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      7 New Collaborations You Should Hear Now

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      Hear music from pairings that include Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, and Post Malone and Chris Stapleton.Post MaloneThea Traff for The New York TimesDear listeners,It’s time once again for your monthly digest of recommended new music, culled from the Friday Playlists that Jon Pareles and I compile each week. This month’s collection has a twist: It’s composed entirely of collaborations.I try to keep these new music compilations relatively brief, so you can stay up-to-date on recent releases without investing too much time. Consider today’s playlist especially efficient. Over just 7 tracks, you’ll get to hear 14 different artists.Some pairings are like peanut butter and jelly, in that they make perfect sense: Of course Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars sound good together. Chloe and Anderson .Paak? I can absolutely hear that in my head before I even press play. But I’d categorize a few of these collaborations as peanut butter and bacon: Unexpected, a bit of a head-scratcher on paper, but surprisingly enjoyable in execution. I never thought I’d hear, say, the rapper ASAP Rocky and the folk singer Jessica Pratt on a song together, but now I have and you know what? That’s a tasty sandwich.You wanna guess if we’re serious about this song,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars: “Die With a Smile”Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars each have the sort of highly adaptable talent that transcends genre and trend; they also pride themselves on professionalism sprinkled with a healthy dose of pizazz. (For what it’s worth, they’re also the exact same age: 38.) Each brings the appropriate amount of firepower to “Die With a Smile,” a romantic torch song accentuated by dreamy guitars. It’s likely a one-off, but Gaga did reference a forthcoming seventh album when she announced this single. Little Monsters, you’ve been warned.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hear Billie Eilish and Charli XCX’s ‘Guess’ Remix

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      Hear tracks by MJ Lenderman, Miranda Lambert, ASAP Rocky featuring Jessica Pratt and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Charli XCX featuring Billie Eilish, ‘Guess’In the slightly less than two months since its release, Charli XCX’s sixth album, “Brat,” has transformed from a clubby cult classic into a mainstream phenomenon, fueled by a sense of cool so elusive yet galactically powerful that a CNN panel recently convened to discuss, with magnificent awkwardness, its potential impact on the presidential election. Strange times indeed. Luckily, Charli is still keeping it light, not allowing the new patina of Importance to cloud the fact that “Brat Summer” is, above all things, about messy, hedonistic fun. So let’s just say that the latest “Brat”-era remix, the deliriously suggestive “Guess,” is unlikely to appear in an upcoming Kamala Harris campaign ad.“You wanna guess the color of my underwear,” Charli winks atop an electroclash beat produced by the indie-sleaze revivalist the Dare, who interpolates Daft Punk’s 2005 single “Technologic”; Dylan Brady of 100 gecs also has a writing credit. It’s an underground loft party crashed by a bona fide A-lister: Billie Eilish, making her first guest appearance on another artist’s song, purring a playfully flirtatious verse that ends, “Charli likes boys but she knows I’d hit it.” It’s refreshing to once again hear Eilish on a beat as dark and abrasive as those on her debut album, but she and her brother and collaborator Finneas know they are ultimately on Charli’s turf, reverently endorsing the trashy aesthetic and if-you-know-you-know humor of “Brat.” “You wanna guess if we’re serious about this song,” Charli intones at the end, as Eilish lets out a conspiratorial giggle. Against all odds, reports of Brat Summer’s death seem to have been slightly exaggerated. LINDSAY ZOLADZOkaidja Afroso, ‘Kasoa’Okaidja Afroso, from Ghana, sings about cycles of nature and human life in his childhood language, Gãdangmé, on his new album, “Àbòr Édiń.” But his music exults in modern technology and cultural fusions. The six-beat handclaps and bass riffs of “Kasoa” look toward Moroccan gnawa music, while the vocal harmonies exult in computerized multitracking. “There will be meetings and partings, and joys and sorrows,” he sings. “May we journey with ease, and hope to cross paths again in another lifetime.” JON PARELESWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Charli XCX and Other Musicians Show Support for Kamala Harris on Social Media

