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    Drake Surprises With a Kim Kardashian Sample, and 11 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Kaytraminé, Blondshell, Yaeji 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.Drake, ‘Search & Rescue’“I didn’t come this far, just to come this far and not be happy” — so said Kim Kardashian on the 2021 series finale of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” discussing why it was time to split from her husband, Kanye West. Two years later, their divorce is finalized, but the narrative persists. That line appears at a pivotal moment in Drake’s new song, “Search & Rescue.” Hovering above a morbid, anxious piano figure, Drake raps about the hollowness of being lonely, and after the chorus, uses Kardashian’s words but reframes them, making them sound like a lament about the single life. Here are two contrasting forms of despair, played off each other. Drake is pleading for connection: “Take me out the club, take me out the trap/Take me off the market, take me off the map.” Kardashian is yearning to be free. But Drake is also a sometime high-profile antagonist of West’s, and his leveraging of Kardashian’s words — an official sample, certainly approved by her — is unlikely to be understood as anything but a broadside from two seemingly unattached people, who would cause a whole lot of trouble were they to attach to each other. JON CARAMANICAKaytraminé featuring Pharrell Williams, ‘4EVA’“4EVA” is the winningly bubbly debut single from Kaytraminé, the duo of the rapper Aminé and the dance music producer Kaytranada. It pairs the irreverence of Leaders of the New School with the sumptuous physicality of A Tribe Called Quest, all delivered at a tempo that triggers a sense of freedom and release. CARAMANICAMahalia, ‘Terms and Conditions’The English R&B singer Mahalia sets out her own EULA — the page everyone clicks through on the way to a website or app — in “Terms and Conditions.” She specifies “the man you’re required to be” over a briskly ticking beat, vocal harmonies and bursts of strings; she wants honesty, attention and fidelity, which don’t seem that much to ask. Can she treat a relationship as a matter of cold internet metrics? The penalties are spelled out: “I’ll cut you off and I won’t regret it,” she sings. JON PARELESIndigo De Souza, ‘You Can Be Mean’With a proudly discordant yelp in her voice, Indigo De Souza vents every bit of her annoyance at her latest hookup in “You Can Be Mean,” a grungy stomp topped by a mock synthesizer. “I can’t believe I let you touch my body,” she snarls. “It makes me sick to think about that night.” She briefly considers extenuating factors, like a bad parent, but not for long. “I don’t see you trying that hard to be better than he was,” she notes. PARELESBlondshell, ‘Salad’The brooding “Salad” is a rock-song revenge fantasy cut through with the Blondshell singer-songwriter Sabrina Teitelbaum’s wry humor: “Look what you did,” she sings, “you’ll make a killer of a Jewish girl.” Still, a genuine sense of menace lurks just out of frame, in a crime Teitelbaum alludes to but can’t name outright when she wails, “God, tell me why did he hurt my girl.” Here, as on the rest of her self-titled debut album as Blondshell, which is out on Friday, Teitelbaum offers candid dispatches from the darker, often unsung corners of a young woman’s experiences. LINDSAY ZOLADZLucinda Williams, ‘New York Comeback’A characteristic grit and defiance courses through “New York Comeback,” a new single from the country-rock legend Lucinda Williams, which features Bruce Springsteen and his wife and bandmate, Patti Scialfa, on backing vocals. The song comes from “Stories from a Rock N Roll Heart,” Williams’s forthcoming album and her first release since suffering a stroke in 2020. That context adds a bit of weight to the song, but as ever, Williams is gimlet-eyed and unsentimental, singing in her signature growl, “No one’s brought the curtain down, maybe you should stick around.” ZOLADZYaeji, ‘Passed Me By’The D.J. and producer Yaeji, whose debut album “With a Hammer” comes out on Friday, pens a letter to her younger self on the booming but introspective “Passed Me By.” The song — on which Yaeji oscillates between English and Korean — begins as a kind of free-form incantation, but all at once a slow, echoing drum beat drops and gives it a loose pop structure. “Do you know that the person is still inside of you, waiting for