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      Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Selena Gomez, Al Green, L’Rain and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. 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, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Miley Cyrus, ‘Used to Be Young’“You say I used to be wild, I say I used to be young,” Miley Cyrus sings on the muted, introspective new ballad “Used to Be Young.” The timing of the single’s release is canny: Cyrus gave her infamous, twerk-seen-’round-the-world MTV Video Music Awards performance 10 years ago on Friday. Cyrus, now 30, isn’t chiding her younger self or expressing regrets here, though — “I know I used to be crazy, messed up, but God was it fun,” she sings with an audible grin — so much as she is asserting her right to grow and change. Though “Used to Be Young” starts out quiet, it gradually builds in intensity, culminating in a finale that allows Cyrus to showcase the full power of her grainy drawl. LINDSAY ZOLADZAl Green, ‘Perfect Day’The magnificently idiosyncratic soul singer Al Green has re-emerged singing “Perfect Day,” a song from 1972 by — of all people — Lou Reed. Reed’s original had a disquieting undertone, warning “You’re going to reap just what you sow.” But Green’s remake — backed by musicians from his 1970s Hi Rhythm Section — trades any misgivings for romance, and the same line becomes a promise of mutual bliss. JON PARELESZach Bryan featuring Kacey Musgraves, ‘I Remember Everything’This wrenching highlight from Zach Bryan’s new self-titled album is a he-said/she-said account of a failed, whiskey-soaked romance, set to a forlorn chord progression. “A cold shoulder at closing time, you were begging me to stay ’til the sun rose,” Bryan sings in his aching croak, before Kacey Musgraves enters with a pointed question: “You’re drinking everything to ease your mind, but when the hell are you gonna ease mine?” ZOLADZL’Rain, ‘Pet Rock’“Why would you go without me?” L’Rain — the songwriter and musician Taja Cheek — wonders in “Pet Rock,” a turbulent song about unwanted solitude. Cascading guitars and shifty-meter drumbeats give the music an unpredictable, almost tidal motion that ebbs and flows with all the lyrics’ unanswered questions. PARELESSelena Gomez, ‘Single Soon’“I know he’ll be a mess when I break the news/but I’ll be single soon,” Selena Gomez exults in the ultra-smiley “Single Soon.” It’s a triumphal march about all the prerogatives of moving on — “I’m gonna do what I wanna do” — with giggles in the backup track as she decides it’s “Time to try another one.” Like Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space,” it celebrates the choices ahead. PARELESPrince, ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’The teaser for the next much-expanded Prince reissue — “Diamonds and Pearls,” due Oct. 27 — is a falsetto funk tune about a woman with a mysterious but alluring occupation. “Some call it a curse, some call it sweet salvation/No one can deny the stimulation,” Prince sings over a skulking synth-bass line. The lyrics stay ambiguous, but the groove tells its own sensual story. PARELESMargo Price, ‘Strays’Margo Price released her album “Strays” in January, but its title track arrives this week in the rollout of “Strays II,” a sequel she’s releasing a few songs at a time. In “Strays,” she sings about being young, broke and ferally in love back in January 2003, with a galloping beat and pounding piano chords that suggests the E Street Band visiting Nashville. The memories sound victorious. PARELESMon Laferte, ‘Tenochtitlán’The Chilean songwriter Mon Laferte sings about a woman shamed for her pregnancy in “Tenochtitlán,” comparing her to the Virgin Mary. In a track that melds the retro and futuristic, she overlays a trip-hop bass undertow with lushly dramatic strings, a flamenco-tinged guitar solo and a passage of pitch-shifted vocals, while she urges, “Beautiful one, cry no more.” PARELESLuciana Souza & Trio Corrente, ‘Bem Que Te Avisei’The new album from Luciana Souza and Trio Corrente, “Cometa” is a celebration of Brazil’s classic songbook, with covers of songs by Dorival Caymmi and Antonio Carlos Jobim alongside lively originals written in the spirit of tradition. Souza contributes a composition, “Bem Que Te Avisei” (“Well, I Warned You”), an up-tempo samba in which she admonishes a suitor not to chase someone unless he’s interested in committing. The piece comes fully alive midway through, when she sings a verse accompanied by just Paulo Paulelli’s bass and Edu Ribeiro’s light percussion, and achieves elevation at the end, as Souza’s wordless vocals double with the piano of Fabio Torres, briefly bringing to mind Flora Purim’s synergy with Chick Corea in Return to Forever. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOTitanic, ‘Anónima’The Guatemalan songwriter Mabe Fratti and the Venezuelan composer Hector Tosta, who bills himself as I la Católica, have collaborated as Titanic, with an album due in October. In “Anónima” (“Anonymous”), Fratti’s cello grunts rhythmic double-stops as she sings about persistent, troubling thoughts, surrounded by clusters of piano notes and increasingly brutal percussion. Her voice maintains its equanimity, but her distorted cello finally lashes out. PARELESAbiodun Oyewole, ‘Somebody Else’s Idea’In 1968, the poet-activists Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka released “Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing,” a collection that would help to define the Black Arts Movement. The poet with the most works featured in its pages was Sun Ra: Although mostly known as the bandleader of the Arkestra, Ra was a philosopher and poet as much as he was a musician. That same year, a group of young poets came together in Harlem, dubbing themselves the Last Poets and helping to lay the groundwork for what would soon become hip-hop; Abiodun Oyewole was one of them. Those histories collide on “My Words Are Music: A Celebration of Sun Ra’s Poetry,” a new album on which various artists read Ra’s poems between spacey synthesizer interludes from Marshall Allen, the Arkestra’s current leader. On “Somebody Else’s Idea,” Oyewole delivers verses that Ra first recorded in the early 1970s, when the Last Poets were in their prime: “Somebody else’s idea of things to come/need not be the only way to vision the future,” he declares. RUSSONELLO More

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      Ticketmaster Under the Magnifying Glass

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicLast year, Ticketmaster was the object of a significant amount of consumer discontent. There was the confusing rollout of tickets for the upcoming Taylor Swift stadium tour. In Mexico City, countless people with valid tickets were denied entry to a Bad Bunny concert. And the rising roots-rock singer-songwriter Zach Bryan made Ticketmaster a focus of his public ire.If all of this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Ticketmaster has long been the target of — or perhaps the cause of — widespread unhappiness. High prices and fees? Blame Ticketmaster. A resale/scalping market that’s even more financially taxing? Blame Ticketmaster. And so on, and so on. Artists as big as Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen have taken on the giant, and mostly been forced to stand down, owing to the company’s reach and power.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the recent spate of kerfuffles that have increased scrutiny of Ticketmaster, the artists who have pushed back against the ticketing giant and the seeming intractability of the issues plaguing the ticket marketplace.Guest:Ben Sisario, The New York Times’s music industry reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Best Albums of 2022: Beyoncé, Rosalía and More

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      The most effective artists of the year weren’t afraid to root around deep inside and boldly share the messiness, the complexities and the beauty of their discoveries.Jon Pareles | Jon Caramanica | Lindsay ZoladzJon ParelesA Cornucopia of IdeasIf there’s one thing that unites my favorite albums of 2022, it’s a sense of creative abundance: of ideas spilling out so fast that songs can barely contain them, and of artists ready to follow their impulses toward revelatory extremes. No need to hold back: In 2022, more was more.1. Beyoncé, ‘Renaissance’A disco revival gathered momentum during the pandemic years, as musicians and listeners found themselves yearning for the joys of sweaty, uninhibited communal gatherings. Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” also looks back to dance floor styles, but it goes much further. It’s not merely a nostalgic re-creation of a fondly remembered era. With leathery vocals and visceral but multileveled beats, it’s an excursion through layers of club culture, connecting with pride, pleasure and self-definition and taking no guff from anyone.Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” is a tour through decades of dance music.Mason Poole/A.M.P.A.S. via Getty Images2. Rosalía, ‘Motomami’“I transform myself,” Rosalía declares in the first song on “Motomami,” and throughout the album she does just that: playfully, impulsively and very purposefully smashing together musical styles and verbal tactics. Every track morphs as it unfolds, hopping across the Americas and back to Spain, rarely giving away where it’s headed. Along the way, Rosalía presents herself as fragile at one moment and invincible the next.3. Beth Orton, ‘Weather Alive’Over ghostly, circling piano motifs, the songs on “Weather Alive” meditate on longing and memory, connection and solitude, nature and time. Beth Orton’s voice stays unguarded in both its delicacy and its flaws, while her production cradles it in patiently undulating arrangements, floating acoustic instruments in electronic spaces; the songs linger until they become hypnotic.4. Sudan Archives, ‘Natural Brown Prom Queen’Sudan Archives — the songwriter, singer and violinist Brittney Denise Parks — juggles the many conflicting pressures and aspirations of being young, Black, female, artistic, carnal, career-minded and social on “Natural Brown Prom Queen.” The music is kaleidoscopic, deploying funk, electronics, hip-hop beats, jazz, chamber-music arrangements and the African fiddle riffs that inspired Sudan Archives’ name, barely