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    Bad Bunny Has the Biggest Week of 2022 on the Chart, for Now

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    Future broke the record last week; Kendrick Lamar is poised to set a new bar next week. Blockbuster season on the Billboard album chart has finally arrived.The blockbuster stage of the year’s music release calendar has arrived, with big numbers for Bad Bunny’s latest album on this week’s Billboard chart, and even bigger sales expected for Kendrick Lamar’s long-awaited, just-released return to next week’s chart.“Un Verano Sin Ti,” the new album by Bad Bunny, the mega-streaming Puerto Rican superstar, opens at No. 1 with the equivalent of 274,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. That is the biggest opening of any album so far this year — beating the record set last week by the rapper Future — and Bad Bunny’s second time at No. 1.Bad Bunny has been Spotify’s most-streamed artist for the last two years running, so it’s no surprise that “Un Verano Sin Ti” racked up a huge number of clicks: 357 million, more than any release so far this year, and the best streaming week for any Latin album ever.But what counts as a blockbuster these days? The numbers have been steadily declining, and what was once the universally recognized milestone of a megahit — one million sales in a single week — looks increasingly unlikely ever to be reached again.The streaming total for “Un Verano” — which accounted for about 95 percent of its consumption in the United States — was certainly big, but it was less than half that of Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy,” which opened with 744 million last September. As a digital album, “Un Verano” sold only 12,000 copies.Not so long ago, a common chart tactic was to bundle copies of albums, as downloads or CDs, with sales of concert tickets or merchandise. But after an industry uproar that such deals were distorting the picture of fan demand and skewing the charts, Billboard changed its rules two years ago to prevent most such deals from affecting chart positions.Even without the rule change, appetites for albums, purchased whole, have been declining for years. Adele’s latest, “30,” opened last year with 839,000 “equivalent sales units” — a measurement that incorporates both sales and streaming — of which 692,000 were for sales of complete albums; in 2015, her previous album, “25,” opened with 3.4 million. No new album has sold a million copies in a single week since Taylor Swift’s “Reputation” had 1.2 million in 2017.Among other notable new releases on this week’s chart, the rapper Jack Harlow opens at No. 3 with “Come Home the Kids Miss You,” which had the equivalent of 113,000 sales, including 137 million streams, and Arcade Fire’s “We” arrives at No. 6.Future’s “I Never Liked You,” last week’s chart-topper, falls to No. 2, while Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous” is No. 4 and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” is No. 5. More

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      ‘We’ Review: Arcade Fire’s Enduring Anxiety

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      The band’s sixth album, “We,” shares many of its predecessor’s thematic fixations on dangerous digital rabbit holes. The music sometimes can’t find its way out, either.Arcade Fire has always sounded at once representative of and defiantly out of step with its own time. It’s easy to slot the group into the aesthetic of the so-called New Sincerity, a post-9/11 ideology that rejected the previous micro-generation’s embrace of hip cynicism and postmodern irony. Arcade Fire, by definition, cared. Numbness and ennui were its boogeymen. Throughout the first decade of its run, the Canadian band released a series of loose concept albums that targeted time-tested opiates of the masses — organized religion on “Neon Bible” in 2007, conformist living on “The Suburbs” in 2010.Still, there was something backward-glancing about the group — not necessarily a bad thing. Arcade Fire was at its sharpest when it was trying to puncture the inherited mythology of the midcentury past. But it was never quite as successful when it shifted its gaze toward the present and began raging against the machines, first on its ambitious 2013 album, “Reflektor,” and again on its less inspired 2017 follow-up, “Everything Now.”Which is why it’s unfortunate that the band doubles down on this approach throughout much of its sixth album, “We,” an LP that wishes to be seen as a course correction but still shares many of its predecessor’s thematic fixations. We are living through an age of anxiety and the end of an empire, we are reminded on songs with grand, explanatory titles like, well, “Age of Anxiety I” and “End of the Empire I-IV.” The first is a searching, forlorn opener with rhythmic backing vocals that huff and puff shallowly, as though they can never quite catch their breath. The nine-minute, multipart suite “End of the Empire” has a few delightful twists, but is ultimately airy and vague, seeking to channel the sort of modernized vision of impending apocalypse that artists like Phoebe Bridgers (“I Know the End”) and Lana Del Rey (“The Greatest”) have recently pulled off more succinctly and sharply.“Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole)” has some dazzling musical moments, like when a brooding synth line suddenly explodes into the evil twin of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle.” Win Butler and Régine Chassagne co-produced “We” with Nigel Godrich, known for his work with Radiohead, and their collaboration makes the more up-tempo material pop.There are a few instances, though, when head-scratching lyrics take the listener out of what should be an ecstatic moment. The catchiest and most upbeat number on “We” is “Unconditional II (Race and Religion),” a neo-80s pop gem sung by Chassagne with backing vocals from Peter Gabriel. The beat and melodic line are hypnotic, yet the song is built around the hook “I’ll be your race and religion” — a weighty, loaded (or maybe just awkward) statement that is never unpacked enough to make the listener want to sing along.Aside from the galvanizing lead single, “The Lightning I, II,” which many heralded as a return to form, the band sounds most comfortable on the “We” songs that speak in a folk-rock idiom, like the understated closing title track. The sweet, rollicking “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)” addresses Butler and Chassagne’s 9-year-old son, imparting to him their own hard-won life lessons while reflecting on the limitations of parental guidance. Call it attentive-dad rock. “There are things that you could do that no one else on earth could ever do,” Butler sings warmly, “But I can’t teach you.”The antidote for the age of anxiety that this record proposes is relatively straightforward: to opt out of the flat and depersonalizing world of the digital rabbit hole and reinvest in IRL personal connection. “I wanna get wild, I wanna get free,” Butler sings on the subdued final track, accompanied by a pastoral-sounding 12-string guitar. “Would you wanna get off this ride with me?” The stakes feel a bit low, though, because I’m not entirely convinced he was ever on the ride to begin with.Most of the most potent recent art about the agony and ever-diminishing ecstasy of being too online — Patricia Lockwood’s brilliant novel “No One Is Talking About This,” the last few albums by the British pop group the 1975 — has spoken the language of the internet vividly, with a specificity that suggests its authors are not entirely apart from the culture they’re critiquing, and that is precisely what makes their eventual protestations palatable. Arcade Fire’s depictions of our techno-dystopia, instead, feel more distant and diffuse.“I unsubscribe,” Butler sings repeatedly throughout “End of the Empire,” and Chassagne underlines it with her backing vocals until the line’s fleeting cleverness wears thin. But what, exactly, are they relinquishing? Despite its occasional moments of brilliance, “We” too often finds Arcade Fire stuck in a digital maze of its own design, ignoring the fact that it’s always sounded more at home off the grid.Arcade Fire“We”(Columbia) More

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      How Arcade Fire Found a Way Back

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      There are a few indicators that Win Butler, the singer and guitarist who fronts the rock band Arcade Fire, might be a professional somebody: the flat-brimmed, cream-billed bolero hat atop his head or the shock of slicked-back, bleached blond hair that materializes when he takes it off. He’s also exceptionally tall, a trait that helped him to win MVP at the 2016 NBA All-Star Celebrity Game over Jason Sudeikis and Nick Cannon.On a warm day in March, Butler and his wife, the singer and multi-instrumentalist Régine Chassagne, were walking through Times Square when Butler was conscripted into a tourist-trap performance where someone would vault over a group of men. It was safe to say that Butler was the only participant who’d once accepted a Grammy for album of the year.In the end, the performers chose to leap over someone else. “Discrimination against tall people is real,” he noted with humor returning to Chassagne, who’d pressed a wad of bills into a collection hat.This trip represented a musical homecoming, of sorts. The night before, Butler, Chassagne and Arcade Fire, a band that has headlined to more than 100,000 at Glastonbury, performed at Manhattan’s 600-capacity Bowery Ballroom for the first time since 2004. David Bowie and David Byrne attended that performance 18 years ago, and the joint patronage of two art-rock legends helped anoint the band as The Next Big Thing.