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      Charli XCX, John Legend and other musicians posted messages supporting the vice president’s nomination, while fans remixed an old speech into pop hits on TikTok.Within hours of President Biden’s announcement that he would not seek re-election and would instead endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, social media exploded with support from the pop music world.As concerns about Mr. Biden’s electability have accelerated in recent months, Ms. Harris, who is 59, with a big, diverse family, seems to have energized digitally engaged voters in a way that Mr. Biden did not.Fans quickly started posting remixes on TikTok that incorporated audio from Ms. Harris’s speeches, along with her laugh, into songs by Charli XCX, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Chappell Roan, Mitski and Kim Petras.The snippet most often used is from a speech Ms. Harris gave in May 2023. She was addressing the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics and recalled an adage from her mother: “She would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’”After pausing to laugh, Ms. Harris continued: “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” (The combination of a coconut emoji and a palm tree emoji has become shorthand to refer to Ms. Harris’s campaign.)Charli XCX, in a nod to her latest album, “Brat” — and its signature green album cover that has become a Gen Z emblem of the summer — set the tone (literally) Sunday night by posting: “kamala IS brat.” On X, formerly Twitter, the official Harris campaign account updated its header to match the color and typography of the album.The pop singer Kesha used the “coconut” quotation to open a pair of posts on TikTok, in which she takes a beat after the word “tree” before breaking into dance.Katy Perry, whose song “Roar” featured prominently in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016, posted a montage of videos of Ms. Harris soundtracked by a remix that integrated the “coconut” quotation and clips of Ms. Harris laughing into Ms. Perry’s new single “Woman’s World.” “It’s a woman’s world, and you’re lucky to be living in it,” Ms. Perry sings.On Sunday, Cardi B reposted a selfie video recorded on June 30, in which she says, in an extended and profane message, that Ms. Harris should have been the Democratic nominee all along. “Been told y’all Kamala should’ve been the 2024 candidate,” she wrote in the caption. “Y’all be trying to play the Bronx education, baby this what I do!!!”And Tina Knowles, mother of Beyoncé and Solange, posted a photo of her and Ms. Harris with a caption that began: “New, youthful, sharp, energy!!!!”Other artists have thrown their weight behind Ms. Harris, who will face former President Donald J. Trump if she is the nominee. Janelle Monáe posted to her Instagram story a simple “I’m in,” and John Legend, who praised Mr. Biden at length, said of Ms. Harris, “She’s ready for this fight.” More

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      Billie Eilish, Lorde and More Are Singing Out About Body Image

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      Billie Eilish, Charli XCX and Lorde are among a group of young women who are revealing, in their music, the pressure they have felt to look thin.Taken together, the first two song titles on Billie Eilish’s third album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” form a provocative pair: “Skinny” and “Lunch.”“People say I look happy/Just because I got skinny,” Eilish sings on the opener, her melancholic croon accompanied by a single, murky guitar. “But the old me is still me and maybe the real me,” she adds, “and I think she’s pretty.”That lyric is a gut punch. It’s also indicative of a subtle shift among the current generation of female pop stars, who have recently been acknowledging — often in stark, striking and possibly triggering language — the pressure they have felt to look thin.Taylor Swift, who first opened up about her past struggles with disordered eating in a powerful sequence in her 2020 documentary, “Miss Americana,” sings about it on her 2022 track “You’re on Your Own, Kid,” a compassionate ode to her younger self: “I hosted parties and starved my body, like I’d be saved by the perfect kiss.” Last month, in a guest appearance on the remix of Charli XCX’s “Girl, So Confusing,” Lorde confessed that fluctuations in her weight had led her to stay out of the public eye. “For the last couple years, I’ve been at war in my body,” she sings, heartbreakingly. “I tried to starve myself thinner, and then I gained all the weight back.”For several years, conversations about weight in mainstream pop have centered around an artist bold enough to speak up about it and absorb the stinging backlash: Lizzo. In her lyrics, on social media, and in her shapewear line, the singer and rapper has played up self-love, becoming a face of the body positivity movement. Earlier this year, however, she told The New York Times that she had “evolved into body neutrality.” “I’m not going to lie and say I love my body every day,” she said.Part of the vitriol Lizzo has faced is rooted in racism, and it is impossible to divorce a dialogue about body image from race, and the different ways Black, brown and white bodies are dissected, denigrated and idolized. Latto recently spoke out about how online criticism led her to have plastic surgery at 21 to enhance her buttocks. Last year the rapper, who is biracial, said, “When I didn’t have my surgery, they’re like, ‘Oh, she shaped like her white side.’” SZA, speaking to Elle about her own, similar, procedure (which she sang about on her hit 2022 album, “SOS”), said, “I didn’t succumb to industry pressure. I succumbed to my own eyes in the mirror.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Charli XCX’s ‘Brat’ Breakthrough

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThe iconoclastic pop star Charli XCX has long flirted with mainstream success — helping write Icona Pop’s omnipresent 2012 hit “I Love It,” appearing on the hook of Iggy Azalea’s smash “Fancy” and in 2014 scoring a Top 10 hit of her own with “Boom Clap” — but largely exists as a self-proclaimed “cult classic,” a denizen of the club underground known for a string of innovative but niche records. Charli’s brash, strobe-lit sixth album, “Brat,” is in some ways her most daring release yet, but — improbably — it’s also her most commercially successful, debuting at No. 3 in the United States and earning her highest opening-week sales in her native United Kingdom.Why is “Brat” such a breakthrough? Some of its success has to do with the raw honesty of its lyrics, which find Charli musing on her innermost insecurities — at least when she isn’t playing the “365 party girl.” But to many listeners growing tired with certain trends in contemporary pop music (faux relatability, therapy-speak, demo-dumps disguised as deluxe editions), “Brat” provides a welcome and unapologetic alternative.On this week’s Popcast, guest hosted by the Times pop music critic Lindsay Zoladz, a conversation about “Brat,” placed in the context of Charli’s eccentric career and the wider pop landscape.Guests:Shaad D’Souza, a freelance writer for The New York Times, New York magazine, the Guardian and othersMeaghan Garvey, a writer from Chicago who runs the newsletter Scary Cool Sad GoodbyeConnect 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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      Charli XCX and Lorde End the Rumors on a Refreshing Remix

