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      H.E.R.’s Soulful Suspicions, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Yves Tumor, Brittney Spencer, Tyler, the Creator 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 theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.H.E.R., ‘Cheat Code’H.E.R. (Gabriella Sarmiento Wilson) has a rich grasp of soul and R&B history backed by her old-school musicianship as a singer, guitarist and keyboardist. There are 21 songs on her new album “Back of My Mind,” but most of them cling to a narrow palette: ballad tempos, two-chord vamps, constricted melody lines. “Cheat Code” is still a ballad, but a little more expansive. Its narrator is coming to grips with a partner’s infidelity — “What you’ve been doing’s probably something I ain’t cool with” — and warning, “You need to get your story straight.” The arrangement blossoms from acoustic guitar to quiet-storm studio band, with wind chimes and horns, only to thin out again, leaving her with just backup voices and a few piano notes, alone again with all her misgivings. JON PARELESBrittney Spencer, ‘Sober & Skinny’An insightful take on the way some relationships become sites of push and pull, one promise traded for another, one letdown making room for the next. “Sober & Skinny” is lonesome and doleful (some light melodic borrowing from Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” notwithstanding), the story of two people bound by their habits, and to each other, and how that can be the same thing: “I empty the fridge, you empty the bottle/we’re stacking up a mountain of hard pills we’ll have to swallow.” JON CARAMANICAAldous Harding, ‘Old Peel’The music is methodical and transparent: steady-ticking percussion, grumbling piano chords, spindly high guitar interjections, a melody line that barely budges. But Aldous Harding’s intent and attitude stay cheerfully, stubbornly, intriguingly opaque. “Old peel, no deal/I won’t speak if you call me baby,” she sings, utterly deadpan, enjoying the standoff. PARELESYves Tumor, ‘Jackie’Yves Tumor, the ineffable and audacious experimentalist, once again brandishes a reverence for Prince on “Jackie,” another venture into magisterial rock that clings to devastating grandeur. Tumor, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, assumes the role of a tortured ringleader, shepherding listeners into their surreal world of sexual and musical provocation. It’s almost easy to miss the song’s reality: a lament for the end of the relationship, in which Tumor’s anguish makes it difficult to eat and sleep. “These days have been tragic,” they wail, yearning for the possibility of a return of their body’s biological rhythms, and a promise that they will one day be whole again. ISABELIA HERRERATyler, the Creator, ‘Lumberjack’A return to croaky bragging for Tyler, the Creator, over a beat that heavily samples “2 Cups of Blood,” from the Gothically gloomy debut album by the Gravediggaz. Tyler’s boasts take the gleaming aesthete excess Pharrell once celebrated and gives it a tart edge: “Rolls-Royce pull up, Black boy hop out”; “Salad-colored emerald on finger, the size of croutons”; a credit card that “really can’t max out.” It’s a posture he’s earned:That’s my nuance, used to be the weirdoUsed to laugh at me, listen to me with their ears closedUsed to treat me like that boy Malcolm in the MiddleNow I’m zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zeroCARAMANICAStiff Pap featuring BCUC, ‘Riders on the Storm’Stiff Pap is an electronic duo from Johannesburg: the producer Jakinda and the rapper and singer Ayema Probllem. For “Riders on the Storm,” they’re joined by the Soweto band BCUC (Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness), adding gritty voices and salvos of percussion to both deepen and destabilize a track that’s already skewed and wily. Amid buzzing, hopscotching keyboard lines and fitful drumming, the song addresses, among other things, perpetual striving and social-media anxiety, doubled down by music that keeps shifting underfoot. PARELESChucky73, ‘Diri’A false start, a tiptoeing piano hook, a video featuring a golf course invasion: with “Diri,” the Bronx rapper Chucky73 has assembled an easy home run. The chubby-cheeked, beaming Lothario dazzles here, his slap-happy persona only amplified by his self-assured, nimble baritone and punch lines about the spoils of his success: “En do’ año’ me hice rico/El dinero me tiene bonito.” “In two years, I got rich,” he says. “The money’s got me looking cute.” HERRERAYoung Devyn, ‘Like This’Elsewhere on her debut EP, “Baby Goat,” Young Devyn leans into her Trinidadian roots and her past as a soca singer, and also toys with Brooklyn drill music. But on “Like This,” she’s just rapping — pointedly, nimbly, eye-rollingly: “I don’t even speak to my pops /How the hell would you think I would speak to my exes?” CARAMANICACochemea, ‘Mimbreños’Cochemea Gastelum, the saxophonist for the Dap-Kings soul and funk band, claims his heritage for “Baca Sewa Vol II,” his coming solo album. “Mimbreños” is named after his ancestors from the Mimbres Valley in New Mexico. It’s a call-and-response, his saxophone tune answered by vocal la-las, carried by calm, six-beat percussion. Then a marimba, hitting offbeats, supplies a vamp for Cochemea’s saxophone improvisations, abetted by biting electronic timbres. It’s untraditional, yet it feels deeply rooted. PARELESLeon Bridges, ‘Why Don’t You Touch Me’Leon Bridges, the Texas-based singer whose voice harks back to Sam Cooke, probes his unhappiness as a lover’s desire wanes in “Why Don’t You Touch Me.” A patient beat and lean electric-guitar chords accompany him as he questions, apologizes, complains and begs. “Don’t leave me out here unfulfilled/’Cause we’re slowly getting disconnected,” he reproaches, desperately longing to get physical. PARELESHarold Land, ‘Happily Dancing/Deep Harmonies Falling’“Westward Bound!”, a collection of never-before-released concert recordings from the early-to-mid-1960s at Seattle’s Penthouse club, offers a chance to revisit the overlooked career of Harold Land. A coolly expressive tenor saxophonist, Land left his mark in bands led by Max Roach and Clifford Brown and by the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, but his own career as a bandleader never rose fully above the fray. In ways, “Happily Dancing/Deep Harmonies Falling,” a Land original, is quintessential hard-bop: the waltz-time swing feel, caught between elegance and heft; the cooperation between Land and the trumpeter Carmell Jones; the commingling of hard blues playing and balladic lyricism. But what sets this recording apart is Land, and his way of articulating each note with just enough restraint and sly timing to pull you in close. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOBen Goldberg, ‘Everything Happens to Be.’The clarinetist Ben Goldberg arranged “Everything Happens to Be.,” the title track from his rewarding new album (its name riffs on a jazz standard), in such a way that everyone in his quintet has a load-bearing role to play. The guitarist Mary Halvorson, the bassist Michael Formanek and the saxophonist Ellery Eskelin all carry different melodic parts, as the drummer Tomas Fujiwara employs a light touch to push things ahead, mirroring Formanek’s cadence without bearing down on him. RUSSONELLO More

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      Now Sparks Can Confuse Fans on the Big Screen