keeping up with her ambitions.5. iLe, ‘Nacarile’Vulnerability and courage are never far apart on “Nacarile,” which is Puerto Rican slang for “No way!” The songwriter Ileana Cabra, who records as iLe, sings about political and feminist self-assertion alongside songs about toxic and tempting romances. Each of the 11 songs conjures its own sound — acoustic bolero, orchestral ballad, Afro-Caribbean drums, gravity-defying electronics — for music that’s richly rooted but never constrained.6. Sylvan Esso, ‘No Rules Sandy’Sylvan Esso’s electronic pop goes gleefully haywire on “No Rules Sandy,” the fourth studio album by the duo of Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn. In songs that leap between the everyday and the metaphysical, they maintain the transparency that has always defined their music, but skew and tweak the details: moving vocals off the beat, slipping in hints of cross rhythms, always keeping serious ideas lighter than air.Sudan Archives’ “Natural Brown Prom Queen” reflects the vastness of her aspirations and influences.Frank Hoensch/Redferns, via Getty Images7. black midi, ‘Hellfire’The human condition is nasty, brutish and ferociously virtuosic on the third album by the British band black midi. In songs that flaunt the complexity and dissonance of prog-rock and the bitter angularity of post-punk — while stirring in ideas from jazz, classical music, funk, salsa and flamenco — loathsome characters do odious things. But the music turns grotesquerie into exhilaration.8. Björk, ‘Fossora’Forget pop comforts: Björk has other plans on “Fossora,” leaning toward chamber music at one moment and blunt impact the next. Her new songs contemplate earthy fertility and the continuity of generations, using rugged electronic sounds, families of acoustic instruments and the very human passion of her voice. As Björk looks all the way back to a primordial “Ancestress,” she’s also determined for her music to move ahead.9. Billy Woods, ‘Aethiopes’In hip-hop that’s simultaneously grimy and cerebral, upholding a New York City legacy, the prolific Billy Woods raps about colonialism, poverty, personal memories and ruthless historical forces. The unsettling productions, by Preservation, draw on Ethiopian music (of course) as well as funk, jazz, reggae, soundtracks, Balinese gamelan and many murkier sources, and Woods is joined by equally determined guest rappers. The tracks are dense, and well worth decoding.10. Porridge Radio, ‘Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky’Catharsis is the agenda for Porridge Radio, the British band led by Dana Margolin. In songs that wrestle with connection and autonomy, her vocals declaim, sob and gasp; her lyrics blurt out dilemmas and demand responses that may not arrive. The arrangements sound live and jammy, harnessing post-punk and psychedelia for emotional crescendos.And 15 more, alphabetically:Rauw Alejandro, “Saturno”Bad Bunny, “Un Verano Sin Ti”Congotronics International, “Where’s the One?”Jorge Drexler, “Tinto y Tiempo”Ethel Cain, “Preacher’s Daughter”FKA twigs, “Caprisongs”Horsegirl, “Versions of Modern Performance”Jenny Hval, “Classic Objects”Rokia Koné & Jacknife Lee, “Bamanan”Kendrick Lamar, “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers”Makaya McCraven, “In These Times”Mitski, “Laurel Hell”Bonnie Raitt, “Just Like That…”Soul Glo, “Diaspora Problems”Soccer Mommy, “Sometimes, Forever”Jon CaramanicaLetting It All GoJudging by these albums, it was a year of release: superstars opting to get physical, neat songs spilling over with unruly emotions, artists relinquishing familiar beliefs, singing and rapping teetering on the edge of control. Disruption is in the air — being contentedly static is no longer enough.1. Zach Bryan, ‘American Heartbreak’An astonishing feat of emotionally acute songwriting and shredded-artery sentiment, Zach Bryan’s mainstream breakthrough is a heavy lift, in all senses: 34 songs, and 10 times as many small details that kick you in the sternum. “Summertime Blues,” the EP he released two months later, is maybe even better — bare bones and almost harried, it’s even more evidence of a faucet that simply won’t stop spilling.2. Rosalía, ‘Motomami’When Rosalía first broke through, she was engaged in a tug of war between tradition and modernity. But the dissonance she’s navigating on “Motomami” is more profound: cultivating a futurist aesthetic that spans multiple genres, eras and philosophies, making for an album as radical and syncretic as any released by a global superstar in the last few years.Zach Bryan’s “American Heartbreak” is a lengthy album that probes raw emotions.Kristin Braga Wright for The New York Times3. Drake, ‘Honestly, Nevermind’The better of the two Drake albums this year was the less expected one: a collection of earthen, sensual, soulful house music. In a career defined by blurring borders, this was less a plot twist than a quick spotlight on an underappreciated character: body music that keeps the heart palpitating.4. Priscilla Block, ‘Welcome to the Block Party’The most promising Nashville debut of the year belonged to Priscilla Block, a pop-friendly singer-songwriter with a robust grasp of country tradition. Her first album includes a few