“Right out of the gate, it was like, ‘I think our lives might be a bit different,’” Butler recalled.From left: Parry, Butler, Gara, Chassagne and Paul Beaubrun onstage at Bowery Ballroom in March. The band returned to the New York club for the first time since 2004.OK McCausland for The New York TimesWhat followed was one of the sharpest ascents in recent rock history. Arcade Fire’s debut, “Funeral,” became the fastest-selling record in the history of its indie label, Merge. Its 2010 LP, “The Suburbs,” debuted at No. 1 and was the surprise album of the year winner, beating out Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Eminem.The group’s music has combined delicate interiority with expansive Springsteen-esque rock ’n’ roll, and pulled from classical, disco, chamber music and Haitian rara. Onstage, where the large ensemble’s ecstatic performances could resemble a tent revival, it has sounded like a shuffling street band, a tight rhythm machine and a superstar rock unit capable of filling out a football stadium.But when “Everything Now” arrived in 2017, an LP that hybridized the band’s dance and rock sounds, something shifted. The record was accompanied by a trollish press campaign where the band created several websites that intentionally spread false information about its activity, as a sort of commentary on the nascent “fake news” era. This did not go over well. For whatever reason — the darker political climate, the quality of the record itself — “Everything Now” was a commercial and critical misfire.“We,” the group’s sixth album, due May 6, is a reset. The lead single “The Lightning I & II” returns to soaring, big-sky rock, and the existential concerns threaded through the band’s career. (“I heard the thunder and I thought it was the answer,” Butler sings. “But I find I got the question wrong.”) “Age of Anxiety I” and “Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole)” start as solemn, piano-driven ballads before slowly building toward explosive, rhythmic release. Other songs veer into stripped-down, singer-songwriter territory: “End of Empire I-IV” is a multipart epic about life during American decline, while “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)” wouldn’t sound out of place at a campfire singalong.“I look at Paul Simon, and look at the breadth between ‘Graceland’ and what he was doing with Simon & Garfunkel — to think that’s the same person who made that music, that’s extremely inspiring,” Butler said. “I was always more interested in seeing if there’s a way to do whatever you want, musically, and still have it feel like the band.”As the group performed some of those tracks at the Bowery — and led elated fans on a mini-march into a nearby subway station — the new songs bled seamlessly together with older favorites like “Rebellion (Lies)” and “Ready to Start.” But the band that made “We” has undergone significant changes.“It’s a less physically unified life than it was once upon a time, which you can look at however you want to,” Richard Reed Parry, one of the band’s multi-instrumentalists, said in a video interview, with a knowing chuckle. “Very, very different life these days.”“Our process is just our life,” Butler said, of songwriting with Chassagne.OK McCausland for The New York TimesSITTING AT THE Midtown restaurant Patsy’s, where Butler’s grandfather Alvino Rey used to perform with his jazz band, Butler was chattier than Chassagne, but they regularly finished each other’s thoughts, and shared knowing glances across the table.“I’ve come to believe that music is literally a spirit,” Butler said. “Not figuratively. There’s something that gets inside you, and it can get passed on to different people.”For more than 20 years, Arcade Fire has thought deeply about the forces, spiritual and otherwise, that connect people. On some level, its music wagers, all of us feel that society is stupefying, and modernity is terrifying. Only by acknowledging this can we be liberated from the paralysis that accompanies adulthood, and recapture our uncontaminated appreciation of the world.“The music is good, but I think it’s also about what they represent,” David Byrne said in a video interview. “They don’t seem too slick; they take the slightly chaotic aspect of their shows as a virtue. I think people appreciate that they’re not getting a super-duper polished pop product — it feels like this is something they really believe in.”Butler in the crowd at Bowery Ballroom.OK McCausland for The New York TimesIn the band’s early years, the band gained and shed members, settling into a lineup that included the multi-instrumentalist Parry, the bassist Tim Kingsbury, and Butler’s brother, Will, on various keys, strings and football helmets; the drummer Jeremy Gara began as a tour manager, and joined full-time in 2004. They remained remarkably self-contained, and resistant to the external pressures of rapid success.