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      The musical brothers Ron and Russell Mael are known for catchy songs and perplexing shifts. But they longed to be in films. This summer they’re part of two.Sparks is a band unlike any other. Ron and Russell Mael — the brothers who have made up the eccentric, unclassifiable duo for more than 50 years — have played a pivotal, if unheralded, role in multiple musical movements, from glam rock to new wave to synth-pop.Their witty, hyper-literate songs, along with the singer Russell’s good looks and keyboardist Ron’s deadpan, glowering stage presence, made Sparks icons of a sort in Europe, but never more than a cult band in the United States. With 25 albums to their name, they have often followed up their biggest moments with radical shifts in style that thrilled loyal fans but baffled more casual listeners.In 2017, the music-obsessed director Edgar Wright, fresh off the success of “Baby Driver,” went to see Sparks perform in Los Angeles. For years, he had been telling his friends that someone needed to make a documentary about the group, and as he looked at the audience, which ranged from teenagers to graying 60-somethings, and the weird mix of celebrities in attendance, he insistently repeated the idea to his friend, the filmmaker Phil Lord — who told him to make the movie himself.“I thought, if not me, then who would do it?” Wright said in a recent video conversation.Four years later, “The Sparks Brothers” is reaching theaters, an exhaustive, proudly overstuffed two-hour-20-minute celebration of a group described in the film as “successful, underrated, hugely influential and overlooked at the same time.” In addition to interviews with the enigmatic Maels, Wright conducted 80 interviews, talking with Sparks fans like Beck, Flea, members of Duran Duran, Mike Myers and Neil Gaiman, as well as collaborators and associates.Edgar Wright filming the Maels in Japan. If there’s one takeaway from the band’s story, the director said, “it’s about the persistence of vision.”Richie Starzec/Focus FeaturesOne theme in the documentary is the Maels’ lifelong interest in film, and their multiple near-misses in trying to bring their music to the big screen, including a proposed collaboration with the French comedian Jacques Tati and a project with Tim Burton. So it’s ironic that just weeks after “The Sparks Brothers” arrives, they have another movie release: “Annette,” a musical written by the Maels, directed by Leos Carax, and starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. The story of a comedian and opera singer who give birth to a daughter with a “unique gift,” it will open the Cannes Film Festival in July.“Even before we had a band, the merging of music and movies just seemed so perfect,” Ron, 75, said, adding, “To be sitting on a movie set in Brussels and watching Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard singing something you wrote — it’s surreal, way beyond what we expected.” (Carax was unavailable for comment.)Wright presented his idea to the Maels that night he saw them onstage, but they expressed some trepidation, for the same reasons they had turned down previous offers for a documentary.“We always say that we don’t like looking back because we think it kind of paralyzes you,” said Russell, 72, encapsulating the constant creative forward motion that has defined the band’s oddly incomparable history. “The proposition of doing a documentary is kind of the opposite of that, and in our minds we thought, is it like an obituary in some sense?”During a video call, Russell added that the endurance of the Maels’ partnership also seemed potentially problematic. “Sparks’ story isn’t the standard fare of a lot of music documentaries,” he said. “There’s no drug casualties, we don’t have that conflict of other bands with brothers in the band — so are there enough dramatic elements to make it interesting?”To Wright, on the contrary, their perseverance was exactly the point. “That’s the inspiring part,” he said. “Every other band story is about people squandering their talent, and at a certain point you lose sympathy. The fact that Sparks have lasted so long is partly because they’re always close to success but never mainstream. They’ve managed to exist in this sweet spot where they can keep going, but they never have to sell out.”To the surprise of many, the Maels were born not in Britain, but in Southern California, and were even star athletes in high school. They started playing in groups while attending the University of California, Los Angeles, inspired by the spiky spirit of the Who and the Kinks and by French New Wave cinema. Their band, Halfnelson, was championed by Todd Rundgren, but their 1971 debut album flopped. (Closing a circle, Sparks and Rundgren released the new song “Your Fandango” earlier this year.) They moved to England in 1973, after taking on the name Sparks.Russell and Ron Mael in the documentary. They got their start in the ’70s and continue to make music.via Focus FeaturesThat was the start of a crazy roller coaster career (including an appearance in the 1977 disaster movie flop “Rollercoaster”). The dramatic “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us” reached No. 2 on the British charts in 1974. After hooking up with pioneering disco producer Giorgio Moroder, “The Number One Song in Heaven” (1979) was not only a huge club record, but also created a blueprint for dance-based electro-pop of acts like the Human League and New Order.Sparks’ theatrical presentation, from their album covers to their stage production, added to the allure. “What really stuck with me,” Wright said, “is these two performers who were staring down the camera at you, in sharp contrast to a lot of acts who would smile — it was quite unnerving.”Their most notorious signature is Ron’s mustache, alternately compared with that of Adolf Hitler or Charlie Chaplin. In Paul McCartney’s 1980 music video for “Coming Up,” in which he dresses as an array of rock stars from Buddy Holly to Frank Zappa, he appears behind a keyboard with Ron’s unmistakable scowl and facial hair.Teaming up with Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s, who was dating Russell at the time, Sparks had a genuine MTV hit in 1983 with “Cool Places.” By the time the lush, pulsing “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way’” was the top airplay record of 1994 in Germany, they were being accused of copying the artists they had inspired.But most of these hits were followed with rapid musical left turns, as if the group was eager to shed any expectations that might come with popular success. In “The Sparks Brothers,” Ron says, “we think it’s important to do something that’s polarizing.”Sometimes the results are gloriously weird (in “My Baby’s Taking Me Home,” the lyrics consist of the title phrase repeated more than 100 times), and sometimes they’re more confrontational: When a label executive suggested they make an album of music to dance to, they responded with a record titled “Music You Can Dance To” (the label dropped them), and when the idea of a project with the band Franz Ferdinand surfaced, the first song they sent to the other group was called “Collaborations Don’t Work.” (The resulting 2015 album, “FFS,” was a major critical success.)Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesBoth Maels, though, deny that there’s anything willfully destructive in their musical choices. “Within pop music, within three-minute songs, the exciting thing is to see how you can reshape the formula and still come up with something provocative that hasn’t been done,” Russell said. “You’re always searching for that new thing you can impose on the givens of pop music — that’s when the change becomes something exciting, and not just because we want to say we’re chameleons all the time.”The portrait that emerges in “The Sparks Brothers” is of musicians fully dedicated to their work — even in the years when Sparks didn’t have a record deal, the Maels continued to write and record with almost monastic discipline. “I don’t think it’s especially praiseworthy that even in those periods when things around us were kind of dire, we were working on the music,” Ron said. “There isn’t an alternative; that kind of work ethic is all that there is. At this point, we have an excuse and we could say we’re too old, but that’s a part of our DNA.”Wright said this example of artistic commitment beyond the pursuit of commercial success is the true intention of the film. “I hope that for people with creative ambitions, the lesson that comes out is to stay true to your beliefs, because really it’s about the persistence of vision,” he said. “Especially in this climate when musicians are having the hardest time they’ve ever had, I hope the documentary shows a way to do it.”Meanwhile, the Mael brothers have not slowed down. Last year, their album “A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip” became their fourth British Top 10 entry, and they plan to tour the United States, Europe and Japan in early 2022, alongside the release of a new album. They have a “very brash” sequel to “Annette” they will be pitching during the Cannes festival, and still hope to make an animated film of their 2010 radio musical, “The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman.”The experience of “The Sparks Brothers” has given the perpetually evolving Sparks a different attitude about revisiting their life’s work.“We’ve always said that we dispose of everything immediately after the moment,” Ron said. “But with this specific representation, we have to admit that perhaps some of those judgments were wrong. This way of presenting our legacy is the one way we want to be remembered.” More

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      Hit Hard by Pandemic, Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center to Merge

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      By joining forces, the two institutions hope to bounce back from the severe losses brought by the coronavirus.The pandemic forced many American arts organizations to resort to mass layoffs and deep pay cuts as ticket sales vanished for more than a year.Now one of the nation’s most prominent ensembles, the Philadelphia Orchestra, is trying another tack as it seeks to recover from the crisis: It announced plans Thursday to merge with its landlord, the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.“We knew we needed a big move,” said Matías Tarnopolsky, the president and chief executive of the orchestra, who is set to lead the new organization, which will be called the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Kimmel Center, Inc. “The only way forward is collaboration.”Facing severe shortfalls, cultural groups across the country are looking for ways to streamline operations and establish new sources of revenue. American orchestras, including Philadelphia’s, are particularly vulnerable after years of rising costs.The Philadelphia Orchestra, one of the nation’s best ensembles, has struggled financially. Its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, led them in 2017 at Carnegie Hall.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesThe orchestra and the Kimmel Center are betting that by pooling resources, they can better navigate the financial and artistic challenges of the post-pandemic era.The orchestra has won accolades for its artistry under the music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who also serves in that role at the Metropolitan Opera, but it has long struggled financially. After a year of mostly streaming concerts, the orchestra will begin a new season in October with a performance by the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.The merger will give the orchestra, which has tried for years to rebuild after declaring bankruptcy a decade ago, a leading spot at one of the country’s largest performing arts centers, and allow it to save on rent. (When the orchestra filed for bankruptcy in 2011, it cited the high cost of rent at the Kimmel Center, which then totaled $2.5 million a year, as contributing to its woes; it subsequently got a rent reduction.)The arrangement will allow the Kimmel Center, which is almost entirely dependent on ticket sales, the added support of the orchestra’s $266 million endowment. That endowment, which was bolstered by a $50 million gift in 2019, is now among the largest for an American orchestra.Both institutions have made painful cuts as they seek to recover from the pandemic. The orchestra lost about $26 million in ticket sales and performance fees after canceling more than 200 concerts. The orchestra’s leaders took pay cuts and its musicians agreed to reduce compensation temporarily by 25 percent.The Kimmel Center, which depends heavily on touring artists, Broadway shows and appearances by authors and public intellectuals, canceled more than 1,100 events and lost more than $42 million in ticket revenue. The center furloughed many of its 126 employees and led an emergency campaign to raise $10 million.The pandemic accelerated conversations about a possible merger, said Anne Ewers, the president and chief executive of the Kimmel Center, who initiated talks with Tarnopolsky last fall.“When the pandemic hit, every single earned revenue line was gone,” Ewers said. “I realized that our philanthropic base was not as deep and as broad as it needed to be.”The orchestra has called Verizon Hall, one of three venues at the Kimmel Center, its home since the center’s opening in 2001, playing more than 100 concerts a year there.But behind the scenes, the orchestra and the Kimmel Center sometimes clashed over schedules and programming choices, Tarnopolsky said.By merging with the Kimmel Center, he said, the orchestra would be able to expand its offerings, hosting classical music festivals, collaborating with Broadway performers and jazz artists, and taking part in outreach events and other live offerings.“It’s about seizing those opportunities rather than watching them go by,” Tarnopolsky said.The orchestra has balanced its budget in recent years as it has worked to recover from a financial crisis that drove it into bankruptcy in 2011. Despite cutting its expenses in bankruptcy, rebuilding has not been easy: In 2016, its musicians held a brief strike that began on the night of the orchestra’s season-opening gala.The pandemic has led many arts organizations to reconsider questions of structure and management, and some have come to see benefits in joining together during a time of uncertainty. The San Francisco Conservatory of Music last fall acquired Opus 3 Artists, a leading agency that was struggling with steep losses as venues around the world shut down.Ewers said she hoped the merger in Philadelphia would serve as a model for other institutions facing economic pressures.“Many people tell us there needs to be more of this kind of collaborative effort,” she said. “I’m hoping that we inspire that.” More

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      'Arab Divas' at the Arab World Institute: Singers Who Took Center Stage