rowdy bridge-burners and a gaggle of torch songs sung in a sweet but unshakable voice.5. Beyoncé, ‘Renaissance’“Renaissance” is a few things that Beyoncé’s music hasn’t always been: chaotic, breathy, unrelentingly sweaty, appealingly frayed. A titanic collection of club music, it has an almost gravitational urgency, emphasizing the primal pull of the dance floor, where putting on airs is not an option.6. Bartees Strange, ‘Farm to Table’Bartees Strange has quite a voice, or perhaps voices. He sings with huskiness and nimbleness, plangency and viscosity — sometimes all of these at once. On his eruptive second album, he writes about growth and self-doubt, Phoebe Bridgers and George Floyd, all unified by singing that’s brimming with heart and pluck and can pivot on a dime.7. Gulch’s final show, Sound & Fury Festival, July 31, 2022Not an album per se, but the video of this 34-minute concert — on the StayThicc YouTube channel — is a hair-raising document of this San Jose, Calif., hardcore band at its punishing peak, the fan fervor it inspired, and the ridiculous, anticlimactic conclusion in which power to the stage was abruptly turned off.8. 42 Dugg & EST Gee, ‘Last Ones Left’These two, stars in their own right, have all the makings of a great rap duo — EST Gee, from Louisville, Ky., is steely and narratively vivid, his verses square-cornered and bleak. 42 Dugg, from Detroit, delivers nasal, curvy passages flecked with scars of having seen too much.9. Asake, ‘Mr. Money With the Vibe’The debut album from the rising Nigerian star Asake is both appealingly grounded and aiming for an astral plane. Taking in Afrobeats, fuji and amapiano, but also flickers of jazz fusion and even gospel, Asake’s music is enveloping and inspirational, mellow but assured.10. Bad Boy Chiller Crew, ‘Disrespectful’There’s an inherent silliness to bouncy club music, songs designed to trigger full-scale abandon. Bad Boy Chiller Crew — effectively a comedy troupe wearing the costume of a music collective — amplifies and underscores that tendency on its second album. The songs — faithful bassline and garage tunes that sound like shout-rapping over a D.J. mix — are absurd and uncanny, an invitation to dance and a metacommentary on letting loose.11. Bad Bunny, ‘Un Verano Sin Ti’The defining pop star of 2022, Bad Bunny is fully untethered from expectations. His fourth solo album is a sunshine beam, taking reggaeton and Latin trap as starting points and embracing styles from across the Caribbean, from mambo to dembow.Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” has dominated the charts in 2022.Gladys Vega/Getty Images12. Bandmanrill, ‘Club Godfather’Bandmanrill emerged last year from the Jersey drill scene, which takes the drill template of immediate, punchy rapping and matches it with up-tempo Jersey club music. In short order, he became one of drill’s premier songwriters, but his debut, “Club Godfather,” already shows him stretching beyond the genre’s boundaries.13. Special Interest, ‘Endure’The ecstatically erratic third album from the New Orleans band Special Interest is full of politically minded punk-funk. It is a howling good time, but also nervous and tense, with songs that are agitated, but more crucially, agitating.And 16 more, alphabetically:The 1975, “Being Funny in a Foreign Language”Cash Cobain & Chow Lee, “2 Slizzy 2 Sexy (Deluxe)”Tyler Childers, “Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?”Fred again.., “Actual Life 3 (January 1 — September 9, 2022)”Giveon, “Give or Take”Lil Durk, “7220”Mavi, “Laughing So Hard, It Hurts”Tate McRae, “I Used to Think I Could Fly”Rachika Nayar, “Heaven Come Crashing”Harry Styles, “Harry’s House”Earl Sweatshirt, “Sick!”Rod Wave, “Beautiful Mind”The Weeknd, “Dawn FM”Willow, “”YoungBoy Never Broke Again, “Colors”Honorary late 2021 release: Kay Flock, “The D.O.A. Tape”Lindsay ZoladzInner Lives, Shared WideThis year I found myself drawn to records that created their own immersive worlds that reflected the bold, distinct perspective of their creators — a trick that quite a few big-budget pop albums pulled off, sure, but plenty of smaller indie records did, too, with just as much personality and flair.1. Grace Ives, ‘Janky Star’Small, quirky pop albums are a dime a dozen these days, but they rarely come with the wit, vision and lyrical personality of this one by Grace Ives. For the last half year, the Brooklyn musician’s sharp, frequently hilarious observations have stuck in my mind as often as her infectious, synth-driven melodies: the overdraft fee from a $100 A.T.M. withdrawal on “Loose”; the flirty way she co-opts business jargon like “circle back” on “Angel of Business.” Or how about this deadpan punchline on the jangly, crush-struck “Shelley”: “I wonder what she wants for dinner/She’s really got me looking inward.” Ives’s voice across these 10 tracks is weighty but nimble, her ear for melody idiosyncratic but always immediate and true. By the end of “Janky Star,” it’s hard not to be charmed by the warm interiority of her sound and her peculiar, canted vision of the world.Grace Ives’s “Janky Star” is laced with small details and personal touches.Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images2. Beyoncé, ‘Renaissance’Along this dazzling and immaculately sequenced joyride through the history of dance music, Beyoncé celebrates her own uniqueness while also decentering herself, refracting the disco ball’s spotlight so it illuminates a long line of forebears: Grace Jones, Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer, Robin S., Moi Renee, Nile Rodgers, Big Freedia and of course her very own Uncle Jonny. Bless whoever dosed the lemonade at this party: “Renaissance” is Queen Bey at her loosest, funniest, sweatiest and — as she testifies on the sublime “Church Girl” — her most transcendently free.3. Rosalía, ‘Motomami’On the singular “Motomami,” one of the coolest pop stars on the planet mashes up innumerable genres and cultural influences to create her own sonic world. Rosalía combines the braggadocio of your favorite rapper (“Rosa! Sin tarjeta!”) with the emotional intensity of the flamenco legend Carmen Amaya (“G3 N15”), effortlessly pivoting between stylistic extremes that would give a less innovative talent whiplash.4. Alex G, ‘God Save the Animals’The Philly indie-rock everydude Alex Giannascoli reimagines the New Testament as a fanzine, sort of (“God is my designer, Jesus is my lawyer”), and the miracle is how well it actually works. The sudden jolts of sonic abrasion — a hyperpop breakdown in the middle of an acoustic ballad about the innocence of children, say — and the unbroken through line of weirdness do not diminish the radical empathy and poignant sincerity that is this record’s beating heart.5. Florence + the Machine, ‘Dance Fever’On her fifth, and best, studio album with her trusty Machine, Florence Welch’s imperial goddess persona comes crashing down to earth, or maybe somewhere even less dignified: “The bathroom tiles were cool against my head, I pressed my forehead to the floor and prayed for a trap door,” she sings on the gut-wrenching closer “Morning Elvis,” a painstakingly detailed depiction of a breakdown. Welch has never been sadder (“Back in Town”), more provocative (“King,” “Girls Against God”), or funnier (“And it’s good to be alive, crying into cereal at midnight”) than she is on the kaleidoscopic “Dance Fever,” an album that constantly, seamlessly moves between the macro and the micro, from an inquisitive exploration of gender and power to a blown-open window in the heart.6. Nilüfer Yanya, ‘Painless’London’s Nilüfer Yanya harnesses the antsy buzz of modern anxiety and transforms it into something not just manageable but actually beautiful, thanks to her elegant melodies and the lavender calm of her voice. The magnificent “Painless” is so well paced that one of the peak musical moments of the year comes at its direct center: that beat when the hitherto coiled “Midnight Sun” suddenly blooms into a reverie of guitar distortion.Florence Welch has never been sadder or funnier than she is on her latest album, “Dance Fever.”Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated Press7. Alvvays, ‘Blue Rev’This Toronto five-piece makes — and on its third album, “Blue Rev,” perfects — a kind of inverted shoegaze: big-hearted, smeary dream-pop oriented toward the sky. Molly Rankin’s achingly sweet voice cuts through the woolly squall of distortion as she sings of the thwarted expectations and indistinguishable hope of early adulthood: “I find myself paralyzed/Knowing all too well, terrified/But I’ll find my way.”8. Sudan Archives, ‘Natural Brown Prom Queen’Get comfy when Sudan Archives welcomes you into her domicile on the mood-setting opener “Home Maker” — you’re going to want to stay awhile. The prismatic songwriter born Brittney Denise Parks showcases the many facets of her musical personality — singing, rapping, playing violin — on the immersive, genre-hopping “Natural Brown Prom Queen,” an 18-track song-of-self filled to the brim with smart, sensual and continuously adventurous ideas.9. Angel Olsen, ‘Big Time’To address some radical changes in her life — coming out as queer just before both her parents died — the indie star Angel Olsen turns, incongruously, to the traditionally minded sounds of vintage country and torch-song pop. Turns out they suit the wailing grandeur of her voice perfectly, though, and she can’t help but make them her own thanks to the fiery force of her musical personality.10. Miranda Lambert, ‘Palomino’Miranda Lambert’s wandering spirit is given plenty of room to roam on the majestic “Palomino,” a travelogue across not just the interstate highway system but the many musical stylings Lambert can command: honky-tonk country (“Geraldene”), Petty-esque Southern rock (“Strange”) and even some heartstring-tugging folk balladry (“Carousel”). Mamas, this is what it sounds like when you let your daughters grow up to be cowboys.11. Amanda Shires, ‘Take It Like a Man’Here’s the spirit of outlaw country in 2022: a fearless woman gathering all her strength and belting out her truths with a poet’s diction and a bird of prey’s voice. “Come on, I dare you, make me feel something again,” the singer/songwriter/fiddle player Amanda Shires trills at the beginning of “Take It Like a Man,” and then she spends the next 40 minutes rising to her own challenge.12. The Weeknd, ‘Dawn FM’If you’ve ever wondered what the finale of “All