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      The 1975’s Chamber-Pop Confessions, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear new tracks from Alvvays, Tyshawn Sorey, Killer Mike 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.The 1975, ‘Part of the Band’Matty Healy, the proudly enigmatic singer-songwriter of the 1975, leads his group into chamber-pop with “Part of the Band,” the first song from an album due in October, “Being Funny in a Foreign Language.” He sings about “cringes and heroin binges,” about a “vaccinista tote-bag chic barista” and about literary-minded gay liaisons — “I was Rimbaud and he was Paul Verlaine.” He also queries, “Am I ironically woke?” The production wanders from chugging string ensemble to fingerpicked folk-rock to saxophone choir, with all of them mingling near the end. It’s pandemic confusion, self-questioning and ennui, with melodies to spare. JON PARELESAlvvays, ‘Pharmacist’A plain-spoken, everyday admission — “I know you’re back, I saw your sister at the pharmacy” — kick-starts the latest single from the Canadian dream-pop band Alvvays; as soon as the vocalist Molly Rankin sings that line, the song suddenly transforms into a fantasia of melancholic melody and squalling guitars. Hints of My Bloody Valentine and Japanese Breakfast hang in the hazy atmosphere, but Rankin’s bittersweet delivery gives “Pharmacist,” the opening track from the upcoming album “Blue Rev,” a distinct emotional undertow, like a stirring dream that ends a little too soon. LINDSAY ZOLADZJulien Baker, ‘Guthrie’“Guthrie” is a quietly harrowing postscript to Julien Baker’s 2021 album “Little Oblivions” from a collection, “B-Sides,” being released later this month. Like “Little Oblivions,” the song confronts what it’s like to be an addict: “Whatever I get, I always need a little more,” she sings. But while Baker overdubbed herself into a rock band on “Little Oblivions,” in “Guthrie” she’s solo, picking a soothing waltz on her guitar as she tears into her own failings. The song is a crisis of conscience and of faith, with a voice humbled by self-knowledge. “Wanted so bad to be good,” she offers, “but there’s no such thing.” PARELESKing Princess, ‘Change the Locks’“A year without no separation just might have broke us, baby,” King Princess sings in “Change the Locks,” a song about how pandemic proximity — and friction — could destroy a relationship. It’s three-chord folk-rock that explodes into hard rock when King Princess (the Brooklyn songwriter Mikaela Strauss) realizes how bad things have gotten. She wants to hold on; she knows she can’t. PARELESFlo, ‘Immature’English R&B lags American innovations by years or sometimes decades. The vocal trio Flo is catching up with what American acts like Destiny’s Child accomplished in the 1990s: calling out male assumptions while mastering recording techniques and harnessing voices, instruments and machines to sharpen their message of self-determination. The way Flo juggles individual voices and two or three-part harmonies, flirtation and fury, harks back to Destiny’s Child, but unerringly: “Why you gotta be so immature,” they sing, adding “Tell me how can I relate/If you don’t communicate?” Even before a crying-baby sample slips into the mix, it’s easy to know who’s in the wrong. PARELESGhetto Kumbé, ‘Pila Pila (Trooko Remix)’Ghetto Kumbé is a group from Bogotá that fortifies Afro-Colombian drumming and socially conscious lyrics with electronics; it released a potent self-titled debut album in 2020 and has opened for Radiohead. The group handed over tracks from its album to various producers for “Ghetto Kumbé Clubbing Remixes,” an album due in November. “Pila Pila,” a brawny tribute to the power of drums, got reworked by the Grammy-winning Honduran producer Trooko (who worked on “Residente” and “The Hamilton Mixtape”). He revved it up even further, switching the meter from 6/4 to 4/4, moving its incantatory lead vocal to the start of the song and bringing in a hopping salsa bass line, electronic hoots, jazzy piano and twitchy drum machines, constantly hurtling ahead. PARELESKiller Mike featuring Young Thug, ‘Run’A verse from a still-jailed Young Thug only adds to the urgency of “Run,” Killer Mike’s first new track as a solo artist since his vital 2012 album “R.A.P. Music.” Across four fruitful albums with Run the Jewels, it’s become commonplace to hear Mike rapping over El-P’s kinetic, collagelike beats, but it’s refreshing here to hear him link up once again with the veteran No I.D., whose understated production allows Killer Mike to tap into a smoother flow. “The race to freedom ain’t won,” he raps on the chorus, providing some welcome counterprogramming to your standard Independence Day jingoism. ZOLADZDomi & JD Beck (featuring Anderson .Paak), ‘Take a Chance’Jazz might be one of the only spaces left where the term “internet star” still means anything. Domi & JD Beck are Exhibit A, a duo of virtuosic post-jazz Zoomers who seem to have leaped out of a cartoon, and whose wow factor is suited to the small screen: A blond keyboardist rips solos while a diminutive drummer taps out hyper-contained, hyperactive beats. References to jazz history are funneled into the aesthetics of a sped-up TV jingle. Domi and Beck have found a champion in Anderson .Paak, and their debut album, “Not Tight,” is being jointly released by his new label and Blue Note Records. Redolent of lounge, ’70s fusion, trip-hop and breakbeat, this LP offers the nonstop dopamine drip of a doom-scroll, and it’s heavy on star features: Thundercat, Snoop Dogg and Mac DeMarco all pull up. “Take a Chance” is their moment with Paak, and if his earnest, rapped pledges of devotion don’t exactly square with the song’s feel-good vibes and the geometrically sound pop hook that Domi and Beck sing, you’re hard-pressed to hold it against them. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOTyshawn Sorey Trio, ‘Enchantment’A multi-instrumentalist, composer, University of Pennsylvania professor and MacArthur “genius” grantee, Tyshawn Sorey is likely to be found writing suite-length experimental works, or serving as composer in residence with an opera company, or conjuring up new systems for group improvisation. It’s been a long time since anyone really thought of him as “just” a jazz drummer. So, for Sorey, recording an album of standards with a piano trio qualifies as a curve ball. Of course, he has a big fondness for throwing curves. Sorey recently joined up with the pianist Aaron Diehl, one of jazz’s standard-bearing traditionalists, and the versatile bassist Matt Brewer to record “Mesmerism,” an album of jazz classics and lesser-known pieces from the canon. Horace Silver’s “Enchantment” is usually played as a tautly rhythmic samba, but the trio retrofits it, with Diehl putting the lush precision of his harmonies to work over a loose-limbed, shuffling beat from Sorey. RUSSONELLO More

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      Joan Shelley’s New Songs Soothe Old Wounds

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      As a Kentucky farm kid, the singer and songwriter made music to have a voice in her troubled home. On her new album, “The Spur,” her songs finally process those times.SKYLIGHT, Ky. — The second week of November 2016: Donald Trump was president-elect, and Leonard Cohen was dead. The songwriter Joan Shelley and the guitarist Nathan Salsburg — her collaborator for the better part of a decade and boyfriend for the better part of a year — were the opening act on a tour that suddenly seemed meaningless. They listened to Cohen’s haunted farewell, “You Want It Darker,” on repeat and bickered about the news.“It was so masochistic: ‘Start it over, and let’s feel horrible,’” Shelley, now 36, remembered recently by phone from Kentucky during one of several interviews, laughing through a sigh. “Talk about bad reverb, the worst echo box.”But, Shelley recalled, as the sun sank to the couple’s west along the Indiana plains during that 2016 drive, she marveled at the outlines of homes scattered on the horizon, how they seemed to resist the tug of inevitable darkness. “It made a really beautiful point — the hopefulness of someone building a house out here, despite all the …” she said, pausing for words that never came. “It was lonely, but it was resilient. Everything became part of the sunset.”Standing in the kitchen of their bungalow three years later, Shelley played her newest tune for Salsburg — “When the Light Is Dying,” a snapshot of that gloomy scene and a portrait of hope through shared perseverance. “Oh God, I felt emptied out,” Salsburg, 43, remembered in a phone interview. “That was a desperate, desolate moment, but she turned it into something profoundly beautiful, this whole cocktail of being human.”The graceful song’s quiet redemption is the centerpiece of “The Spur,” Shelley’s sixth solo album, due Friday. Written largely during the pandemic while Shelley was pregnant with their daughter, Talya, its dozen songs deal not with her expectations for motherhood but instead with her difficulties as a daughter and sister, as an attentive observer of the cycles around her lifelong home and her worries about the place’s future, both politically and environmentally. There is death and renewal, romance and retreat, self-doubt and societal hope, all rendered with elegant restraint in her fireside alto.“I had to clean out this junk I’d been dragging around,” Shelley said on another interview day. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a mom, but doing this made that possible. I was scared of hurting a new human, of perpetuating the pain inflicted on me.”Shelley and Salsburg live on a 40-acre former tree farm 30 minutes northeast of Louisville, tucked at the end of a long driveway in the community of Skylight. She grew up on her mother’s nearby farm for Saddlebred horses, a world apart from Louisville and “punk kids that looked so hard.”“I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a mom, but doing this made that possible,” Shelley said, of writing her new album. “I was scared of hurting a new human, of perpetuating the pain inflicted on me.”Stacy Kranitz for The New York TimesHer parents split when she was 3. After her mother remarried, Shelley, quiet and pensive, struggled for space among four other children. She began mimicking songs of heartache from the radio, using the borrowed language of romance to explore adolescent anxiety. She won a songwriting contest at 9, then joined any chorus she could find, rehearsals providing trips to the big city. As high school began, she learned chords on a guitar salvaged from the attic.“I didn’t have a voice in that family, but I found one through music,” she said. “That’s 100 percent why I sing now. I was the only one in my family that had this expression, so I made a quiet corner in a noisy world in this very isolated family.”Shelley headed south to the University of Georgia, hoping Athens’s fabled music scene would motivate her when coursework didn’t. She majored in anthropology, dreaming of archaeological digs in exotic places. But after graduating, she fell into a small traditional music crew back in Louisville, starting the old-time trio Maiden Radio alongside two music therapists, Cheyenne Marie Mize and Julia Purcell.