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      A multimedia exhibition in Paris offers a rich flashback to a period between the 1920s and the 1970s when many female performers took center stage.PARIS — The diva sings of love and unmitigated lust. Dressed in a scarlet evening gown with her hair pulled high, she cries out to her beloved, longs for a night of undying passion and yearns for the sun not to rise.The vocalist in the 1969 concert video is Umm Kulthum: the Arab world’s greatest 20th-century performer, possibly the best-known Egyptian woman since Cleopatra and the star of the exhibition “Divas” at the Institut du Monde Arabe, or Arab World Institute, in Paris. The show, which runs through Sept. 26, is a richly illustrated flashback to the period between the 1920s and the 1970s. It portrays unveiled and openly voluptuous women performing on stage and screen without fear of censorship or religious condemnation, and feminists, political activists and pioneering impresarios facing down the patriarchy.Costumes worn by the Lebanese singer Sabah in the 1970s, on display at the Arab World Institute.Alice SidoliBesides costumes and jewelry, passports and posters, album covers and high-heeled shoes, visitors get to watch footage of female performers wiggling their hips in mesmerizing moves and posing on the beach in hot pants. The overall picture contrasts sharply with present-day Western perceptions of the Arab world as a place where women are veiled from top to toe and silenced by all-powerful men.“The exhibition knocks down a fair number of clichés and preconceived ideas about this part of the world. Women actually occupied center stage, embodied modernity and were not at all absent from history,” said Élodie Bouffard, the exhibition’s co-curator. “They sang, acted, made people cry, broke hearts and showed off their bodies just as Western actresses did at the time.”“These images are still very present in the minds of younger generations,” she added. “They don’t just represent the past.”The institute’s president, Jack Lang, who was France’s culture minister in the 1980s and early 1990s, recalled in an interview that when he was a boy visiting Cairo, he sneaked into a theater where Umm Kulthum was performing, and was “stunned, absolutely breathtaken.” He later heard another singer, Fayrouz (the exhibition’s other major diva), while touring in Lebanon as a young actor, he said, then gave her a medal as culture minister in 1988.A poster from the 1968 movie “Bint El-Hares” (“The Guard’s Daughter”), which starred Fayrouz, center. The poster is included in the Paris show.Abboudi Bou JawdeThese women were not just exceptional vocalists, Lang noted: Some participated in their country’s struggle for independence from the colonial powers, Britain and France, and joined in a wave of nationalism that swept across the Arab world. “The emergence of these divas coincided more or less with a time of collective emancipation,” Lang explained. “The music sung by them is an extraordinary expression of freedom.”The exhibition opens in pre-World War II Cairo, the artistic and intellectual hub of the Arab world, where concert halls and cabarets proliferated, many of them established by women, the exhibition co-curator Hanna Boghanim said. Women also had a significant role in the film industry, she added, working as “directors, producers, actresses, costume makers, talent scouts.”Many of these women came from very humble backgrounds, including Umm Kulthum, who is introduced in a velvet-curtained enclosure in the show. Born in a village in the Nile Delta, she first performed disguised as a boy, singing religious songs that bewitched the crowds. Eventually, she came into her own, as a woman and as a voice, and became famous for her improvisational style. Her songs sometimes went on for more than an hour.Her story is told through photographs, album and magazine covers, videos, and bright-colored costumes created for the 2017 biopic “Looking for Umm Kulthum,” directed by the Iranian-born artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat.An installation at the Arab World Institute featuring stills and video from Shirin Neshat’s 2017 biopic “Looking for Umm Kulthum.” Alice SidoliThere are no loans from the Umm Kulthum museum in Cairo, the curators said; they were too complicated and expensive to organize. Nor are there loans from Fayrouz, who is still alive, despite requests made via the family and entourage of the reclusive vocalist. Her section contains posters, album and magazine covers, photographs and other paraphernalia, some compiled by a dedicated fan.By contrast, the section on the half-Algerian, half-Lebanese diva Warda is full of her personal possessions: sunglasses, medals, earrings, passports, an oud instrument, a brown leather suitcase and an Agatha Christie crime novel. Born in the Paris suburbs, Warda made her debut as a child in her father’s cabaret in the city’s Latin Quarter and became a successful recording artist before moving to Algeria in 1962, the year the country gained independence from France. There, she married an army officer who stopped her from singing. Her career took off when she moved to Egypt a decade later.The exhibition gets racier as it goes along, culminating with the last wave of 20th-century Arab divas, including the Egyptian-born Dalida, who became a superstar in France. Interspersed among displays of sequined evening gowns, stilettos and powder compacts are video monitors that show a woman singing from a hot tub and rows of others lifting their legs in skimpy outfits worthy of the Folies Bergère.In the decades since, the place of female performers in Arab countries has changed. Islamist movements and migration from rural areas have made parts of society more conservative about women’s dress and public behavior. That has led to assumptions in the West that Arab women are veiled and constrained today, as opposed to the decades when the divas reigned. The Egyptian-born performer Dalida in Giza in 1959. She became a superstar in France.D.R. Orlando ProductionsTo Coline Houssais, the author of “Music of the Arab World: An Anthology of 100 Artists,” these then-versus-now perceptions, which the exhibition risked encouraging, were misguided.“There are two visions of the Arab world,” she said in an interview. “One is: ‘They’re barbarians, they’re Islamists.’ The other is: ‘Everything used to be so good before. It was a golden age.’”“The Arab world’s development is measured using ultra-Western criteria, such as whether women smoke or not, or whether they wear short skirts,” she said. There were “more important factors, to do with equality: the number of women who work, women’s civil rights,” she added.Despite the coronavirus epidemic, the show is a hit with Parisian museumgoers, and visitors to the exhibition appeared to validate Houssais’s assessment. On a recent afternoon, onlookers seemed intrigued by the story of these stars of yesterday, who bucked contemporary stereotypes about Muslim women in France.“It’s really very interesting to find out about the emancipation of women in these societies and to see the contrast with today, even in terms of hairstyles,” said Camille Hurel, 23, a visitor to the show. “These were strong personalities who were known all around the world.”“Nowadays, I have the feeling that there isn’t as much freedom of expression,” she added.Randa Mirza and Waël Kodeih’s installation, “The Last Dance” (2020), featured in the Paris show, brings together the two D.J.s with vintage footage, converted to a hologram.Thierry RambaudHoussais said that, in fact, the Arab world today was mostly populated with people under 30, a generation “glued to social media, completely open to the world, and leading their own private revolutions against their families and their communities.”The notions of family, community and religion were fading, and these societies were in the middle of a major “recomposition,” she noted.“There are still 1,000 places in the Arab world where you can wear a bikini, snort coke and listen to American music,” she added. 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      Angélique Kidjo Connects With Africa’s Next Musical Generation