That Jazz” would sound like had it been scored by Oneohtrix Point Never, have I got the record for you. The Weeknd follows the huge success of “After Hours” with some high-concept and deeply stirring experimentation on the probing “Dawn FM,” reimagining the pop album as a kind of death dream without sacrificing the hooks.13. Aldous Harding, ‘Warm Chris’The New Zealand eccentric Aldous Harding is a folk-rock harlequin, clowning and mugging her way through beguilingly catchy tunes. In the weird world of her fourth album, “Warm Chris,” there’s not a lot of because, just a lot of deadpan, and glorious, is.And 12 more very good records worth mentioning:The 1975, “Being Funny in a Foreign Language”Bad Bunny, “Un Verano Sin Ti”Yaya Bey, “Remember Your North Star”Kendrick Lamar, “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers”Julianna Riolino, “All Blue”Sasami, “Squeeze”Syd, “Broken Hearts Club”Sharon Van Etten, “We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong”The Weather Station, “How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars”Weyes Blood, “And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow”Wet Leg, “Wet Leg”Wilco, “Cruel Country” More

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      The Sudden Rise of Zach Bryan

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherOne of the year’s biggest pop breakouts is Zach Bryan, a Navy veteran who makes calm and detailed country-folk. His major label debut album, “American Heartbreak,” has steadily held in the Top 20 of the Billboard album chart since its release in May.Bryan is not a radio fixture, and mostly has found success on streaming, translating into live crowds of several thousand per night. He is also a reluctant star, offering very little to the public outside of his music and Twitter feed.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Bryan’s old-fashioned artistry and 1990s attitude, the shifts in mainstream country music that have in part set the table for his rise and how genre boundaries serve as guideposts, even for artists who assiduously try to skirt them.Guest:Grady Smith, who hosts a YouTube channel about country musicConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Popcast Live! The New Faces of 2022

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherFor the first live taping of Popcast, held at Gertie in Brooklyn, members of The New York Times pop music team explored the ways music is evolving today by highlighting some of this year’s breakout stars. The conversation touched on the British rapper Central Cee, the Bronx drill rapper Ice Spice, the country-folk singer Zach Bryan, the alt-rock revivalist Blondshell, the haunted pop crooner Ethel Cain and more.The conversation included debate about what makes for innovation in the crowded and confusing pop music marketplace in 2022, and an audience Q. and A. session touching on Taylor Swift, the persistence of physical media and much more.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Zach Bryan Is Music’s Most Reluctant New Star

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      The Navy veteran — who blends folk, rock and country — has had a breakthrough year with his major-label debut, “American Heartbreak.” But fame isn’t what he’s after.INDIANAPOLIS — In late May, Zach Bryan released “American Heartbreak,” a bracing and shaggily elegant 34-song country-folk opus that served as his major-label debut. It opened at No. 5 on the Billboard album chart, an astonishing mark for a singer who less than a year before had been in the Navy, putting out music on the side.A couple of weeks later, he was riding his motorcycle with his girlfriend when he took his eyes off the road for a moment and crashed. The left side of his forehead was badly scraped, his right arm deeply gashed and his skin pockmarked with road rash. (His girlfriend, Deb Peifer, was largely unhurt.)The two had just spent a quiet afternoon at a nearby creek. The emotional whiplash jolted Bryan, 26, into his new reality.“The most beautiful moment that I’ve had in the last five years, and the worst moment I’ve had in the last five years, and it all happened in like 24 hours,” he said in July, in the diviest dive bar in Indianapolis, the afternoon after he performed to around 6,000 people at TCU Amphitheater at White River State Park.“I’m like a Kerouac guy,” he continued. “Like, I think life is reckless and it should be insane. It all ends in agony. It’s all about the outcome, so like, do it, you know? Do whatever it is.”But the accident — and the new responsibilities it underscored — chastened him. “I rode motorcycles 120 miles an hour, 130 miles an hour in my life. Now I’m on a scooter going 10 miles an hour, like, freaking out, looking back at her like, ‘Are you OK? Are you OK?’”A handful of days after the crash, he returned to the stage. And not long after that, as Bryan is wont to do, he started writing through the suffering, resulting in an EP, “Summertime Blues.” “Here,” Bryan said, his eyes tightening ever so slightly. “Thanks for the pain.”BRYAN HAS BEEN making hay from pain for the past few years, first getting attention for the muscularly intense songs he released on Twitter and YouTube