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    The Rolling Stones Roar Back, and 13 More New Songs

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    Hear tracks by Allison Russell, Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion, Ashley McBryde 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.The Rolling Stones, ‘Angry’There’s no mistaking the time-tested Rolling Stones sound on “Angry,” the first single off “Hackney Diamonds,” the band’s first album of its own songs since 2005. The beat is blunt and brawny. The guitars riff and mesh, but also tangle and tease one another. And Mick Jagger unleashes full-throated indignation as he lets a lover — an angry one — know that they’re breaking up. He’s aggrieved, petulant, wounded and flippant, almost all at once. JON PARELESJoni Mitchell, ‘Like Veils Said Lorraine’This stunning, previously unreleased song from the forthcoming third installment of Joni Mitchell’s archive series (which will cover her early Asylum Records years, 1972 to 1975) begins with a quote about life from the titular character: “It’s veils you tear off one by one.” Another voice disagrees: “No, it’s walls we put up.” Accompanied by resonant, searching piano chords, Mitchell wrestles with these dueling perspectives and as ever, doesn’t settle on an easy compromise but finds the truth between extremes. Recorded as a demo sometime between Mitchell’s intimate 1971 masterpiece “Blue” and “For the Roses,” her labyrinthine 1972 meditation on the emptiness of fame, “Like Veils Said Lorraine” sounds like a bridge between those two eras of Mitchell’s rapidly developing artistry and serves as proof that her archives still contain untold riches. LINDSAY ZOLADZAllison Russell, ‘Eve Was Black’On her remarkable 2021 album, “Outside Child,” Allison Russell recalled childhood abuse and celebrated her survival. Her new one, “The Returner,” is just as strong, and it examines larger forces as well — most directly in “Eve Was Black,” which directly confronts racism and considers the African ancestors of all humans. “Do I remind you of what you lost/Do you hate or do you lust?” Russell sings. “Do you despise or do you yearn/To return, to return, to return back to the motherland?” What starts as a bluesy, folky, foot-stomping tune drifts toward jazz, then grows molten with rage as Russell sings about lynching. The track includes an epilogue; Russell, who grew up in Montreal, sings in French, over a banjo and fiddle, about a family uprooted from Africa to America. PARELESAshley McBryde, ‘Women Ain’t Whiskey’“You can’t just quit me/When you get lonely come pick me back up,” Ashley McBryde sings in “Women Ain’t Whiskey.” It’s a country-meets-U2 march that states the obvious; apparently it needs to be restated, loudly. At least it doesn’t have brand placements. PARELESGuppy, ‘Texting and Driving’J Lebow, of the Los Angeles band Guppy, talk-sings her way through the sinewy punk-pop of “Texting and Driving,” delivering lines like “Texting your dad a curated playlist/Texting God in my head — also known as praying” with sardonic glee. Produced by Sarah Tudzin (a.k.a. Illuminati Hotties), the track is laced with little sonic eruptions — bursts of dissonant guitar, out-of-nowhere backup vocals, outright screams — and there’s plenty of cowbell to kick it along. PARELESCardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion, ‘Bongos’The FCC’s least favorite duo, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, reunite on the unrelenting “Bongos,” their first collaboration since the 2020 succès de scandale “WAP.” Atop a clipped, appropriately percussive beat — bong, bong, bong — the two rappers trade boisterously braggadocious verses and winking, heavily stressed double entendre. “Bongos” feels more like a retread than a reinvention, though Megan — for once, more of a comic than Cardi — gets off a few hilariously memorable lines like “purse so big had to treat it like a person.” ZOLADZPeso Pluma, Jasiel Nuñez and Junior H, ‘Bipolar’Auto-Tune meets acoustic instruments in “Bipolar,” a very 21st-century regional Mexican collaboration by three of its stars: Peso Pluma, Jasiel Nuñez and Junior H. It’s an old-fashioned waltz about a newish situation: giving in to the temptation to check an ex’s social media, but then deciding “I’d rather make money than waste my time with mere stories.” PARELESResidente and Wos, ‘Problema Cabrón’The ever-provocative Puerto Rican rapper Residente harnesses an electric blues shuffle for “Problema Cabrón,” (“Problem Bastard”), a ferocious boast about being a perpetual troublemaker. “The day I die, you’re the ones who will