Music

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.Carly Rae Jepsen, ‘This Is What They Say’[embedded content]Remember malls? Carly Rae Jepsen — our millennial Debbie Gibson — and her fizzy ’80s-inspired pop have returned to remind us drab, homebound zombies what the hot sizzle of neon sounds like. “Dedicated Side B” is a collection of material that didn’t make the cut of the prolific songwriter’s most recent album, and while it isn’t quite the buried-treasure trove that was her last collection of castoffs, “Emotion Side B,” there are a few gems in the mix here. The sky-high chorus of “This Love Isn’t Crazy” is classic CRJ; even better, or at least a little more surprising, is the slick, pulsating synth-pop throwback “This Is What They Say.” Sword not included. LINDSAY ZOLADZPhoebe Bridgers, ‘I See You’Tentative hope battles chronic depression and crippling self-consciousness in Phoebe Bridgers’ “I See You,” with musical jitters to match. A nervy, insistent string arrangement pulses behind her as she sings, “I get this feeling, whenever I feel good/It will be the last time”; pretty picking briefly takes over when she confesses, “I feel something when I see you.” The music surges ahead again, but don’t count on a happy ending. JON PARELESKathleen Edwards, ‘Options Open’Not long after releasing “Voyager” in 2012, the most accomplished album of her criminally underrated career, a close friend of the Canadian singer and songwriter Kathleen Edwards pointed out that the music business was making her miserable. “Half-jokingly,” he suggested that she throw in the towel and just open a coffee shop called Quitters. He — and Edwards’ fans — were shocked when she took him up on that offer, quite literally. Now, after a long silence (first broken when the Edwards devotee Maren Morris recruited her to help write “Good Woman,” a song that ended up on Morris’s hit 2019 album, “Girl”), Edwards is back with the gently upbeat “Options Open.” It’s the first single from a forthcoming album, “Total Freedom,” due in August. “For 39 years, I’ve been keeping my options open,” she sings with a shrug, summing up a career and a life that’s moved in her own time. Warm and wry, it’s a joy just to hear her voice again. ZOLADZPolo G featuring BJ the Chicago Kid, ‘Wishing for a Hero’“Wishing for a Hero” is built on the piano chords of Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is” and on 2Pac’s early 1990s revision of the song, “Changes.” It’s about the bleak options offered by present-day systemic racism, “the struggle of living black.” At top speed, as if his time is already running out, Polo G raps, “Every day might be the end of the road for me/We die young, so I couldn’t picture a older me.” 2Pac’s update of Hornsby’s chorus insisted, “Things will never be the same,” but nearly three decades after 2Pac, Polo G has even fewer expectations; BJ the Chicago Kid sings, “Some things will never change.” PARELESDerrick Hodge, ‘Not Right Now’The lead single from a forthcoming album by the bassist and producer Derrick Hodge, “Not Right Now” contains his signatures: chest-filling electric bass; production so bright and spatial that if you listen to it through headphones, you may feel like you’ve just strapped on a pair of VR glasses. But really this track is about the drums and keys: The two drummers, Justin Tyson and Michael Mitchell, nudge and tweak each other, inserting an element of play into a tightly grooving beat. And as the piece drifts on, the mix of Jahari Stampley’s piano, Michael Aaberg’s synthesizer and additional keyboards from Hodge create a ball of good tension. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLONatalie Slade, ‘Gimme Ya Love’[embedded content]Natalie Slade, from Australia, enlisted members of the jazz-R&B-rock band Hiatus Kaiyote for her debut album, “Control,” due June 5. “Gimme Ya Love” is a modestly insistent demand — ”I won’t take less/And I don’t need much” — setting her angular vocal lines to a double time vamp that hints at Freddie Hubbard’s “Red Clay,” circling through three ambiguous chords and merging agitation and cool, never finding satisfaction. PARELESJeff Rosenstock, ‘No Dream’Like a stealthy D.I.Y. superhero, Jeff Rosenstock has a way of suddenly appearing when he’s most direly needed. The Long Island punk lifer surprise-released his previous solo album, “Post-,” on the first day of 2018 and now — in a year that’s making 2018 feel like a cake walk — he’s once again dropped a full-length without warning, the urgent, searching “No Dream.” The title track covers a lot of ground in just under four minutes, moving from a chiming, Against Me!