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      Lorde adds guest vocals to Charli XCX’s “Girl, So Confusing,” a song that muses on the complexities of female friendship, and helps create something revelatory.To a lot of people these days, “ambivalent pop music” is an oxymoron. Catchy hooks tend to streamline complex emotions into universal, legible sentiments, temporarily dividing the world into teams: the heartbreakers vs. the victims, the happy vs. the sad, the boys vs. the girls. Infectious as they are, many of the songs on Charli XCX’s incisive sixth album, “Brat,” refuse to take sides, making them difficult to discuss in the explainer-generating, SEO-baiting grammar of modern pop standom. How refreshing.Charli never mentioned Lorde by name on the album’s knotty ninth track, “Girl, So Confusing,” but all signs pointed to her being the somewhat socially awkward, poetry-loving doppelgänger to whom the song is addressed. (“People say we’re alike, they say we’ve got the same hair,” Charli sings, winking at those of us who remember when an interviewer asked her about writing Lorde’s “Royals.”)It was less clear how we were supposed to understand this song in the limited and polarized language of 2020s musical fandom, which pits female pop stars against one another like pro athletes while still insisting that they “support women” at all times with a benevolent grin. “Sometimes I think you might hate me, sometimes I think I might hate you,” Charli babbles atop a strobe-lit A.G. Cook beat, one of the many “wait, are you even allowed to say that anymore?” moments on “Brat.” The song strains the vocabulary of clickbait. Is this a “diss track” or the start of a “feud”? Are the girlies fighting? And if they are, what could Lorde possibly be doing in the V.I.P. section of Charli’s recent show?It’s complicated, and — blessedly — so is the surprise remix on which Lorde appears, firing off her first new lyrics in three years. After Charli unloads her feelings and projections in that first verse, Lorde responds with the run-on intensity of a late-night voice note: “You’d always say, ‘let’s go out,’ but then I’d cancel last minute,” the New Zealander confesses, “I was so lost in my head and scared to be in your pictures.” She then reveals, devastatingly, that she’s been “at war with my body,” insecure about fluctuations in her weight, and that the enigmatic aura she’s created is actually a stifling defense mechanism. That she does it all so succinctly in a cadence that effortlessly matches Cook’s beat should make everyone excited for her next album, whenever it arrives.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Taylor Swift’s ‘Tortured Poets’ Logs an Eighth Straight Week at No. 1

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      Billie Eilish is No. 2, and Charli XCX debuts strong at No. 3.Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, Taylor.For two months now, Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” has dominated the Billboard album chart, fending off challenges from Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa and the K-pop group Ateez, often with the help of special “versions” featuring extra tracks.This week, “Tortured Poets” logs its eighth consecutive time at No. 1, with the equivalent of 128,000 sales in the United States, including 136 million streams and 23,000 copies sold as a full package, according to the tracking service Luminate.Although two of Swift’s previous albums have posted more times at No. 1 overall — “Fearless” and “1989” had 11 each — none has held the top spot for as many weeks in a row. Consecutive runs of eight weeks or longer are rare on the chart. The last releases to do so were both by Morgan Wallen: “One Thing at a Time,” which logged 12 last year, and “Dangerous: The Double Album,” with 10 in 2021. For another example you have to go back to Drake’s “Views,” which led the chart for nine straight weeks at No. 1 in 2016.Also this week, Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” is No. 2 in its fourth week out, while “Brat,” the latest from the British pop singer-songwriter Charli XCX, opens in third place with the equivalent of 82,000 sales. Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” holds at No. 4 and Bon Jovi’s latest, “Forever,” starts at No. 5, helped by collectible vinyl and CD editions. More

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      Plant and Krauss Cover a Led Zeppelin Classic, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Soccer Mommy, Tems, Floating Points and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, ‘When the Levee Breaks’No one is more entitled to cover Led Zeppelin than its singer, Robert Plant. His close-harmony duo with the singer and fiddler Alison Krauss excels at making songs sound far older than they are, and even in 1971, “When the Levee Breaks” harked back to a vintage blues by Memphis Minnie. This live recording is stark, resonant and rumbling, with a fiddle solo by Stuart Duncan that looks toward both Ireland and Morocco and a cranked-up guitar stomp that builds toward — alas! — a frustrating fade-out. JON PARELESCarly Pearce, ‘Truck on Fire’The spoiler is in the title of “Truck on Fire,” a swinging country revenge song from Carly Pearce’s new album, “Hummingbird.” Her voice seethes as she recalls “the way that you laughed it off when I was catching on/Said it was in my head,” and there’s a dark glee (and a product placement) while she watches the “flames rolling off of your Goodyear tires.” PARELESSabrina Carpenter, ‘Please Please Please’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More