“We didn’t want to go play around the world as ‘Kentucky’s Appalachian band,’ because that’s not who we were,” said Mize, who stayed up until dawn singing with Shelley when they met while camping in the state’s Red River Gorge. “Joan was writing in an old-time vein as an exercise; she started finding her style.”Shelley has steadily refined that style — a braid of folk immediacy and poetic insight, much like the writing of fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry — for a dozen years. The tree sanctuary has become another quiet corner, allowing her to “recoil into solitude” to raise chickens and goats, grow collards and kale, bake sourdough bread and write songs alone at the kitchen table. (When Salsburg walks in for a snack but finds her with a guitar, he disappears; she plays him songs only when they’re finished.)Birds, rivers, leaves and ridgelines animate her writing; images wrested from her surroundings offer unexpected lenses for self-reflection. “There is no facade that is useful out here,” Shelley said of life on a farm. “This privacy is a way to let go of the things you’ve said and try to say something else.”To write “The Spur,” however, Shelley opened her usually hermetic process. She joined a new group of local songwriters who met weekly to share their responses to a prompt. The time constraint inspired her to be satisfied with pieces she would have once considered unfinished, like “Fawn,” a playful but frank ode to safeguarding privacy. “I’ve been worried since the beginning,” she sings, tone gentle but clinched. “Am I safe in my skin?”And when she stalled on a tune that reflected all the birth, life and death she’d seen as a country kid, she emailed the sketch to Bill Callahan, a singer-songwriter she’s long admired. They’ve become pen pals in recent years, having met only once. “She writes songs that don’t feel like they’re trying to do something,” Callahan said from Austin by phone. “You’re never really sure if the tide is going in or going out.”“Music made me a whole person — it allowed for the survival of the softer parts of me,” Shelley said.Stacy Kranitz for The New York TimesKnowing of her rural circumstances, he supplied images of cows killed for hides or crops planted for harvest on “Amberlit Morning,” his trademark baritone the doomy inverse of her tender awakening. “When I was a child, I didn’t see the tragedy of, like, a colt dying. ‘A snake ate the ducks’ — that’s just what happened,’” Shelley said. “Only later did I learn to cry about the loss or ugliness or violence.”As new parents, married for a year now, Shelley and Salsburg talk about leaving the farm or even Kentucky, of finding some place where their elected officials reflect their values. “We have this community rich with really wonderful people, but is that enough to insulate Talya from the insidious stuff?” Salsburg asked, squinting in the sunlight outside the barn where he works remotely as the curator of the Alan Lomax Archive. “For this child, we could use a different place, a different path.”Shelley, though, waffles with the seasons. The new song “Why Not Live Here” squares up to the troubles of making home in challenging places. Strolling toward Harrods Creek on the afternoon of an in-person interview, her billowing pants swishing against thick grass, she pointed out the culvert where she sits to read and stood over a possum’s carcass, unfazed as she contemplated its end.“As soon as all the trees leaved out, I was like, ‘I’m staying forever,’” she said of spring’s recent start, singing those last few words in a soprano vibrato. “But it’s still hard to imagine planting a child in this.”For now, the songwriting coterie that prompted much of “The Spur” has morphed into the Marigold Collective, an upstart group organizing letter-writing campaigns to conservative Kentucky politicians and a parade along an old bison trail to, as Shelley put it, “celebrate life on the edge of extinction.” These actions are small, she said, like writing new songs to process old wounds. But maybe they prove more meaningful than submitting to darkness.“Music made me a whole person — it allowed for the survival of the softer parts of me,” she said on a FaceTime call, walking through the yard as birds chirped. “It’s a way to be unstuck about it all.” More

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      Jim Seals, Half of a Popular 1970s Soft-Rock Duo, Dies at 79

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      Teamed with Dash Crofts, he hit it big with “Summer Breeze” in 1972. The two went on to have chart success with “Diamond Girl” and other songs.Jim Seals, half of Seals & Crofts, a soft-rock duo who had a string of hits in the 1970s, including the Top 10 singles “Summer Breeze” and “Diamond Girl,” died on Monday evening at his home in Nashville. He was 79.His wife, Ruby Jean Seals, said the cause was an unspecified “chronic ongoing illness.”Mr. Seals and his musical partner, Dash Crofts, were still teenagers when they were asked to join an instrumental group, the Champs, which had had a No. 1 hit in 1958 with “Tequila.” By the mid-1960s they had tired of the band and of the loud, sometimes angry strains that were infusing the hard rock of the time.Adherents of the Baha’i faith, they sought to make a calmer brand of music, mixing folk, bluegrass, country and jazz influences and delivering their lyrics in close harmony.“Jim Seals plays acoustic guitar and fiddle,” Don Heckman wrote in The New York Times in 1970 in a brief review of their second album, “Down Home,” “and Dash Crofts plays electric mandolin and piano; together they sing coolly intertwined, and quite colorful, vocal harmony.”With the lilting, nostalgia-seeped single “Summer Breeze,” released in 1972, the two found international stardom. They had developed a modest following, but that song changed everything, as they found out when they arrived in Ohio to play a show.