-esque melody into a pummeling hardcore breakdown that will make you nostalgic for mosh-pit sweat. “It’s not a dream, it’s not a dream!” Rosenstock hollers, a refrain that becomes more prescient by the day. But the potent alarm clock of breakneck guitars certainly backs up his point. ZOLADZNeil Young, ‘Try’Neil Young has been opening up his archives and is about to release “Homegrown,” the much-bootlegged album he set aside in 1975 in order to release the far more tumultuous “Tonight’s the Night.” One of its seven previously unreleased songs is “Try.” On the surface, it’s a low-key, countryish shuffle, with Emmylou Harris joining him as a backup singer. But what he’s depicting, with enigmatic understatement, is the tentativeness of a wounded heart: “Darlin’, the door is open,” he sings, “to my heart and I’ve been hopin’/That you won’t be the one to struggle with the key.” PARELESSalif Keita featuring Dr. Keb, Gaspi, Ami Yerewolo and Robot Papito, ‘Attention Coronavirus!’Public service announcements don’t get any catchier than “Attention Coronavirus!” Salif Keita has been a star in Mali since the 1970s, fusing West African (particularly Mande) traditions with international pop and making himself a public conscience in his lyrics. Over one of his typically springy modal grooves, Keita is joined by a younger generation of Malian singers and rappers, determinedly dispensing advice that’s familiar but still necessary. PARELESLuke Schneider, ‘Lex Universum’Luke Schneider plays pedal steel guitar as a widely recorded Nashville sideman. But his solo album, “Altar of Harmony,” turns away from country and Americana, toward ambient and new-age music that luxuriates in his instrument’s edgeless tones and otherworldly sustain. The pealing, cascading, bendable notes atop the gorgeous “Lex Universum” are clearly from a pedal steel guitar, but so is the soothing, ever-so-slowly changing, organ-like drone that suffuses the track. PARELESJulianna Barwick, ‘Inspirit’We could all use a moment of Zen right now. Let the heavenly sounds of Julianna Barwick’s “Inspirit” — from the forthcoming, appropriately titled “Healing Is a Miracle” — take you away. Barwick’s breathy, looped vocals recall the simple but profound experiments of her early albums, but the humming bass line that emerges halfway through the track adds an intriguing new element to her sound. ZOLADZMatthew Shipp, ‘Cosmic Juice’A solo piano album by Matthew Shipp is a constant cycle of brewing and scattering; an action painting; an immersion in something so expansive and uncommon it feels like a genre unto itself. The full effect of ”Cosmic Juice” — the closing track on “The Piano Equation,” Shipp’s latest — won’t completely land unless you’ve already journeyed through the 10 pieces before it. But there’s a beauty at the end that you can’t miss as he lets things go: After a last bout of fierce, loose counterpoint on the low end of the keyboard, he settles back into the piece’s central harmony, his touch stern but melancholic. He plays a series of turbid minor chords and then lets them fade away, sending us into darkness. RUSSONELLO More

WARSAW — Last Friday, Kazik Staszewski, a rock legend in Poland, achieved a stunningly short-lived success in the country’s oldest music chart.His song “Your Pain Is Better Than Mine” was named No. 1 on the beloved “Radio Three Chart” show — but only for a few moments. Within minutes of the show ending, the results disappeared from the website of the show’s state-run broadcaster. Mr. Staszewski’s anthem had vanished, along with the rest of the chart.Since Mr. Staszewski’s song chastised one of Poland’s most powerful politicians, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, its disappearance was immediately interpreted by critics as censorship. Over the following week, the furor set off a string of resignations, including from some of Radio Three’s most prominent hosts, and saw high-profile artists calling to withdraw their music from the broadcaster.The Radio Three station has long been a favorite of Poland’s intelligentsia. Commonly called Trojka, it is known for promoting noncommercial musical genres, such as alternative rock and jazz, though it also features speech-based programming, including spirited intellectual debates. Under communism, it was the only institution that was allowed to broadcast music from beyond the Iron Curtain.Since 2016, Mr. Kaczynski’s party, Law and Justice, has exerted ever-greater control over Poland’s state-funded television and radio outlets, effectively turning them into mouthpieces of the government and promoting a conservative agenda, often steeped in xenophobia, homophobia and nationalism.Trojka’s musical focus had, to some extent, spared it the fate of other public broadcasters, which have seen loyalists of the Law and Justice Party brought in to replace some journalists and hosts.But since the station erased Mr. Staszewski’s