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      The artist from Benin showed African songwriters how to reach the world. Now they’re repaying the favor.Angélique Kidjo, the singer from Benin who has been forging Pan-African and transcontinental hybrids for three decades, didn’t really need another Grammy.In 2020, she received the best world music album award for the fourth time with “Celia,” her tribute to the Afro-Cuban salsa dynamo Celia Cruz. True to form, Grammy voters chose familiar names and snubbed the year’s world-music phenomenon: the Nigerian songwriter Burna Boy’s “African Giant,” an ambitious, thoughtful album that drew hundreds of millions of streams and made him an international sensation. (“African Giant” also included a guest appearance by Kidjo.)In her acceptance speech, Kidjo was gracious, but she pointedly looked ahead. “The new generations of artists coming from Africa gonna take you by storm,” she said, “and the time has come.”Kidjo, 60, follows through on that declaration with her new album, “Mother Nature,” which is full of collaborations with rising African songwriters and producers: Burna Boy, Mr Eazi and Yemi Alade from Nigeria as well as the Zambian rapper and singer Sampa the Great, the Zimbabwean-American songwriter Shungudzo and the singer Zeynab, who was born in Ivory Coast and lives in Benin. Throughout the album, her guests give their all to keep pace with Kidjo’s leather-lunged fervor.“This young generation has the same concern that I’ve had throughout my career — trying to give a very positive image of my continent, Africa,” Kidjo said via video from Paris. “I also wanted to hear from them about climate change and the impact it’s having on their life, and the way that they want to tackle that. With climate change, we in Africa are going to pay the greatest price for it, especially the youth. It’s going to be up to the future generation not to ask questions, but to act. Because the time to ask questions is running out.”Kidjo with the singer Zeynab, who appears on “Mother Nature.”via Angelique KidjoThe songs on “Mother Nature” feature snappy programmed Afrobeats, lilting Congolese soukous, rippling Nigerian juju and a dramatic orchestral chanson. Irresistible beats carry serious messages about preserving the environment, about human rights, about African unity and about the power of music and love.Kidjo recorded “Dignity” — a song that was galvanized when protesters against police brutality in Nigeria were shot — with Alade, 32, a major star in Nigerian pop whom she had worked with previously, in 2019. Alade, like Kidjo, has collaborated with musicians from across Africa and beyond (including with Beyoncé on the “Black Is King” soundtrack).“I grew up listening to her music,” Alade said in an interview from Lagos. “She is one of the few role models that I have. The one thing that definitely drew me to Angélique is her unapologetic Africanness, no matter where she goes. As far as Africa is concerned, she’s definitely our Angélique, our songbird — any time, any day. It’s always heartwarming to see her do what she does and the way she does it, despite the fact that she’s been doing it for so long. I look at her and I’m encouraged to just keep doing what I do.”Like most of Kidjo’s music through the years, the new album is multilingual — primarily English, but also French and West African languages like Fon and Nago — and it fuses new sounds and technologies with Africa’s past. In “One Africa,” Kidjo celebrates the year she was born — 1960 — because it was a turning point in African history, when multiple countries gained independence. (She planned a March 2020 Carnegie Hall concert around the milestone, which was canceled as New York shut down for the pandemic.) She based the music on “Indépendance Cha Cha,” released in 1960 by Joseph Kabasele’s group L’African Jazz.“What this album taught me,” Kidjo said, “is that if we take the time really to speak to one another, we come up with beautiful stuff.”Julien Mignot for The New York TimesFor “Africa, One of a Kind,” Mr Eazi constructed the track around a sample of the Malian singer Salif Keita’s 1995 song “Africa,” but Kidjo raised the ante: She coaxed Keita, now 71, out of retirement to sing it anew. The song’s video features a dance, gogbahoun, from Kidjo’s home village in Benin, Ouidah.“Gogbahoun means the rhythm that breaks glass,” she said. It’s a beat, she explained, that was originally tapped on an empty bottle with a piece of metal: a ring, a spoon, a coin. “And when the bottle is broken, the party is over,” she said.The recording of “Mother Nature” was shaped by the pandemic. “We had time on our hands and nowhere to go,” Kidjo said. Her two previous albums were re-Africanized tributes to music from the Americas: “Celia” and, before that, a transformative remake of the Talking Heads album “Remain in Light.” But Kidjo and her husband and longtime musical partner, the keyboardist and programmer Jean Hébrail, were writing songs of their own in 2019, the year she also released and toured for “Celia.”When lockdowns were imposed in 2020, Kidjo set out to complete the songs with new, far-flung collaborators working remotely. On an album concerned with global warming, there was an upside: “a minimal carbon footprint,” Kidjo noted.She assembled the album’s personnel through connections and serendipity. Kidjo happened to hear Sampa the Great, 27, a rapper and singer who was born in Zambia and built her career in Australia, on an NPR Tiny Desk Concert and contacted her via direct messages on Instagram. They had actually met years earlier in a fan encounter, when Kidjo autographed a T-shirt for Sampa at WOMADelaide, a world-music festival in Australia.Their song together, “Free & Equal,” draws on the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights and the United States’ Declaration of Independence. “We been in the struggle since before I could speak,” Sampa raps, then praises “Angélique/connecting through the generations, power of musique.”“She was that person I saw who looked like me, who was from the continent, who spoke in her own language and made a huge impact outside of the continent,” Sampa said in an interview from Botswana.“She knows how much of a reach African music is having now — the continent is just connected with the world,” she continued. “The beauty of this album is to have legends who are able to give a nod to the young people, to acknowledge that we continue what people like Salif Keita and Angélique Kidjo had started. She said, ‘I want you to express yourself. That’s why I’m reaching out to you.’”Kidjo with Burna Boy. She appeared on his album “African Giant,” and he returned the favor on “Mother Nature.”Jean HebrailKidjo didn’t just invite songwriters and rappers to add vocals. She also handed skeletal tracks over to some of the electronics-savvy producers, like Kel-P from Nigeria, who are spreading Afrobeats and other African rhythms worldwide. “I said, you guys have found a way to make this a global rhythm,” Kidjo said. “Anyone in any part of the world can claim Afrobeats and do it their own way, because their own culture fits in perfectly. The jigsaw is just perfect. All the music that comes from Africa, based on our tradition, always has an inclusive way of doing things.”Some of Kidjo’s vocals get a computer-tuned twist in “Do Yourself,” a duet with Burna Boy that calls for self-reliance for Africa. “I asked Burna Boy, I asked his engineers and producers, ‘What did you do with my voice?’” she said. “He sent me a snapshot of the board, and I don’t understand anything about that stuff. It looks like something from out of space!” She laughed. “But it’s OK, I’ll take it. I don’t have to understand it to love it.“Every time I do a collaboration, it is always about keeping people’s freedom,” she added. “I would say, I’m going to send you the song, and you let the song lead you to what you want to do. I said, ‘Just go for it.’ What this album taught me is that if we take the time really to speak to one another, we come up with beautiful stuff.” More