you to notice?” she sings in the song’s final moments, a question that both lingers and haunts. ZOLADZUncle Waffles, ‘Asylum’Lungelihle Zwane, the D.J. and producer who calls herself Uncle Waffles, distills her new album, “Asylum,” into a five-minute megamix and dance extravaganza for her “Asylum” video. Uncle Waffle was born in Swaziland (now Eswatini) and is now based in South Africa. With a quick-changing array of singers and rappers — men, women, soloists, groups — she works countless variations on the midtempo beat, shaker percussion and gaping open spaces of South African amapiano. It’s still only a small sampling of what she concocts in the course of the album. PARELESArthur Moon, ‘7 O’Clock Clap’Lora-Faye Ashuvud, the songwriter, singer and producer behind Arthur Moon, finds joy in disorientation in “7 O’Clock Clap.” As speedy staccato blips and skittering percussion race above a languid bass line, the song has advice what to do when “you’re a foreigner in your own production/in your own bed, in your own body.” There’s a big grin in the vocal as Ashuvud sings, “Take your shoes off, get a move on/Pray to someone, break your cover!” PARELESLabrinth, ‘Never Felt So Alone’“Never Felt So Alone” first surfaced as part of Labrinth’s soundtrack for “Euphoria,” and snippets thrived on TikTok for years. The full-fledged version — a collaboration by Labrinth, Billie Eilish and Finneas — luxuriates in heartache. Labrinth intones the title as a falsetto plaint above hollow, puffing organ chords that hark back to Brian Wilson; the beat is slow, sporadic, almost stumbling. Midway through, the track stages a near-collapse, with fragmented lyrics and bits of dead air, then grandly reassembles itself. Eilish takes over to deliver her side of the story — “Who knew you were just out to get me?” — before each moves on, resigned to loneliness. PARELESPeter Gabriel, ‘I/O’The title of Peter Gabriel’s first new album in 21 years, “I/O,” stands for input/output, a metaphor he earnestly spells out in its title track, preaching the oneness of humanity and nature over solemn keyboards; “Stuff coming out, and stuff going in/I’m just a part of everything.” But the song takes off in the nonverbal moments of the chorus, when electric guitars surge and the Soweto Gospel Choir backs him in the exultant vowel sounds of “i, o, i, o.” PARELESThis Is the Kit, ‘Inside/Outside’Calm on the outside but bustling within, “Inside Outside” ponders fate, physics and free will. “All the molecules were focused on your next move,” Kate Stables sings, as complex counterpoint gathers around her. The sparse acoustic guitar at the beginning is deceptive; soon she’s in a polytonal tangle of horns, guitars and cross-rhythms, living up to her admonishment: “Bite off as much as you can chew.” PARELES More

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    Lizzo and SZA Spin Up a Fresh ‘Special,’ and 7 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Luke Combs, Jessie Ware, Indigo de Souza 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.Lizzo featuring SZA, ‘Special’Lizzo’s soulful, gospel-choir-backed performance of “Special,” the title track from her 2022 album, was a highlight of this year’s Grammys telecast, and now she’s recruited SZA to provide a fresh spin on the song. “You call it sensitive, and I call it superpower,” SZA sings, nimbly skipping across the beat, while Lizzo offers her a message of solidarity: “I thought that I’d let you know, in case nobody told you today, you’re special.” If the original version was a more general anthem of uplift, SZA’s presence gives the song a more intimate call-and-response quality, as if she and Lizzo were two girlfriends exchanging words of support after a long day. LINDSAY ZOLADZBeyoncé, ‘Cuff It (Wetter Remix)’It’s easy, and expected, to think about Beyoncé from the top down. On Sunday, she won four Grammys, giving her a career total of 32 and making her the most decorated performer in the show’s history. Conversations about her music, how she assembles it and how she releases it often take on a world-historical tone. She is the defining superstar of the stan era, publicly available only every once in a while.The Emotionally Charged Sound of SZAThe artist, whose real name is Solána Imani Rowe, has become a dominant figure in American pop.View From the Top: Her moody, enigmatic music made SZA a megastar. Can she learn to live with success?