“There were kids waiting for us at the airport,” Mr. Seals told Texas Monthly in 2020. “That night we had a record crowd, maybe 40,000 people. And I remember people throwing their hats and coats in the air as far as you could see, against the moon.”The song, written jointly by the two men, featured the kind of chorus that sticks in the brain:“Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, / Blowing through the jasmine in my mind.”The single reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, and a follow-up, “Hummingbird,” made the Top 20. “Diamond Girl” in 1973 reached No. 6. “Get Closer” in 1976 also reached No. 6.But the duo’s run of success basically ended when the decade did, and they called it quits for a time.“Around 1980, we were still drawing 10,000 to 12,000 people at concerts,” Mr. Seals told The Los Angeles Times in 1991, when the two revived the act. “But we could see, with this change coming where everybody wanted dance music, that those days were numbered.”Six years earlier, though, the pair had begun to fall out of favor with some listeners and critics because of their sixth album, “Unborn Child,” which was released in 1974 not long after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights. The title track urged women who were considering an abortion to “stop, turn around, go back, think it over.”Mr. Seals, in a 1978 interview with The Miami Herald, acknowledged that the record damaged the duo’s career.“It completely killed it for a while,” he said. Radio stations refused to play the record. Some Seals & Crofts concerts were picketed, although there were also hundreds of letters of support. In the 1991 Los Angeles Times interview, Mr. Seals said the pair never intended the song to be a lightning rod.“It was our ignorance that we didn’t know that kind of thing was seething and boiling as a social issue,” he said. “On one hand we had people sending us thousands of roses, but on the other people were literally throwing rocks at us.“If we’d known it was going to cause such disunity,” he continued, “we might have thought twice about doing it. At the time it overshadowed all the other things we were trying to say in our music.”James Eugene Seals was born on Oct. 17, 1942, in Sidney, Texas, to Wayland and Susan Seals. His father worked in the oil fields, and Jim spent much of his childhood in Iraan, a boomtown in southwest Texas.“There were oil rigs as far as you could see,” Mr. Seals told Texas Monthly. “And the stench was so bad you couldn’t breathe.”His father played a little guitar and his mother played the dobro, so informal jam sessions were a common way to pass the time in the household. When a fiddler came by one evening, young Jim was taken with the instrument, and his father ordered him one from a Sears catalog.Later he took up the saxophone, which led to an invitation to join a rockabilly band called the Crew Cats that played at dances and in local clubs. The band’s drummer quit right before a show at a junior college, and the drummer from another band on the bill sat in — Darrell Crofts, known as Dash.The two became friends and played with the Champs for several years out of Los Angeles. Both mastered other instruments, including the guitar. Once they hit it big as a duo, they knew the image they wanted to project and tried to stay true to it. In 1973, when they were about to tour England, Mr. Seals told a reporter that they had pulled out of a previous European engagement.“We were going to tour there earlier, but we had a last-minute change of mind when we found out that we’d be playing with Black Sabbath,” he said. “I’m sure they’re a fine band, but I’m not sure that the audience would be quite right for us.”Mr. Seals, left, and Mr. Crofts in an undated promotional photo.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIn addition to his wife, Mr. Seals is survived by their two sons, Joshua and Sutherland; a daughter, Juliet Crossley; and three grandchildren. A sister, Renee Staley, and a half brother, Eddie Ray Seals, also survive him. His brother, Dan Seals, a singer who had success in the late 1970s as a member of another soft-rock duo, England Dan & John Ford Coley, died in 2009. The two brothers toured together for several years before Dan Seals’s death, with Jim Seals’s two sons sometimes playing with them.Maia Coleman More

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      Sky Ferreira’s Dazzling, Defiant Return, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Wynonna & Waxahatchee, Superorganism, Rico Nasty 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.Sky Ferreira, ‘Don’t Forget’The nine long years since Sky Ferreira’s 2013 cult-classic album “Night Time, My Time” vanish in the opening moments of “Don’t Forget,” a dazzling return to form that is slated to appear on Ferreira’s much-delayed second album, “Masochism.” In her near decade (mostly) away from music — due, in part, to disagreements with her record label — Ferreira’s grungy synth-pop sound has hardly changed at all. But “Night Time, My Time” still sounds singular enough that “Don’t Forget” (which she co-produced with Jorge Elbrecht and co-wrote with Tamaryn) comes as a comfort rather than a disappointment. It’s refreshing to hear the 29-year-old pick up exactly where she left off, inhabiting a song’s echoing, tarnished atmosphere with her signature breathy intensity and smeared glamour. “Keep