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      For a Composer, the Final Minutes Are Critical

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      Flowering into lushly affecting patterns, Christopher Cerrone’s new album is part of a burst of activity over the past year.Christopher Cerrone’s career got a huge boost right at its beginning: His opera “Invisible Cities,” inspired by Italo Calvino’s novel, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2014, when he was barely in his 30s.But despite its lucid grace and a compelling production — it was performed in a bustling train station for a wandering audience listening over headphones — I found myself wanting to love its unhurried nimbuses of melody more than I did. The opera’s drifting quality ended up feeling too shapeless.In a recent interview, Cerrone, 37, agreed that “Invisible Cities” suffered a bit from an overreliance on what he called “this lyrical, sort-of-melancholy thing.”“Honestly,” he added, “little by little I think I figured out how to compose.”It certainly didn’t take him too long to figure out. “Hoyt-Schermerhorn,” for solo piano and electronics, suavely subverted its initially sedate cast of mood as a stirring opening for Vicky Chow’s album “AORTA” in 2016. And in “Goldbeater’s Skin,” performed at Trinity Wall Street in 2018, he alternated luminous melodic development with frizzy rhythmic outbursts. At one point, a merger of muted, slowly strummed acoustic guitar and pitched percussion felt like the announcement of a new level of craft.

      Christopher Cerrone: Liminal Highway by Tim MunroCerrone’s most recent full-length album, “The Arching Path,” was released on In a Circle Records in May. The title piece — a three-movement work, played by the pianist Timo Andres — starts with brittle repetition before flowering into lushly affecting patterns before the end of the first movement. Tender ascending notes in the left hand contribute a sense of earnestness to the right hand’s chordal, Minimalist-inflected mechanics.“That’s the classic Cerrone heart-on-the-sleeve moment,” Andres said in an interview. “That’s where it’s all going.”Andres — also a composer and a close friend of Cerrone’s since they met as graduate students at the Yale School of Music — considers the piece a leap forward.“It’s not music that’s virtuosic for virtuosity’s sake — which is something I’m not really interested in, as a pianist or a composer,” he said. “But the musical form and the musical gesture just sort of requires a degree of virtuosity to play itself out. To me, when these two things fuse with each other, it can be very moving.”The pandemic gave Cerrone time to edit and release recordings of performances that had been captured over the past few years. Along with “The Arching Path,” the additions to his discography include a solo percussion-plus-electronics track, “A Natural History of Vacant Lots,” that sounds like a full-length ambient record compressed into a single, without seeming hurried. The second movement of “Liminal Highway,” performed by the flutist Tim Munro (who doubles on piccolo and beer bottles), begins with expansive, hard-core repetition before spiraling into its melodic material.“More and more over the years,” Cerrone said, “I’ve tried to do the same thing with rhythm and pulse that I’ve done with harmony. And I think it’s helped clarify and refine my overall compositional language.”A recent work for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra — “A Body, Moving,” featuring tuba, trumpet and a percussionist who uses a bike pump — saves its most emotive material for its closing minutes. That is also true of Cerrone’s violin concerto for Jennifer Koh, “Breaks and Breaks,” performed with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 2018. (The concerto shares material with the string quartet “Can’t and Won’t,” which was also released as a single last year.)Closing minutes — of a movement, or of an entire work — tend to be a big deal for Cerrone. His compositions can seem like vessels that catch sparse rainfall for long stretches, thus setting critical terms of engagement for a listener, until a limit of storage is reached. Then, his writing sends this carefully husbanded material back outward in generous pourings.“I think he’s always really had this sense of going for a dramatic moment in his forms,” Andres said, while adding that this hasn’t always been clear in Cerrone’s music: “There’s some early works that I can think of where he was sort of too beholden to his modernist influences to really let it fly, if you know what I mean. Morton Feldman is not going to really have a such heart-on-the-sleeve moment. And I think Feldman was a big North Star for Chris, early on.”Born in Huntington, on Long Island, in 1984, Cerrone grew up taking piano lessons, but also played guitar in punk bands. He loved the ambient music of Aphex Twin, as well as Radiohead, Björk and the arranger Gil Evans’s collaborations with Miles Davis — all music that was, he said, “so closely influenced by classical music that I started to get excited by the Stravinsky records that were lying around my house.” (Cerrone’s father did advertising work for Tower Records, and was paid partially in classical LPs.)“My relationship to instrumentality — and, like, time — is not particularly drawn from classical music per se,” he said. “It’s a combination of these other genres of music, and the computer.” Growing up in the MTV era also had an impact on his work, and on his hopes for its intelligibility to nonspecialists.“I’ve just come to embrace it more and more,” he said. “I should make my music really accessible to the equivalent person who’s not in classical music.”Cerrone’s pieces can seem like vessels catching stray raindrops for long stretches, before each piece sends its carefully husbanded material back outward in generous outpourings.Lila Barth for The New York TimesWhile college and then graduate school opened his mind to experimental classical styles, he still has an allergy to certain extremes. On Twitter, where Cerrone is an impish presence, he recently asked what listeners could possibly get from the heady, quick-changing complexity of a composer like (the widely beloved) Elliott Carter, who died in 2012 at 103.“I cannot, for the life of me, understand the appeal of Elliott Carter’s music,” Cerrone wrote, “but sometimes I suspect it’s the ability for it to fit into a certain kind of showy athleticism that fits into the canon the way, say, Vivaldi does?” (He later clarified that “Vivaldi is good.”)“I really should never tweet,” he said in the interview, with a laugh. But there was something telling about his critique, which he said came from his desire in his own music “to do things in as few notes as possible,” reflecting his sense of the precious nature of an audience’s time.“Maybe that’s why I had that moment with Carter,” he said. “It wasn’t offering me anything.”But while he doesn’t court virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake, Cerrone doesn’t have his music stay rudimentary for long — as the gradual windup of“The Arching Path” and “A Body, Moving” both demonstrate.“These pieces,” he said, “are all about taking really simple things and simple materials — repeated notes or single notes or things like that — and trying to build these dense, formally crystalline worlds out of them.” More