“When things blow up, the sharks come around,” Chassagne said with a laugh. “We know what we want to do, and so you don’t get impressed by checks and promises.” (Butler noted they “probably met about 20 people” who claimed to have signed Nirvana after “Funeral” blew up.)After the 2013 album “Reflektor,” Butler and Chassagne relocated to New Orleans, where they’d fallen in love with the local culture (as well as its relative proximity to Haiti, where Chassagne’s family originates), while the rest of the band remained in Montreal. The backlash to its follow-up, “Everything Now,” didn’t prompt “massive internal change,” Parry said, but noted, “It was the first time we’d been outside of an arm’s length from each other, and that had much more of an impact on the band.”Kingsbury agreed. “It coincided with the time in everyone’s life when we were in our mid-30s, and children were appearing,” he said in a video interview. (Butler, now 42, and Chassagne, 45, have a 9-year-old son.) As a result, he said, on the band’s most recent albums “there’s certain aspects that are less all of us and a little more of them.”At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, border restrictions prevented the group from meeting in person, and working over Zoom proved fruitless. Butler said he and Chassagne challenged themselves to envision every song on “We” without production or drums, in case they were forced to make the album without the rest of the band. (Early on, Josh Tillman, who performs as Father John Misty, flew in from Los Angeles to act as a sounding board.) The band was subsequently able to convene in El Paso, Texas, in the fall of 2020, and again the following summer in Maine.Butler and Chassagne are constantly working on new music. “Our process is just our life,” he said, noting that Chassagne doesn’t receive enough credit for the band’s output. “Régine has this magical ability to remember almost anything we’ve ever done. It’s always coexisting at the same time; some songs take 20 years to write, some songs take 20 minutes.” During our conversation, Butler spoke often about time, musing about what it takes for a restaurant to stay open for 100 years (“There’s something to be said for just executing something”), and lamenting the strict standards that new artists are judged by (“I hope there’s still a space in the world for a band to make a bunch of crappy records, and have their fifth record be genius”).The first of four Bowery Ballroom shows ended with the band leading the crowd onto the street, and into a subway station.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMembers of Brother High, a Haitian rara band, joined Arcade Fire on the street outside the Bowery Ballroom.OK McCausland for The New York TimesButler and members of Brother High make their way to a subway station.OK McCausland for The New York TimesOK McCausland for The New York Times“The common path of almost every artist that I respect is very circuitous — it’s not a straight line, and there’s a lot of ups and downs,” he said in a separate video interview. “It takes 20 years to know if anything’s good or bad, anyway.”Butler also resisted the idea that the reaction to “Everything Now” provoked any extended contemplation about the band’s identity. Still, “We” feels like a subtle recalibration that both revisits the past, and pushes forward. The band is “always mixing the old with the new,” Parry said. “Things kind of surface and resurface.” Parts of “The Lightning I and II” date back to the “Funeral” era. Chassagne said one movement of “End of Empire I-IV” was written when she and Butler first met in college; it’s immediately followed by something they wrote the week of recording. Parry said a lot of music was left on the cutting-room floor. “There were other records we were working on at the same time as this one that I would like to exist,” he noted.For “We,” Arcade Fire brought in the British producer Nigel Godrich, who’s known most for his work with Radiohead. The title harkens back to Butler’s childhood memory of his grandmother reading him a book with “We” stamped on the cover. That book was Charles Lindbergh’s autobiography, but the name is more directly drawn from the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel of the same name, which takes place in a future society that exists entirely under mass surveillance.Butler said he made a physical mood board of inspirational material, and was drawn to both “dystopic images of a boot stepping on someone’s face, everyone in masks, really kind of anxiety, fever dream stuff” and “images of our son, family, old pictures of the band, and the piece of concrete outside of our old apartment in Montreal where we wrote our names in 2003.” (It’s still there, he proudly noted.)“It took a while to understand why they were related to each other,” he said. “But we started to realize that it was more like the light and the shadow. It’s tempting to separate them, but they’re actually sort of the same thing.”The first half of the record is shot through with dread about the modern age, with Butler lamenting the palliatives — television, medication, algorithmic-generated content — that don’t seem to make us any happier. But it gives way to a more tender perspective, with Butler and Chassagne singing directly about their son, Eddie (who’s credited with providing “whispers” on “End of Empire”), and the way that love forges meaningful kinship. Peter Gabriel sings on “Unconditional II (Race and Religion),” and they said it was gratifying to talk shop with another artist with the same dogged approach to pursuing music.“It was so special to hear that because I was like …” Chassagne said, trailing off.