while he was still in the Navy, and now as one of this year’s most sudden breakout stars. “American Heartbreak” has hovered in the Top 20 of the Billboard 200 since its release, displaying staying power similar to recent albums from Kendrick Lamar, Future and Post Malone.It is a refreshingly unpretentious album, with songs that take the shortest path from feeling to words while also deploying some alarmingly lovely turns of phrase. “When you place your head between my collar and jaw/I don’t know much, but there’s no weight at all,” he rasps on “Something in the Orange,” which has become his most recognizable hit since his early songs “God Speed” and “Heading South.” On “Sun to Me,” he vividly captures feeling unworthy of someone’s love:I don’t recall what you were wearing on the first night we metBesides the subtle cloud around you from my last cigaretteAnd you come from a good place with a happy familyThe only bad you’ve ever done was to see the good in meBryan is midsize, sturdy and preternaturally calm. He generally dresses comfortably — Carhartt T-shirt, a well-loved pair of Birkenstock Bostons. But onstage, singing any of a couple dozen songs about wounds and what it takes to lick them, he clenches tight, as if determined to lift an unusually heavy barbell, and nailing it.He grew up a Navy brat — his father was a master chief, and the family was stationed in Japan. When Bryan was in the eighth grade, the family moved to Oologah, Okla., an actual one-stoplight town around 30 miles northeast of Tulsa. His parents, Dewayne and Annette, divorced when he was around 12.Bryan, photographed in early September, his forehead still healing from his motorcycle crash.Kristin Braga Wright for The New York TimesBryan was popular in school, a wrestler who was student council president. He had a rebellious streak, but also a clear idea about the man he intended to become. Graham Bright, a childhood friend who’s now his lead guitar player, recalled a night of drinking when the young men saw police lights nearby. “He goes and hides under a bed and starts crying and he’s just like, ‘I want to join the Navy. That’s all I want to do. And I’m not going to be able to!’”Bryan enlisted when he was 17; the day he shipped off to boot camp, he hadn’t spoken with his father in weeks. “He called my wife some names and he put me on my butt,” Dewayne recalled, referring to his second wife, Anna, with whom Zach now has a strong relationship. “He’s tougher than nails.”Even though he lived with his father, who had full custody, Bryan felt close to his mother, who had also served in the Navy: “an Oklahoma sweetheart, homecoming queen cheerleader, like a small-town freaking famous person almost.”But Annette struggled with alcohol, straining family relationships. She died in 2016, and afterward Bryan’s songwriting deepened. “I think my mom dying really solidified the darkness in life to me,” he said. “It opened that thing in you that’s like, ‘Hey, be a man now.’”“People say I repress,” he continued. “And I’m like, no, the person that I want to tell all this stuff to is dead. And you don’t deserve me weighing in on my feelings to you.”Bryan’s years in the Navy left him with an emotional resilience and a sense of equanimity, even under fire. Peifer noted that “Sometimes he’s so levelheaded that I’m like, wait, you should be mad or something. Like, we need to react to this!”Bryan’s sister, MacKenzie Taylor, said they’d “learned from our mom how to put a mask on,” adding, “And he’s a dude in Oklahoma — he’s not supposed to have emotions.”In the military, Bryan was an aviation ordnanceman stationed in Washington and Florida, and did tours in Bahrain and Djibouti. He assembled, repaired and loaded weapons, and in his downtime, recorded songs. He was a fan of the Oklahoma country band Turnpike Troubadours — especially the songwriting of its frontman, Evan Felker — as well as Radiohead, Bon Iver, Gregory Alan Isakov and assorted “weird indie music.”In 2015, he started posting clips of his music online, and by 2019 he was garnering attention from progressive country music websites. In Florida, some Navy buddies helped him record his first album, “DeAnn” — his mother’s middle name — which he self-released in August of that year. A second set, “Elisabeth,” followed in 2020. By 2021, still in the Navy, he made his first appearance at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.Bryan records and releases music at a furious pace. “I have this weird fear of like, if I don’t put this music out, someone 20 years from now isn’t going to be able to hear it,” he said. Kristin Braga Wright for The New York Times“I was like, don’t put your guitar down, keep going, something’s going to happen,” he said. “Not because I felt driven. Not because I wanted to be famous. Not because I wanted to be rich. I literally just would sit there and think about my mom and be like, Something is telling me not to stop doing this.”Bryan was honorably discharged from the Navy in August of last year, and soon after set out on the road, finding a rabid fan base waiting for him.