it in mind, nobody here’s a friend of mine,” Ferreira sneers, proving her melodramatically defiant edge is still intact. LINDSAY ZOLADZAlex G, ‘Blessing’The Philadelphia-based indie artist Alex G has both an easily recognizable aesthetic sensibility and a playfully elastic sense of self. On his excellent 2019 album “House of Sugar,” Alex (last name: Giannascoli) sometimes pitch-shifted and distorted his vocals as though he were embodying different characters — and then on the very next track he’d sing a twangy and seemingly earnest acoustic-guitar ditty that could break your heart in half. His predictable unpredictability strikes again on “Blessing,” which contrasts quasi-spiritual lyrics (“Every day/Is a blessing”) with a sound that borrows from the moody, alt-rock/nu-metal sound of the late ’90s. Alex sings in a menacing whisper, and an explosion of apocalyptic synths completely transforms the song midway through. Inscrutable as it may be, the whole thing is eerie, hypnotic and, somehow, strangely moving. ZOLADZSuperorganism, ‘On & On’The London-based group Superorganism turns boredom and monotony into something almost perky in “On & On.” “No more space, hit replay/It goes on and on,” Orono sings with sullen nonchalance, then repeats “and on” another 16 times. The track is bubble gummy pop with a hint of reggae, and it’s packed with little hooks and ever-changing effects, but nothing breaks through the ennui. JON PARELESWynonna & Waxahatchee, ‘Other Side’As she’s gotten older, Wynonna Judd has been singing with an assured husk in her voice, cutting the crisp country she’s performed for decades with just a hint of the blues. Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, over the course of a career that began in DIY warehouse spaces, has found her bridge to American roots music. The two singers meet on “Other Side,” a gentle rumination on impermanence. For Judd — whose mother and longtime singing partner, Naomi, died last month — it’s a sturdy breeze, understated but invested. For Crutchfield, it’s a soft landing in a new home. JON CARAMANICASaya Gray, ‘Empathy for Bethany’“Empathy for Bethany” keeps wriggling free of expectations. Saya Gray, a Canadian songwriter who played bass in Daniel Caesar’s band, starts the song like a folky, picking triplets on an acoustic guitar. But almost immediately, the chord progression starts to wander; then her vocals warp by multitracking and shifting pitch, and soon a breathy trumpet drifts in from the jazz realm; by the time the track ends, it has become a loop of electronic aftereffects. “Honestly, if I get too close I’ll go ghost,” Gray sings, and the track bears her out. PARELESBruce Hornsby, ‘Tag’Bruce Hornsby has stayed productive and exploratory through the pandemic, doubling down on musical craftiness and structural ambition. His new album, “’Flicted,” pulls together spiky dissonances and folky warmth, chamber orchestrations and electronic illusions, puckishness and benevolence. “Fun and games in pestilence/We could use, use some kindly kindliness,” he sings in “Tag,” adding, “Still shake your fist/A kind of gritted bliss.” The music seesaws between rumbling, dissonant piano over a funky backbeat and richly chiming folk-rock, neatly juggling skepticism and hope. PARELESMaria BC, ‘April’The songs on Maria BC’s debut album, “Hyaline,” are reveries built around patiently picked guitar patterns and tranquil melodies, though they might sprout electronics, percussion or chamber-music orchestrations at any moment. In “April,” vocals overlap and multiply into cascading chords while unexpected sounds wink into earshot behind the guitar. “Listen to me/Anything you want,” the lyrics promise. PARELESKaitlyn Aurelia Smith & Emile Mosseri, ‘Amber’The experimental artist Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and the Academy Award-nominated film composer Emile Mosseri have struck gold with their collaborative album, “I Could Be Your Dog/I Could Be Your Moon.” It’s only two minutes long, but “Amber,” from the second half of the project, runs like a spaced-out symphony. Over bubbling synth tones, Smith’s airy vocalizations loop into circuitous entanglements, shapeshifting into oceans of cosmic flotsam. The effect is appropriately cinematic, like a long-lost immersive Pipilotti Rist video. ISABELIA HERRERANduduzo Makhathini featuring Omagugu, ‘Mama’The first release on the new Blue Note Africa label, “In the Spirit of Ntu” is the South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini’s homage to the universal energetic force known in Bantu cultures as “ntu.” It includes this wistful but swiftly rolling tune, “Mama,” written by Makhathini’s wife, Omagugu, in memory of her mother, who recently died. Omagugu sings in a sweeping, brushy tone, holding her syllables open, as Makhathini surrounds her in a pattern of chords that ascend and ascend. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLORico Nasty, ‘Intrusive’Falling somewhere between gritty hardcore and distorted jungle, Rico Nasty’s “Intrusive” scrapes like metal through a meat grinder. With her latest single, the Maryland rapper continues her return to music after her 2020 album “Nightmare Vacation.” On “Intrusive,” she harnesses punk verve and raps over a warped breakbeat, letting her intrusive impulses and most violent desires flow out in a stream-of-consciousness torrent. It’s bratty, turbulent and deliciously cathartic, like a childhood temper tantrum. “Mom, if you hear this I’m sorry,” she raps. Hey, at least she warned you. HERRERASleazyWorld Go featuring Lil Baby, ‘Sleazy Flow’ (remix)There’s not much to “Sleazy Flow,” by the Kansas City rapper SleazyWorld Go: a few piano tinkles, some groaning bass throbs, a sleepy, sinister tempo and crucially, some select lyrics blending street beef and sexual conquest: “How you mad she choosing me?