the possibility of revitalizing it. In the parking lot, Bagg asked his driver to turn the SUV so he could keep an eye on the street.“I’m so comfortable, I could be in house shoes right now,” he said, almost giggling.Minutes later, he headed to “the red store,” a bare-bones convenience store that’s the only retail establishment for blocks in the middle of streets dotted with rundown homes. “We gambled right there,” he said, pointing to a house up the block, then leaned in and whispered with a quick laugh, “I was selling dope right here.” He has a picture of the store tattooed on him.The rapper said his new album would be a turn back toward the energy of his “Federal” era. Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesHe stepped into the building, greeting employees and fans and telling an associate to buy out all the Rap Snacks chips in his signature flavors (Heat vs. Hot and Dill Pickle Jalapeño), then peeled off a few $100 bills to give to the store’s owner.Bagg’s next stop was intensely personal: visiting, for the first time, the grave of a longtime friend, Nuskie, who was killed in January at age 24. “I really ain’t snapped back,” Bagg said of wrestling with the tragedy. “I’m just dealing with it better now.”He sat down to roll a blunt from a pouch of weed, and thought about his trajectory. “Every time I ever dropped a project, something always happen before I ever elevate, like a hardship,” he said, adding that he planned to name his plot of land after Nuskie. Then, for the only time all day, he was silent.The show beckoned, though. By now, he was traveling with a full caravan of cars filled with old friends. They stopped at the Superior Shop, a clothing store where Bagg dropped off some Louis Vuitton pants to be tailored, and met up with the rapper EST Gee, a label mate and friend also in town for the concert.Once the store became claustrophobically crowded, with well over 100 people filling the room, he headed to Straight Drop, a seafood restaurant in North Memphis. The building’s lobby was filled with pallets of bottles of Vior, an alkaline water Bagg is an investor in. (“It’s every day, it’s clean.”) While waiting for the catering-size platters of fish and shrimp to come out, he and EST Gee filmed some footage for a video for a new song, “Strong,” in the parking lot.Earlier in July, he had performed to tens of thousands of people at London’s Wireless Festival, his first international show, but here he was, a platinum rapper back on his home turf, continuing to do things the old-fashioned way. He said his recent string of successes only emboldened him to double down on the specificity of his sound. The new album, he said, would be a turn back toward the energy of his “Federal” era. He recently put his permanent flawless diamond teeth back in.“Trap taking over the world now,” he said. “It ain’t limited no more.” More

The 26-year-old singer and guitarist saw terrifying signs and symbols during the making of his new album, “Young Blood.” He steadied himself, and put it all in the music.Ours is an improbable world, in which Birkenstocks and tie-dye — once signifiers of hippie anti-style, as glamorous as trail mix — are now more chic than ever.But in the early 2000s, when the singer and guitarist Marcus King was attending middle school in Piedmont, S.C., this was not the case. In a recent interview, King recalled being made fun of by “teachers and students alike” for showing up to class dressed like a Deadhead.“I was like, ‘Man, I saved up a long time for these Birkenstocks!’” King said. “‘I’m going to wear them all year!’ So I always kind of stood out.”That same unapologetically out-of-step spirit animates King’s second solo album, “Young Blood,” a collection of brawny hard-rock songs in the audibly hirsute tradition of the James Gang, Grand Funk and early ZZ Top — uber-70s outfits whose names have not been trendy musical reference points since Homer Simpson was single and people under 60 used “boogie” as a verb.But in this respect, too, King — who is 26 but looks younger, with a baby face and a goofy, almost triangular smile — has the tastes of a time traveler. He grew up with his father, the blues musician Marvin King, whose record collection was full of music like this.“I was getting spoon-fed these riffs along with my Gerber applesauce, man,” King said in a video chat from Italy, where he’d stepped outside and found Hollywood-quality sunset light. “My dad would give me records to listen to while he was off at work. And I’d just listen to them and learn ’em.”His mother left the family when King was very young. They maintain a relationship, but King says her absence “created the first sense of loss and sorrow in my life”— a predisposition to the blues.In King’s earliest conscious memory, he’s around 4 years old, home alone, strumming his father’s Epiphone El Dorado, which he described as “one of the more off-limits guitars” in the house. Once King acquired his own guitar, it became his closest companion. From the beginning, he was remarkably good at it, too. He was only 11 when he made his professional recording debut, on Marvin King’s album “Huge in Europe” — that’s him on the cover, a pint-size prodigy in shades and a wide-brimmed Stevie Ray Vaughan hat.By the time he was a teenager, King said, “I didn’t want to just be the kiddo guitar player.” He started listening to more jazz, and paying closer attention to vocalists — from Aretha Franklin to David Ruffin to Janis Joplin — whose tone and phrasing he’d then try to emulate on his own instrument.As soon as he was old enough to secure a learner’s permit, he was booking shows at any venue within driving distance. These experiences relieved him of whatever teenage timidity he had left. “Being in the clubs and having to stand your ground is kind of a scary place,” he said. His extracurricular activities made him chronically late for school. “They were so terrible about it, man,” he said. “They tried to put me in juvenile hall for truancy, multiple times.”