be able to rest in peace,” he taunts in Spanish, over a track that keeps reconfiguring itself, from full band down to piano and finger snaps and back up. Like Residente’s other recent songs, the song arrives with a video; this one has him facing off with an authoritarian police force. The song itself is pure, apolitical insubordination. PARELESYussef Dayes featuring Shabaka Hutchings, ‘Raisins Under the Sun’The London-based drummer Yussef Dayes, the owner of one of the most distinctive backbeats in contemporary music — a taut but shrugging, hi-hat-heavy funk groove, lightly inflected with Afrobeat flavor but rooted in today — has spent years hanging out at the junction of jazz, hip-hop, garage and funk, awaiting his moment. Maybe it has arrived. His debut album, “Black Classical Music,” is both a sprawling declaration of his musical ambitions and a reminder that patience is his biggest virtue. Across 75 minutes, the focus is on catalyzing a vibe. On “Raisins Under the Sun,” he reunites with Shabaka Hutchings — they’ve known each other since childhood, and have collaborated intermittently — on a wafting, two-chord vamp, with Hutchings’s bass clarinet adding a misty layer but never forcing its way to the front. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOTirzah, ‘No Limit’“What’s your limit? What’s my limit?” repeats throughout “No Limit,” an evocatively low-fi track by the English songwriter and electronic producer Tirzah. That question runs alongside drum and piano loops, never to be fully answered; it’s a gateway to intimacy that recognizes all its dangers. PARELESMarika Hackman, ‘No Caffeine’In the verses, the English songwriter Marika Hackman dispenses random self-help advice: “Take a day off work, call your mum/Have a glass of wine, stay away from fun.” At first, there’s little more than a few piano notes chiming behind her. But as instruments assemble around her — double-time bass and drums, doleful strings — it’s clear her desperation is mounting, and the chorus is a reveal: “You got me good/And I feel so stupid.” PARELESLaufey, ‘California and Me’Is this the Samara Joy effect? If Joy’s best new artist win at the Grammys seemed like it could open the gates to a flood of young jazz singers who sound like they’ve leaped out of a reel-to-reel, then Laufey is at the crest of that wave. She’s a 24-year-old Chinese-Icelandic vocalist and multi-instrumentalist with a sepia croon and label support that’s helped her grab streaming listeners by the millions. Laufey’s tunes roll around in a plush, tear-stained bed, channeling the cool-jazz vocalists of the ’50s (think Chris Connor, but without the dangerous passion that haunts her music) by way of indie singers like Angel Olsen and Mitski at their most nostalgic. On “California and Me,” an original, she accepts heartbreak with an enthusiastic sigh, singing over London’s Philharmonia Orchestra: “Left me and the ocean for your old flame/Holding back my tears, I couldn’t make you stay.” RUSSONELLOJames Brandon Lewis, ‘Sparrow’James Brandon Lewis has a way of holding his tenor saxophone poised at the tipping point between a melody and a holler. That’s how Mahalia Jackson sang, too, when shaken by divine inspiration: moving from robust cascades of song to gravelly shouts. Lewis’s new album devoted to the singer, “For Mahalia, With Love,” turns his all-star Red Lily Quintet loose on nine gospel hymns. On its opening track, he combines the oft-covered “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” with an original, “Even the Sparrow.” Playing in unison with the cornetist Kirk Knuffke, Lewis keeps the focus on melodic clarity; it’s a moment of peace and meditation, before the album takes wing. RUSSONELLOVince Clarke, ‘The Lamentations of Jeremiah’Expect drones, not dance beats, from the new solo album by Vince Clarke, the synth-pop expert from Erasure and, before that, Depeche Mode and Yaz. In “Lamentations of Jeremiah,” an unswerving but subtly changing drone tone — with occasional distant-thunder eruptions — underlies the solo cello of the composer Reed Hays, which moves between moody, declarative melodic phrases and strenuous arpeggios, as if it’s wrestling with looming dread. PARELES More

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      Andy Fletcher, a Founder of Depeche Mode, Dies at 60