‘Ctrl’: The artist’s first album for a major label, released in 2017, held on to the electronics and the leisurely tempos of her past work. But it placed her fully in command of her songs.Interview: After receiving five Grammy nominations for “Ctrl,” the singer sat down to discuss her journey to success and facing her inner critic.‘SOS’: On her second album, SZA presents herself not as a heroine but as a work in progress who knows she’ll make more mistakes.But she is listening. One of the more gratifying and unexpected turns of the “Renaissance” era has been her acknowledgment of how fans listen to her, responding in something like real time. First, in August, she formally released a mash-up of “Break My Soul” and Madonna’s “Vogue” that had been floating around online.Now, she’s done it again. A few months ago, the D.J. and producer esentrik made a mash-up of “Cuff It” with “Wetter,” a temperate love rap from 2009 by the Chicago fast talker Twista, produced by the Legendary Traxter. It was a hit on TikTok, and now, it’s become something even more substantive. Beyoncé recorded new vocals for this version, which takes the sauciness of the original and cools it down slightly, leaning into afterglow.Making this remix official is savvy acknowledgment that fans listen to music in ways artists can’t anticipate, and it behooves artists to be mindful of how they’re being consumed. And it is savvy business too, a way of formalizing the chaos of TikTok and bringing it under the umbrella of the empire. JON CARAMANICAJessie Ware, ‘Pearls’Jessie Ware’s latest disco-inspired track is an effervescent invitation to, as she puts it, “shake it til the pearls fall off.” The single from her April album “That! Feels Good!” is thick with sumptuous atmosphere and Ware’s signature sass. But most impressively, its chorus’s ascending melody is a dazzling showcase of Ware’s stratospheric upper register. Sing along at your own risk. ZOLADZMegan Moroney, ‘I’m Not Pretty’A razor-sharp premise for a song: “Somewhere out there my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend is scrolling through my Instagram/Tearing me down, passing the phone around.” A young country singer with a voice that mixes sweetness with wryness, Megan Moroney targets this charming, funny, exhausted song at women who tear other women down. CARAMANICALuke Combs, ‘Love You Anyway’In midcareer mode, Luke Combs doesn’t let it rip quite as often as he once did. His bellow is more stable, his emotional presence more dignified. But there’s still something of a purring engine inside songs like “Love You Anyway,” which in the hands of a lesser singer, would be a familiar, cloying ode to a love so strong, it’s worth the pain of potentially losing it. But when Combs sings, “If your kiss turned me to stone, I’d be a statue standing tall in ancient Rome,” he sounds like he’s thoroughly pondered the consequences — the likelihood of heartbreak — and is pressing on with force nonetheless. CARAMANICAIndigo de Souza, ‘Younger & Dumber’“Younger & Dumber,” from the Asheville singer-songwriter Indigo De Souza, is a slow-burning tear-jerker, a gradual accumulation of heartbreaking lines that takes flight in a soaring climax. “Sometimes I just don’t want to be alone, and it’s not because I’m lonely,” De Souza sings in a wearied croon. “It’s just that I get so tired of filling the space all around me.” But just then, her voice swells in intensity and fills that space with her own wrenching emotion. ZOLADZYaya Bey, ‘Exodus the North Star’Brooklyn’s Yaya Bey brings a light touch to “Exodus the North Star,” the title track from an upcoming EP that follows her excellent 2022 album “Remember Your North Star.” “Exodus” is a love-struck reverie that begins as a sparse arrangement — just Bey’s voice and some celestial keys — but soon explodes into a joyful, horn-kissed celebration. “Baby, it’s the way you make me feel like your girl could get up and fly,” Bey sings and, accordingly, the song suddenly takes flight. ZOLADZFrench Montana featuring 2Rare, “Ratataaaaa’Turns out that French Montana’s meandering smears, typically at home over lightly galloping production, sound equally intriguing over sounds twice as quick. This song (which perhaps is an allusion to an old TikTok meme) is jubilant and spacious, and a little odd. The Philadelphia club rapper 2Rare, who guests here, is more naturally bouncy than his host, but his antic energy is mostly a counterweight to French Montana’s impressionistic almost-raps. CARAMANICA More