“He wouldn’t sell meet-and-greet tickets because he is too goddamned principled, I guess,” J.R. Carroll, Bryan’s keyboard player and another Oklahoma friend, said with a light cackle. “So they would just have anybody who wanted to meet him after our show. He would just stand there and talk to these people, and they would tell him the most unbelievably dark and depressing stories for three hours.”Now that Bryan is operating at a bigger scale, he is beginning to set boundaries for himself. “People don’t understand the pressure exerting emotion on other people exerts back on you,” Bryan said.‘AMERICAN HEARTBREAK’ HAS 34 songs, an improbable number but not, apparently, an undigestible one. In the four months since its release, Bryan has continued to unleash music at an unconventional clip, more like a rapper than a folk singer.“The EPs I give the label for free — I can’t stop writing,” he said. “I have this weird fear of like, if I don’t put this music out, someone 20 years from now isn’t going to be able to hear it. If some kid needs this in 40 years and he’s 16, he’s sitting in his room, what if I didn’t put out ‘Quiet, Heavy Dreams’? What if that’s his favorite song of all time?”Considering that Bryan is now routinely selling out shows of several thousand people, he’s maintaining raw skepticism about the ruinous power of money and celebrity. He has a decidedly old-fashioned take on the music business and the ways art should be made, a throwback to the authenticity obsessed 1990s, or even the late ’60s and early ’70s.“Songwriting is such a massive part of this,” he said. “If you’re missing out on it, what the hell are you doing? You’re just performing. You’re an actor.”Still, he has embraced the occasional surreal moment — recording “American Heartbreak” at Electric Lady Studios; coincidentally being at the New York restaurant Carbone the night in January that Kanye West went there with Julia Fox; getting the opportunity to work out at the Ohio State football team’s facilities before the Indianapolis concert.“People feel entitled to be famous and rich,” he said, with genuine amazement, “and I’m like, dude, you could be digging ditches, bro.”Besides, the music business is fickle. “You don’t know if it’s cringy in the time,” Bryan said of his songs, and their success. “‘Cause what if it’s a trend? What if all this is going to be embarrassing and you’re just trying to be a genius that you’re not?”In the current slotting of genres, Bryan falls perhaps closest to country, though it doesn’t feel like home to him. “I think people understand that I’m not that,” he said. “I want to be in that Springsteen, Kings of Leon, Ed Sheeran at-the-very-beginning space,” he said.But some of the more partisan elements of the country audience can surface at his shows. In Indianapolis, before Bryan took the stage, parts of the crowd broke out in a vulgar chant about President Biden.Bryan spent much of 2022 on the road. Next year, he plans to scale back to spend more time with family and potentially return to school.Kristin Braga Wright for The New York Times“I told people if I heard it, I would stop it immediately,” Bryan said. “Don’t come to my shows and start it. But they do it anyway.” (He describes himself as a “total libertarian.”)Moments like that contribute to the creeping sense that his success has become too big to fully control and supervise. This was made manifest at a performance in Oklahoma in April, when someone threw a beer at Bryan when he was onstage. The audience was filled with people he knew, or somewhat knew, or somewhat knew him.“You see all these eyes and you’re like, Y’all don’t know me anymore, man. I’ve grown. I’m reborn,” he said last month, taking a cigarette break in a Philadelphia parking lot, not far from the modest home he recently bought. Living in Oklahoma, as much as he loves it, isn’t a viable option right now.And so he’s already retrenching a bit, aiming to make his suddenly big life just a bit more cloistered. “I’m too writing-driven to be a big star,” he said. “I’m not meant for it.”Last month, “he had like a week and a half off,” Peifer said. “Got back, recorded some songs, and then took four days to build cabinets. And it was all of the exact same importance.”And he has been chipping away at the final nine credits he needs to receive his bachelor’s degree, squeezing coursework in between concerts. He’s studying psychology: “I just wanted to figure out why my mom was the way she was, you know? Like the most beautiful lady of all time and also kind of tortured herself.”On Twitter, he recently said he wouldn’t properly tour again: Next year, he plans to play around 30 shows — less than half of this year’s number — so he can leave time to potentially return to school and pursue a master’s degree, ideally in philosophy, and also to spend time with his loved ones.“How are you going to write music that’s personal and heartfelt if you never get to see the people you love?” Carroll asked, adding that the band’s goal is simply “Letting it be beautiful.”That means taking space, and saying no, and knowing when is enough. Bryan underscored the dilemma with what sounds like self-deprecation but is in fact a kind of stoic pragmatism. “Music’s going to die out,” he said, characteristically straight-faced. “You either keep going and you fail, or you stop while you’re ahead.” More