“My dad would give me records to listen to while he was off at work,” King said of his father, the blues musician Marvin King. “And I’d just listen to them and learn ’em.”Eric Ryan Anderson for The New York TimesHe eventually dropped out, and then toured relentlessly, working his way up to sharing stages and festival bills with the jam-circuit elite. He made three well-received albums of soul-inflected Southern rock as leader of the Marcus King Band, and earned a Grammy nomination for his first solo album, “El Dorado,” released in 2020.Produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, “El Dorado” drew on vintage AM-radio pop, Nudie-suit country and even psychedelia, bringing out a surprising delicacy in King’s preternaturally weathered vocals. But when King and Auerbach began mapping out plans for King’s next album, they quickly decided to tack in the opposite direction, aiming for something more raw and immediate.It was a practical decision, at least at first. “He’s out on the road, on tour, and the venues keep getting bigger and bigger,” Auerbach said in an interview, “and he wanted some songs to help feed that energy he’s experiencing onstage.”But in April, the momentum shifted. “Everything kind of fell apart in my personal life,” King said, his eyes suddenly downcast, narrowing behind his round tinted sunglasses.The album would become a document of this harrowing period. “Every part of me believed this was going to be my last record,” King said, “’cause I just knew I was going to either drink or drug myself to death. I was already on that path.”King started sneaking post-set beers while playing in bars as a teenager; as an adult, he said, he turned to alcohol and drugs to help him play through the pain of a punishing tour schedule. “If you’re tired and you need to get up and go, there’s things that’ll get you up to go. And if you’re depressed as hell, there’s things that will make you not so depressed,” he said. “And if you’re hung over, you do all those things again, and it goes away.”This was particularly unwise given that King was also taking prescription medication. “A lot of people argue that pineapple don’t belong on pizza,” he said. “But I can tell you for a fact that antidepressants and alcohol don’t go together.”Things got dark. King — who’d grown up in the Pentecostal church, whose father believed in messages from God, and whose mother often talked about premonitions and spirits — began to see ominous signs and symbols everywhere. The music of the English rock band Free seemed to follow him around; when King looked up the band’s lead guitarist, Paul Kossoff, he discovered that he’d died — of a pulmonary embolism, after years of drug use — when he was 25.King was 25 when he read this; it didn’t feel like a coincidence. “When you start creating these signs in your mind,” he said, “they start to show up all over the place.”Meanwhile, his relationship with his girlfriend was circling the drain. It was in April that they booked a staycation in Nashville, hoping to rekindle things; it didn’t work. One night he wound up walking the streets after dark, and encountered what he described as an “entity without a face”— a man in a hooded sweatshirt with nothing but a void inside the hood.King said he lets the drama in his life build. “And then I write it in a record.”Eric Ryan Anderson for The New York TimesKing says he wasn’t wearing his glasses at the time — but he was also sober that night. Whatever he’d actually seen, it felt like a message: “A heads-up that the end was coming soon for me, and to get all the work in that I could.”“Young Blood” was in progress, and its track listing tells a story from the abyss — “It’s Too Late,” “Lie Lie Lie,” “Pain,” “Dark Cloud,” “Blues Worse Than I Ever Had.” But the tone of the music itself is defiant, not desperate; King calls it a “real war-cry kind of thing,” an attempt to rise from the ashes.“I’ve been through a lot of those things that Marcus is going through,” Auerbach said. “I can relate, and I was just trying to be supportive the whole time. It was tough when he would come into a writing session and he would be late because things were bad at home. I felt bad for him. But in retrospect, it definitely set the fire of creativity when it came to making the record.”These days King believes that weird night in Nashville was a warning, as opposed to an omen: Get it together, or else. He’s engaged to someone new — the singer Briley Hussey, who he says “kind of pulled me out of that crevasse”— and while he still enjoys the occasional glass of wine, he uses “non-repressive techniques” to deal with whatever demons arise.One of those techniques is music. He was in Tuscany to put the finishing touches on another new record, working in a studio housed in a former 12th-century church at the suggestion of a producer he wouldn’t name.Another new album?“I’ve tried to keep a journal,” King said sheepishly. “And I just can’t keep up with the damn thing. So I just let it all build up. And then I write it in a record.” More