“ … we feel crazy sometimes,” Butler said, finishing the thought. “It’s nice to meet other people that know what we’re talking about.”“We” signals a new era for Arcade Fire in some more formal ways. The day after the first of what turned into four Bowery shows, Will Butler announced he was leaving the band. “There was no acute reason beyond that I’ve changed — and the band has changed — over the last almost 20 years,” he said in a statement.Kingsbury said, “He was just ready to take a break.” Parry added he was “devastated” by the move: “I think there’s just a lot of things that he has to do, while he’s still in the prime of his life, that are not being in a rock band on tour.” (Will Butler declined to comment.)Arcade Fire’s membership has always expanded in a live setting, and with a tour tentatively scheduled for the fall, it has brought in Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner and the Haitian multi-instrumentalist Paul Beaubrun. “Even though they’re one of the biggest bands in the world, it always feels like we’re the underdog,” Beaubrun said. “We have to give it our all, all of the time. I’ve never felt that from anyone.”The group’s ambitions still stretch beyond putting out more records. Chassagne cited her philanthropic work in Haiti as a major focal point of the next few years. Butler said he and Beaubrun are working on launching a digital label focused on importing Haitian artists. He brought up his grandfather Alvino, who continued playing music into his 90s. “The scope of his career, and those relationships, is so long. Even with my brother — if he hadn’t been in the band, we just have so many shared experiences that I’m really proud of.”He wanted to stay present, he said, no matter what the future held. “This whole process of people judging a record, and is this good or is this bad — I don’t give a [expletive] about any of that,” he said. “I play music to stay alive.” More

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      Arcade Fire Ignites a Fresh Era, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Normani, Brad Mehldau, Valerie June 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.Arcade Fire, ‘The Lightning I, II’Rarely does critical consensus pivot as quickly and sharply as it did for Arcade Fire, a band that began the 2010s snagging a surprise album of the year Grammy for its beloved, towering double album “The Suburbs,” and ended the decade caricatured as out-of-touch scolds when its 2017 technology critique “Everything Now” left just about everybody cold. The overwhelming return-to-form narrative that has greeted its first new music in five years, from an album due May 6, though, suggests that many were simply waiting for the group to once again make songs that sound like “The Lightning I” and “II.” “I won’t quit on you, don’t quit on me,” Win Butler sings through gritted teeth on the first part of the song, which moves at the tempo of someone running against the wind. Then, all at once, the track kicks into a rapturous gallop and becomes the kind of urgent, clenched-fist anthem the band was once known for: “Waiting on the lightning, waiting on the lightning, what will the light bring?” Butler sings, burning once again with an earnest, fiery hope. Somebody kept the car running after all. LINDSAY ZOLADZOumou Sangaré, ‘Wassulu Don’Oumou Sangaré has carried a women’s song tradition from Mali’s Wassoulou region to a worldwide audience. Her first new song since 2017, from an album due in April, is the Malian fusion of “Wassulu Don”: the quavering vocal lines and call-and-response of Wassoulou songs propelled by the modal, six-beat electric guitar picking — echoing Ali Farka Toure — that has been called “desert blues,” topped by an openly bluesy slide guitar. The song, it turns out in translation, praises regional economic development “thanks to colossal investments”: a prosaic text for a euphoric piece of music. JON PARELESNormani, ‘Fair’Her debut full-length is so long awaited, to some people the phrase “new Normani album” has come to mean roughly what “Chinese Democracy” used to, or — heaven help us —“#R9” still does. But the arrival of Normani’s new single “Fair” is promising on two counts: It indicates that 2022 really could be the year she puts out that mythical album; and it’s much better than “Wild Side,” the sultry but ultimately snoozy Cardi B duet from 2021. Mining the liquefied sounds of Y2K-era TLC or Aaliyah, “Fair” is an anguished ballad with a deep, menacing undertow. “Is it fair that you moved on?” Normani asks, “’cause I swear that I haven’t.” All the while, the moody track throbs with a sputtering but persistent heartbeat. ZOLADZInside the World of RosalíaIn just a few years, the Spanish singer from Catalonia has grown into one of the most worshiped, scrutinized and counted on young artists in the world.Reinventing Flamenco: Rosalía first burst onto the scene with her take on tradition, earning worldwide acclaim and introducing new generations to the genre.New Album: With “Motomami,” the singer adds irony and humor to her thematic arsenal, while turning up the sex and swagger.The Making of a