/I like what she do to me/She say she feel safer over here, this where the shooters be.” That snippet became a TikTok breakout earlier this year, and Lil Baby picks up that taunting theme on the song’s official remix. His verse is almost chipper: “Acting like I’m chasing her or something, she be pursuing me/Can’t hold her, she be telling me all the time she wish that you was me.” CARAMANICADavid Virelles, ‘Al Compas de Mi Viejo Tres’David Virelles has no beef with the piano. A virtuoso improviser and classically trained pianist from Santiago de Cuba, he doesn’t seem intent on turning the instrument inside-out, like Thelonious Monk did; or jettisoning it entirely, like a John Cage; or turning it into an android, like some of his contemporaries. Virelles is a subtler expander. He plays the grand piano with sensitivity and deference, working with it, not against. He tucks dense harmonies inside other harmonies, shading his music with deep browns and grays — like an island sky turning dark before a storm. And on “Al Compás De Mi Viejo Tres” (“By the Compass of my Old Guitar”), from his masterly new album, “Nuna,” he celebrates the lilt of classic Cuban danzón by playing with utter elegance and clarity — stopping every so often to get in his own way with a few irruptive slashes or low, corrosive chords. RUSSONELLO More

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      Bob Neuwirth, Colorful Figure in Dylan’s Circle, Dies at 82

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      He was a recording artist and songwriter himself, but he also played pivotal roles in the careers of Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin.Bob Neuwirth, who had credentials as a painter, recording artist, songwriter and filmmaker, but who also had an impact as a member of Bob Dylan’s inner circle and as a conduit for two of Janis Joplin’s best-known songs, died on Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 82.His partner, Paula Batson, said the cause was heart failure.Mr. Neuwirth had a modest, eclectic string of albums to his credit, including his debut, simply titled “Bob Neuwirth,” in 1974, as well as a 1994 collaboration with John Cale called “Last Day on Earth” and a 2000 collaboration with the Cuban composer and pianist José María Vitier, “Havana Midnight.” But he was perhaps better known for the roles he played in the careers of others, beginning with Mr. Dylan.Mr. Neuwirth said that he first encountered Mr. Dylan at the Indian Neck Folk Festival in Connecticut in 1961. Mr. Dylan was still largely unknown but, Mr. Neuwirth said years later, the singer caught his eye “because he was the only other guy with a harmonica holder around his neck.”The two hit it off, and Mr. Neuwirth became a central figure in the circle that coalesced around Mr. Dylan as his fame grew. When Mr. Dylan held court at the Kettle of Fish bar in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, Mr. Neuwirth was there. When Mr. Dylan toured England in 1965, Mr. Neuwirth went along. A decade later, when Mr. Dylan embarked on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, Mr. Neuwirth was instrumental in putting the band together.Mr. Dylan’s contemporaries and biographers have described Mr. Neuwirth’s role in various ways.“Neuwirth was the eye of the storm, the center, the catalyst, the instigator,” Eric Von Schmidt, another folk singer active at the time, once said. “Wherever something important was happening, he was there, or he was on his way to it, or rumored to have been nearby enough to have had an effect on whatever it was that was in the works.”From left, Bob Dylan, Mick Ronson and Mr. Neuwirth performing in Toronto in 1975 as part of Mr. Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour, for which Mr. Neuwirth was instrumental in putting the band together.Frank Lennon/Toronto Star via Getty ImagesIt has often been suggested that as Mr. Dylan assembled his distinctive persona while climbing to international fame, he borrowed some of it, including a certain attitude and a caustic streak, from Mr. Neuwirth.“The whole hipster shuck and jive — that was pure Neuwirth,” Bob Spitz wrote in “Dylan: A Biography” (1989). “So were the deadly put-downs, the wipeout grins and innuendos. Neuwirth had mastered those little twists long before Bob Dylan made them famous and conveyed them to his best friend with altruistic grace.”Mr. Neuwirth, Mr. Spitz suggested, could have ridden those same qualities to Dylanesque fame.“Bobby Neuwirth was the Bob Most Likely to Succeed,” he wrote, “a wellspring of enormous potential. He possessed all the elements, except for one — nerve.”Mr. Dylan, in his book “Chronicles: Volume One” (2004), had his own description of Mr. Neuwirth.“Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in ‘On the Road,’ somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth,” he wrote. “He was that kind of character. He could talk to anybody until they felt like all their intelligence was gone. With his tongue, he ripped and slashed and could make anybody uneasy, also could talk his way out of anything. Nobody knew what to make of him.”Ms. Joplin, too, benefited from Mr. Neuwirth’s influence. Holly George-Warren, whose books include “Janis: Her Life and Music” (2019), said that Mr. Neuwirth and Ms. Joplin met in 1963 and became fast friends.Mr. Neuwirth performing in Brooklyn in 1999. Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images“In 1969, he taught her Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ after he heard Gordon Lightfoot play the then-unknown song at manager Albert Grossman’s office,” Ms. George-Warren said by email. “He quickly learned it and took it to Janis at the Chelsea Hotel.”Her recording of the song hit No. 1 in 1971, but Ms. Joplin was not around to enjoy the success; she had died of a drug overdose the previous year.Mr. Neuwirth was also involved in “Mercedes Benz,” another well-known Joplin song that, like “Bobby McGee,” appeared on her 1971 album, “Pearl.” He was at a bar with her before a show she was doing at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y., in August 1970 when Ms. Joplin began riffing on a ditty that the poet Michael McClure would sing at gatherings with friends. Mr. Neuwirth began writing the lyrics the two of them came up with on a napkin.She sang the song at the show that night, and she later recorded it a cappella. She, Mr. McClure and Mr. Neuwirth are jointly credited as the writers of the song, which on the album is less than two minutes long.Ms. George-Warren said that this anecdote was revelatory: Mr. Neuwirth nudged along the careers of artists he admired, including Patti Smith, in whatever ways came to mind.“Though Bob was renowned for his acerbic wit — from his days as aide-de-camp to Dylan and Janis — when I met him 25 years ago, he epitomized kindness, mentorship and curiosity,” she said. “That is the unsung story of Bob Neuwirth.”Robert John Neuwirth was born on June 20, 1939, in Akron, Ohio. His father, also named Robert, was an engineer, and his mother, Clara Irene (Fischer) Neuwirth, was a design engineer.He studied art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and dabbled in painting over the decades; in 2011 the Track 16 gallery in Santa Monica presented “Overs & Unders: Paintings by Bob Neuwirth, 1964-2009.”After two years at art school, he spent time in Paris before returning to the Boston area, where he began performing in coffee houses, singing and playing banjo and guitar.He appeared in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 Dylan documentary, “Dont Look Back,” as well as in “Eat the Document” (1972), a documentary of a later tour that was shot by Mr. Pennebaker and later edited by Mr. Dylan, who is credited as the director, and Mr. Dylan’s “Renaldo & Clara” (1978), most of which was filmed during the Rolling Thunder tour. He also appeared in “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story,” the 2019 Martin Scorsese film.Mr. Neuwirth was a producer of “Down From the Mountain” (2000), a documentary, directed in part by Mr. Pennebaker, about a concert featuring the musical artists heard in the Coen Brothers’ movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”“It’s all about the same to me,” he said, “whether it’s writing a song or making a painting or doing a film. It’s all just storytelling.”Mr. Neuwirth, who lived in Santa Monica, is survived by Ms. Batson.Mr. Neuwirth could be self-deprecating about his own musical efforts. He called his collaboration with Mr. Vitier, the Cuban pianist, “Cubilly music.” But his music was often serious. The Cale collaboration was a sort of song cycle that, as Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times when the two performed selections in concert in 1990, “added up to a shrug of the shoulders in the face of impending doom.”“Instead of breast-beating or simply wisecracking,” Mr. Pareles wrote of the work, “it found an emotional territory somewhere between fatalism and denial — still uneasy but not quite resigned.” More

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      Judy Henske, a Distinctive Voice on the Folk Scene, Dies at 85

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      Her versatile vocals were a trademark, as was her comic stage patter. The character Annie Hall owed her a debt.Judy Henske, who made a splash on the folk scene of the early 1960s with a versatile voice that could conjure Billie Holiday or foreshadow Janis Joplin, and performances full of offbeat stage patter, died on April 27 in hospice care in Los Angeles. She was 85.The death was announced by her husband, the keyboardist Craig Doerge.Ms. Henske played in clubs and coffee houses on the West Coast in the late 1950s and early ’60s — she opened for Lenny Bruce at the Los Angeles club the Unicorn — before heading east to be part of the vibrant Greenwich Village scene. By 1963, when Robert Shelton of The New York Times sampled the up-and-coming talent in those clubs, she had made a strong impression.“Standing head and shoulders above the new contenders,” Mr. Shelton wrote, “is Judy Henske, a six-foot hollyhock who is blooming with talent.”“She is praiseworthy for her singing of blues, folk ballads and popular songs,” he added, “as well as for her freely improvised patter, which has been called ‘cafe of the absurd.’”That same year, her debut album, called simply “Judy Henske,” was released, and she appeared in a feature film, “Hootenanny Hoot,” playing herself, alongside Johnny Cash, the Brothers Four and other musical acts.“I was the only folk singer who looked good in a swimsuit,” she told The Santa Cruz Sentinel of California in 2000, explaining her presence in that forgotten movie.In 1964 her second album, “High Flying Bird,” was released. Its title track, written by Billy Edd Wheeler, was among her better-known songs, and the record also included a bluesy version of the standard “Until the Real Thing Comes Along” and a mournful cover of “God Bless the Child.”