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      With three others, he created the band in 1980 and rode its synthesizer-driven music to worldwide fame.Andy Fletcher, who played synthesizers in Depeche Mode, the electronics-heavy British band that developed a huge fan following and sold millions of records in the 1980s and ’90s, has died. He was 60.The band announced his death on Thursday on Twitter. The announcement did not specify where he died or give a cause. An unidentified source close to the band told The Associated Press that he died on Thursday at his home in Britain.Mr. Fletcher formed Depeche Mode in 1980 in Basildon, east of London, with his fellow synthesizer players Vince Clarke and Martin Gore and the vocalist Dave Gahan. Mr. Clarke left after the group’s first album, “Speak & Spell,” was released in 1981, Alan Wilder filled the spot, and Mr. Gore took over from Mr. Clarke as the group’s main songwriter. The band started to veer away from pop and toward the darker, more serious music that it rode to worldwide fame over the next two decades.Critics at first often didn’t fully appreciate the appeal of the synthesizer-dominated act.“Consisting of four young men, three synthesizers and a tape recorder playing prerecorded rhythm tracks, Depeche Mode makes gloomy merry-go-round music with a danceable beat,” Stephen Holden wrote in an unenthusiastic review in The New York Times of a 1982 performance at the Ritz in New York.Fans, though, latched on, and by the end of the 1990s the group had landed dozens of singles on the British charts — “People Are People” (1984) and “Personal Jesus” (1989) were among the more successful, also charting in the United States — and it was filling big arenas.Onstage, Mr. Fletcher was the least flashy member of the group. And he was self-deprecating about his role.“Martin’s the songwriter, Alan’s the good musician, Dave’s the vocalist, and I bum around,” he said in “Depeche Mode: 101,” a 1989 documentary.But Michael Pagnotta, a SiriusXM Volume host who for much of the 1990s was the band’s publicist, said that offstage, Mr. Fletcher was the glue that held the band together, eager to promote it, keeping track of business and financial matters and often serving as the first point of contact when a tour brought it to a new city.“Andy Fletcher was the heart of Depeche Mode,” Mr. Pagnotta said in a statement. “A true believer in the band and their music. His keen musical and business instincts helped Depeche become one of the most popular and influential bands of their generation and helped carry them all the way to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Not bad for a boy from Basildon.”Depeche Mode, with David Gahan on vocals and Mr. Fletcher on keyboards, at Madison Square Garden in New York in 2005. The least flashy member of the group, Mr. Fletcher once said on his three bandmates, “Martin’s the songwriter, Alan’s the good musician, Dave’s the vocalist, and I bum around.”Judith Levitt for The New York TimesThat Hall of Fame induction came in 2020, the band having first been nominated in 2017 — a nomination that Mr. Fletcher never expected, since an electronic band didn’t fit the guitar-and-drums model that traditionally defined rock ’n’ roll.“To be honest, we were surprised,” he said of the initial nomination in a 2017 interview with The Associated Press. “We never aimed to be in it. We think, ‘An electronic band in the rock ‘n’ roll hall?’”Andrew Fletcher was born on July 8, 1961, in Nottingham, England, and, like the band’s other founders, grew up in a working-class family in Basildon. He and Mr. Clarke met when both were in the Boys’ Brigade, a Christian youth organization. They formed a band, Composition of Sound, in 1980 and soon invited another acquaintance, Mr. Gore, to join because, as Mr. Gore put it later, he was “one of the few people in Basildon who had a synthesizer.”Later that year Mr. Gahan joined as featured vocalist, bringing a sense of style and a new name, Depeche Mode. Daniel Miller of Mute Records signed the group, and its popularity began to grow, not only in England but also in East and West Germany and other countries.“Violator,” one of the band’s most successful albums, came out in 1989, and, riding its popularity, Depeche Mode played Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan the next year.“The band’s music, made by synthesizers, is loud washes of sound driven by a dance beat,” Peter Watrous wrote in The Times. “Jet engines roar. Cliffs collapse, dams break. An occasional guitar peeps out from behind the wreckage. All is magnified, and the dance beat, occasionally influenced by house music and hip-hop, continues.“At Radio City, the audience stood during the whole show and constantly had to be kept from dancing in the aisles.”In 2017 the group released its 14th studio album, “Spirit.”Mr. Fletcher’s survivors include his wife, Gráinne Mullan, and their children, Megan and Joe. More