Star: Before racking up magazine covers and millions of views with her YouTube videos, Rosalía spent years training in one of the world’s oldest musical art forms.Diary of a Song: For her hit “Con Altura,” the singer and her collaborators entered the studio with the express mission of paying tribute to old-school reggaeton.Residente featuring Ibeyi, ‘This Is Not America’Setting aside his intramural reggaeton beef with J Balvin, the Puerto Rican rapper Residente returns to major sociopolitical statements with the furious “This Is Not America,” which is rapped in Spanish but purposefully titled in English. It’s a darker sequel to the hemisphere-spanning “Latinoamérica” by Residente’s former group, Calle 13: a far-reaching indictment of repression, corruption and abuse across North, Central and South America. Driven by deep Afro-Caribbean drumming and choir harmonies, it insists, “America is not just the U.S.A.,” with a video that recapitulates brutal human-rights abuses in nation after nation. PARELESBrad Mehldau, ‘Cogs in Cogs, Pt. I: Dance’A three-part suite, “Cogs in Cogs” sits at the center of Brad Mehldau’s new album, “Jacob’s Ladder,” which collects 12 complex, hard-toggling tracks: an attempt to use the tools of prog-rock — his first musical love — to explore how a worldly life might have both shaken and strengthened his Christian faith. Mehldau, who continues to build out from his fixed identity as one of the country’s top jazz pianists, plays almost every instrument on Part 1 of “Cogs in Cogs”: piano, Rhodes, harmonium, mixed percussion and more. He sings some, too. Underpinned by the syncopated rhythm and woven harmonic progression that he outlines at the start, the track works as a patient immersion, providing some balance to the heady overload of so much of this album. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLODonae’o featuring Terri Walker, ‘Good Mood’Everyone in this dystopian moment wants something better. Here’s a song for whenever, eventually, the situation might feel right: a stripped-down bit of electronic funk topped by gritty human voices, placed in a digital grid but hoping there’s a warm, real, physical space beyond it. PARELESSyd and Lucky Daye, ‘Cybah’On the brink of a new romance, Syd — Sydney Loren Bennett, the songwriter and producer who emerged from Odd Future — airs her misgivings in “Cybah,” whispering a question to a prospective partner: “Could you break a heart?” Lucky Daye responds with conditions of his own: “Promise me you’ll always keep my heart in a safe place.” The hesitancy is built directly into the track, three slowly descending chords atop a bass line that sometimes falls away into complete silence, keeping the next step uncertain. PARELESValerie June, ‘Use Me’Valerie June’s “Use Me” isn’t the 1972 Bill Withers song. It offers a more kindly, less exploited version of the same generously loving sentiment: “I’ll let you use me when the world is doing you wrong,” she promises. It’s a soul waltz that gathers a circusy momentum from an oom-pah-pah beat, slightly delayed snare-drum rolls and jovial horns that sound like they wandered into a bar and decided to stick around. PARELESRosalía, ‘Hentai’A delicate, demure piano arrangement serves as a sonic red herring for the raunchiest song Rosalía has released to date. On the surface, “Hentai” is achingly gorgeous, as sparse and intimate as anything the pop-flamenco queen has ever done. “So, so, so good,” she croons ecstatically on the chorus, starry-eyed and accompanied by nothing more than a few plinking notes — the sound of a multifaceted artist revealing yet another side of herself. ZOLADZEthan Gruska and Bon Iver, ‘So Unimportant’Two meticulously disorienting songwriters and producers — Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and Ethan Gruska (Phoebe Bridgers’s producer) — collaborated remotely on “So Unimportant.” It’s a waltz that mingles an argument and an apology, with Gruska eventually deciding, “It’s so unimportant what started the fight.” What could have been a folksy, homey waltz is layered with hazy sonic phantoms — echoes, altered voices, electronic tones, a hovering string arrangement — that hint at the emotional complexities of everyday frictions. PARELESDanilo Pérez, ‘Fronteras (Borders) Suite: Al-Musafir Blues’As the founder of the Berklee Global Jazz Institute in Boston, the celebrated Panamanian pianist Danilo Pérez has a utopian goal, framed by his own experience of jazz: He sees the music as a tool for international solidarity, and a pathway toward some kind of global sonic language. Pérez’s Global Messengers are a transnational band that has grown out of his work at Berklee, and that seeks to put some evidence behind the ideas. “Al-Musafir Blues” comes as part of the “Fronteras (Borders) Suite,” which contemplates the pain of forced migration. “Al-Musafir Blues” is an 11-minute epic unto itself, starting with a plodding, lovely pattern from the Palestinian cellist Naseem Alatrash that melds slowly into a full-band arrangement; by the end, Pérez’s scampering piano is guiding the conversation. RUSSONELLO More