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      Juneteenth: 7 Events for Celebrating the Holiday in New York

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      On Saturday, many of the city’s cultural venues are holding performances and parties to mark the emancipation of enslaved African Americans.As New York reopens, its cultural rhythms are creeping back in, with museums and music venues filling up and outdoor concerts popping up in parks. The city is emerging just in time for Juneteenth on Saturday.The holiday — a portmanteau of “June” and “nineteenth” — began on June 19, 1865. More than two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, union troops arrived in Galveston, Tex., to notify enslaved African Americans there that the Civil War had ended — and that they were free.On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate passed a bill to recognize Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation Day, as a federal holiday. Opal Lee — the 94-year-old Texan activist known as the “grandmother of Juneteenth” — has no doubt that June 19 will become a national holiday, and soon.“So, the 4th of July? Slaves weren’t free. You know that, don’t you?” Lee told The Times in 2020. “I suggest that if we’re going to do some celebrating of freedom, that we have our festival, our educational components, our music, from June the 19th — Juneteenth — to the 4th of July. Now that would be celebrating freedom.”Here’s a selection of events — both in-person and virtual — for New Yorkers to celebrate that freedom this year.‘Summer of Soul’ in the ParkThe hip-hop musician Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson directed the documentary “Summer of Soul (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” which releases in theaters on July 2. Part music film, part historical record, the film captures the previously untold story of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, which took place in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). Stars like Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone and Sly and the Family Stone performed in the six-week festival celebrating Black history, culture and fashion. On Saturday at 5 p.m., New Yorkers can see the award-winning film in the park where much of it was filmed. Free tickets are required for entry.An Alvin Ailey Workshop West African Class at the Ailey Extension in Manhattan.Kyle FromanThe Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater emerged in 1958, when its founder, Alvin Ailey, recognized the power of dance as a tool for social change. Ailey described African-American cultural heritage as “sometimes sorrowful, sometimes jubilant, but always hopeful,” viewing it as one of America’s richest treasures. On Saturday, 12-1:15 p.m., the choreographer Maguette Camara will host a free, virtual dance class featuring live drumming, teaching the basics of traditional West African dance and rhythms.A Community Choir at the ShedTroy Anthony rehearsing “The Revival: It Is Our Duty,” his commission for the Shed in Manhattan. Mari UchidaIt’s not a performance. It’s a service. The composer, director and actor Troy Anthony made sure to clarify the difference for “The Revival: It Is Our Duty,” his commission for the Shed in Manhattan. “Juneteenth is not about Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves. It’s not about Black people finding out that they were free late,” Anthony said. “It’s about the fact that Black people found a path to liberate themselves.” The gospel musical event, includes a community choir and band, is part of The Shed’s “Open Call” series, “The Revival” starts on Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets are free online.Soulfolk ExperienceSoulfolk Experience, from left, V. Jeffrey Smith, Maritri Garrett and David Pilgrim.Julie AtwellFrom MTV star to hip-hop guru to international ambassador, Kevin Powell has seen it all. And he’ll bring that experience to Brower Park in Brooklyn on Saturday, performing an original poetry suite. The rock-jazz-folk band the Soulfolk Experience composed and arranged music to accompany Powell’s performance at 12 p.m. behind the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. The event, presented by the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, is in partnership with the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, and part of the Friends of Brower Park’s free Juneteenth celebration. Instrument making and other activities will accompany the music, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. The event is free.Culinary RootsOn the hit Netflix show “High on the Hog,” the food writer Stephen Satterfield traces African American cuisine from Benin to the Deep South. The show is based on a book by the same name by food historian Jessica B. Harris, who will appear at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn on Saturday. The virtual event, “Meals as Collective Memory,” 12:30-4 p.m., explores Black foodways in New York and beyond. The schedule includes learning to make a delicious family dinner at home and a lesson on food deserts; sessions are free online — just be sure to RSVP.After Parties and After-After PartiesThe Bell House in Brooklyn will host its third annual “Emancipation After Party” on Saturday at 6 p.m. — a stacked deck of music and comedy. Hosted by Chinisha S., a self-proclaimed “certified Prince super-fan, nerd/geek-girl, and cheerful nihilist,” the lineup includes DJ Monday Blue; the sketch-comedy team To Karen, With Love; and the comedians Alex English, Aminah Imani, Dave Lester and Jatty Robinson ($18.65 for tickets). Stick around for the after-after party: Brandon Collins and Gordon Baker-Bone will host a Juneteenth edition of their interactive show, “Black Drunk History,” also at the Bell House ($20 for advance tickets).‘Juneteenth in Queens’Come for the jerk chicken and waffles food truck. Stay for the Black beauty bazaar. “Juneteenth in Queens” was planned by Assemblywoman Alicia Hyndman, who also sponsored the legislation that made Juneteenth a state holiday in New York. The festival, which includes a virtual panel series this week, culminates with an in-person event on Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., in Roy Wilkins Park in Queens. Start your day with yoga for Black liberation, check out the Black art party and try an African dance master class in the afternoon. Register for the event and activities on Eventbrite. More

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      They Won Eurovision. Can They Conquer the World?