song from the charts, some artists and politicians have been calling for a boycott. Tomasz Kowalczewski, the station’s director, initially tried to blame the incident on the chart show’s longtime host, Marek Niedzwiecki, who Mr. Kowalczewski said had manipulated the vote. Because the poll had been “falsified,” Mr. Kowalczewski said in a statement, it had to be annulled.Mr. Niedzwiecki, who has hosted the show since it first went on air in 1982, denied the charges in a statement, and resigned on Sunday, outraged by the accusation of fraud. He later demanded an apology from the station and threatened a lawsuit.Station employees told local news outlets that Mr. Kowalczewski had intervened after “Your Pain Is Better Than Mine” topped the chart, calling the head of the music department, Piotr Metz, to take the chart down from the website. On a TV talk show on Tuesday, Mr. Metz showed a text message from Mr. Kowalczewski demanding the radio station stop playing Mr. Staszewski’s song, sent just hours after the chart show ended.“Your Pain Is Better Than Mine,” which on Friday had more than nine million views on YouTube, is a not-so-veiled censure of a privilege extended to a top politician during the coronavirus lockdown. Mr. Kaczynski, whom the song does not mention by name, was allowed a visit to a Warsaw cemetery in April while it was closed to the public. The visit took place on the anniversary of the Smolensk crash, in which Mr. Kaczynski’s twin brother, Lech, Poland’s president at the time, died. The opening of the cemetery especially for Mr. Kaczynski was sharply criticized on social media.“You alone can soothe your pain, everyone else is in trouble. Two limousines, or one, the entire cemetery just for you,” Mr. Staszewski sings to the mockingly cheerful sounds of an accordion.Mr. Staszewski, who has been recording since 1979, declined through a spokesman to comment for this article. But in an interview with the Polish radio station RMF FM on Friday, he said that the song was about “inequality before the law.”Through the week, nine anchors followed Mr. Niedzwiecki’s lead and resigned, joining about a dozen other prominent hosts who have parted ways with Trojka in recent months.Mr. Metz, the music department director, who started working at Trojka as an anchor in 1982 and continued broadcasting after he became a manager, was among those who stepped down. He said in an interview that even the Communist regime had more respect for the freedom of speech at Trojka than the current government has.“Until now, the music department has been mostly free from political pressures,” he said. “The news and opinion desks were not so lucky, though. In those last years, Trojka has been promoting one ideology, one political camp and a very simplistic narrative that went against what this radio station used to stand for.”The scandal over Mr. Staszewski’s song has also been the last straw for many Polish artists, who called on the station to stop playing their music.Tomasz Organek, the frontman of Organek, an alternative rock band, said in an interview that Trojka had been like “home to him and other independent artists” and that “the decision to part ways is a painful one.”“But this last politically motivated manipulation is unacceptable,” he said. “We’ve been seeing signs of that for years with Trojka, and it’s a real shame because it was once a bulwark of independent thought and sound thinking.”The artists calling on Trojka to stop playing their music, who include some of Poland’s most popular singers and bands, have been joined by Mystic Production, one of the country’s biggest independent record labels. Mystic Production holds the Polish rights to music by many foreign artists, including Nick Cave, Deep Purple and Skunk Anansie.Since those requests are not legally binding, it will be up to Trojka to decide whether they will respect them. Mr. Kowalczewski, the station director, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Even some senior government figures have condemned the station’s actions. Piotr Glinski, Poland’s deputy prime minister and minister of culture, called the move to take down Mr. Staszewski’s song “a provocation.”“At times, some artists say nonsense. Even outrageous nonsense,” he wrote on Twitter. “But it’s even more outrageous to remove a song for ‘being wrongheaded.’”A handful of Trojka’s longest-serving anchors have decided to stay for now. And some of them staged a protest on social media this week, sharing a manifesto in which they denounced “censorship” and “outrageous treatment of journalists” at the station.“There’s almost nothing of the old Trojka left,” Mr. Metz said. “I imagine I will turn it on some time from now, and, for the first time ever not recognize it right away.” More