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      ROME — When the rock group Maneskin won this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, it was little known outside Italy. Then the competition catapulted the band in front of 180 million viewers, and propelled its winning song “Zitti e Buoni,” or “Shut Up and Behave,” into Spotify’s global Top 10, a first for an Italian band.As of Wednesday, the song had been streamed on Spotify more than 100 million times. With nearly 18 million listeners in the last month, Maneskin was performing better on the streaming service in the same period than Foo Fighters or Kings of Leon.Eurovision acts typically disappear from the spotlight as soon as the competition wraps, yet Maneskin’s members are hoping to build upon their existing fame here and newly won international interest to become a rare long-term Eurovision success story.A post-curtain controversy that dogged the group last month has only increased the band’s notoriety. On the night of the Eurovision victory, rumors spread on social media after a clip from the broadcast went viral, showing the lead singer, Damiano David, hunched over a table backstage. At a news conference later that evening, a Swedish journalist asked if David had been sniffing cocaine on live TV, and the singer denied any wrongdoing.David took a drug test, which came back negative. The European Broadcasting Union issued a statement saying that “no drug use took place” and that it “considered the matter closed.”From left, David, is the band’s lead singer, Raggi plays guitar and De Angelis is on bass. Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York TimesSo it’s been quite a world-stage debut for a foursome whose combined ages add up to just 83. (David is 22; Victoria De Angelis, the bassist, is 21; and the guitarist Thomas Raggi and the drummer Ethan Torchio are 20.)“For us,” De Angelis said in a recent interview, “music is passion, fun, something that lets us blow off steam” — no surprise to anyone who has seen Maneskin perform live. The band is a high-octane powerhouse of onstage charisma and youthful energy.One Italian music critic compared Maneskin — which means moonlight in Danish and is pronounced “moan-EH-skin” — to the Energizer Bunny. That may in part explain why “Zitti e Buoni” has transcended what could have been an insurmountable linguistic barrier (though there is already a cover version in Finnish).The song celebrates individuality and marching to the beat of one’s drum, or guitar riff. The refrain repeats: “We’re out of our minds, but we’re different from them.”For Eurovision, Maneskin channelled glam rock in laminated laced-up leather flares, studded leather jackets and gold-speckled poet’s sleeves. Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York TimesWith its carefully curated, stylish androgynous nonchalance — accessorized with high heels, black nail polish and smoky eyes — Maneskin breaks down gender barriers and champions self-expression.The band was formed in 2015. David, De Angelis and Raggi knew each other from middle school in Rome. Torchio, whose family lives just outside the city, joined the group after responding to an ad in a Facebook group called “Musicians Wanted (Rome).”There weren’t many venues here for fledgling rock bands, so they busked on the street, played in high schools and in restaurants “where you were expected to bring your own paying public,” David recalled. Small-time battle of the band competitions “ensured that at least we’d be playing front of an audience,” he added.“These are the kinds of dynamics that toughen you up,” said Torchio.The band didn’t win the “X-Factor” final in 2017, but the show offered a springboard for other successes.Romano Nunziato/NurPhoto, via Getty ImagesAfter a couple of years of struggling to find gigs, the band went on the 2017 Italian edition of the talent show “The X Factor.”Anna Curia, 24, said “it was love at first sight” when she saw the group’s audition song on the program; a few weeks later, she founded the group’s official fan club. “From the first, they had a distinct style and sound,” she said. Other fan clubs soon followed follow. There’s even one, called Mammeskin, for women of a certain age.The “X Factor” stint also grabbed the attention of Veronica Etro, of the fashion brand Etro. “They had something,” said Etro, who is the brand’s creative director for the women’s collections. “I was very bewitched.”The fashion house reached out to the group and began dressing its members for album covers and videos. The collaboration evolved into providing the outfits for Eurovision, where the group’s studded laminated red leather looks made you “think Jimi Hendrix-meets-‘Velvet Goldmine,’” wrote Vanessa Friedman in The New York Times.“What I love is the way that they mix clothes for women and men,” said Etro in a telephone interview. “There is something very revolutionary about them, the way they don’t have any fear and they have fun with clothes.”Manuel Agnelli, who was one of the “X Factor” judges in 2017, took Maneskin under his wing. At first, its members weren’t musically mature, he said, “but I saw in them characteristics that can’t be taught, it’s something you’re born with, it’s personality.”“For us,” said De Angelis, far left, “music is passion, fun, something that lets us blow off steam.”Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times“Their image is a big part of who they are, their sexuality, their charisma, their bodies. It’s part of rock, it’s part of performance,” said Agnelli.Maneskin didn’t win “The X Factor,” coming second to Lorenzo Licitra, a tenor whose style is more in sync with the Italian penchant for big melodic ballads. Yet the program proved to be a springboard to greater things.“They are a television phenomenon,” said Andrea Andrei, a journalist with the Rome daily newspaper Il Messaggero. “Without ‘The X Factor’ and the machine behind it that churns out products ready for mainstream success, Maneskin would have struggled for a lot longer, like other rock bands have.”The real surprise, for many Italian commentators, was Maneskin’s win last March at the Sanremo Festival of Italian Song, the national event that finds Italy’s Eurovision act. Until a few years ago, Sanremo had mostly attracted Italians whose musical heyday predated Woodstock, but recent editions have reached out to younger audiences by involving the winners of talent shows like “The X-Factor.”“Nothing could be further from rock than Sanremo,” said Massimo Cotto, an Italian music journalist and radio D.J.So there, too, Maneskin broke ground. “Italy has never had an idyllic relationship with rock music, it never became mainstream,” said Andrei. “Maneskin’s win was unexpected, because they are a real rock band.”Torchio’s look of androgynous nonchalance is typical of the band’s style.Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York TimesDuring the interview, David soundly rejected the accusations that he was caught on camera using drugs at Eurovision, complaining that the speculation had overshadowed their win.The allegations were both infantile and underhanded, he said. And they came to nothing, because drug tests came up negative. “We know we are clean. We have nothing to hide,” he said.Allegations aside, there have been some changes since the Eurovision win.Merchandise associated with the band’s most recent album sold out in minutes. It lent its music to a Pepsi commercial. And earlier this month, the band parted ways with Marta Donà, its manager since 2017. Some newspapers here wondered whether an Italian management agency had begun to feel too tight for Maneskin’s international aspirations, and the name of Simon Cowell, the mastermind behind “The X-Factor,” came up as a possible successor. The group has not announced who will replace Donà.Agnelli, the Italian “X-Factor” judge, offered the quartet some advice for building on its current momentum: Tour as much as possible, get experience under their belts and continue to be themselves.“It’s their greatest strength,” he said. More