“The Death-Defying Judy Henske,” recorded live in front of an audience in a studio in 1966, captured some of her trademark banter. One of that album’s tracks, “Betty and Dupree,” is almost 11 minutes long and begins with Ms. Henske telling an improbable yarn about two octogenarians looking for love that goes on for four minutes before she starts singing. But the record also included plenty of folk, soul and blues.“Henske’s ability to mark her territory in all of these genres, define it, and then burn it down is decidedly spellbinding,” Matthew Greenwald wrote on the website Analog Planet when the album was rereleased some 40 years later.Ms. Henske performing with Paul Butterfield at the Cafe au Go Go in Greenwich Village in 1968. Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIn 1969 Ms. Henske and her husband at the time, the musician and arranger Jerry Yester, released the album “Farewell Aldebaran,” which took her into even more uncharted territory with its use of synthesizers and psychedelic flourishes. In the early 1970s she recorded with a quintet called Rosebud, but then — after her first marriage ended in divorce and she married Mr. Doerge, a fellow member of Rosebud, in 1973 — came a long absence from recording.In the late 1990s, though, people began to rediscover her, thanks to an internet fan site and to her mentions in the crime novels of Andrew Vachss, whose main character, a private detective named Burke, was a Henske fan.In 1999 she released her first album in decades, “Loose in the World.” The next year found her back onstage in Manhattan, playing the Bottom Line with Dave Van Ronk. Another album, “She Sang California,” came out in 2004. Old fans were surprised, in a good way.“They say, ‘Oh, you’re doing so well. We wondered what happened to you,’” she told The Marin Independent Journal of California in 2005. “It’s like I’m some kind of relative that they liked, or some kind of acquaintance they only had a good time with. And now here’s that person again. And they’re so glad to see me.”Judith Anne Henske was born on Dec. 20, 1936, in Chippewa Falls, Wis. Her father, William, was a doctor, and her mother, Dorothy (Thornton) Henske, studied nursing and worked for a time at the local woolen mill.While growing up, Judy sang at local events, including weddings — but only if her mother was in attendance.“I went to more weddings of people I didn’t even know,” Dorothy Henske told The Chippewa Herald-Telegram in 1962.Judy also sang in her church choir.“She told me once she had such a powerful voice because one of the nuns in Chippewa Falls stood on her chest on a book to help her develop vocal power,” Mr. Doerge said by email. “Hard to know if that’s true, but no one questions the power of her voice.”Ms. Henske studied at Rosary College in Illinois and the University of Wisconsin in Madison. By 1959 she was in San Diego, performing at coffee houses; soon she made her way to Los Angeles.Ms. Henske with Jerry Yester at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles in 2016, almost 50 years after they released “Farewell Aldebaran,” an album that took her into uncharted territory with use of synthesizers and psychedelic flourishes. Rebecca Sapp/WireImage for The Recording AcademyIn 1962 she was playing a club in Oklahoma City when Dave Guard, who had recently left the Kingston Trio, asked her to join a new group, the Whiskeyhill Singers. The group made two albums and increased Ms. Henske’s visibility, but it didn’t last long. After it broke up, she became a fixture in New York.Judy Collins, in her book “Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music” (2011), wrote that Albert Grossman, the manager who had been instrumental in forming the group Peter, Paul and Mary, suggested that she, Ms. Henske and Jo Mapes form a trio, which he proposed to call the Brown-Eyed Girls. “You can get some brown contact lenses,” he told Ms. Collins.That idea fizzled, but Ms. Henske was doing fine on her own. Mr. Doerge said that he first met her when, home from college on Christmas break in 1964, he was asked to fill in as her backing pianist for a show she was doing at La Cave, a club in Cleveland.“Judy was already famous then,” he said, “and I was in awe.”That same year, Ms. Henske toured with a young comedian named Woody Allen, with whom she had sometimes shared the bill at the Village Gate and other New York clubs. In later years she was often said to have inspired Mr. Allen’s character Annie Hall (who like Ms. Henske was from Chippewa Falls), something she was asked about so often that, she said in the 2000 interview with the Santa Cruz newspaper, it irked her a bit.“Woody used a lot of people as models for his people in his movies,” she said. “Annie Hall was an amalgam of maybe three different people. I think it was Louise Lasser, me and what’s-her-name, the movie actress.”Diane Keaton? the interviewer prompted.“Yeah, Diane Keaton.”“So,” she added, “let’s move on from Woody.”In addition to her husband, Ms. Henske, who lived in Los Angeles, is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Kate DeLaPointe, and a granddaughter.Though Ms. Henske was best known as a performer, she also wrote or co-wrote numerous songs, many with Mr. Doerge. Their “Yellow Beach Umbrella” was covered by, among others, Bette Midler and Perry Como.Her witty shows, though, were something to savor — even when there were glitches. Mr. Doerge recalled a show they did in 2001 at Freight & Salvage, a performance spot in Berkeley, Calif.“At the last step up from the dressing room to the stage Judy tripped on her hem and fell flat on her face onto the floor while holding her banjo,” he said. The audience went silent.“She gets up and goes to the mic, pauses, and says, ‘Perfection is so lifeless,’” he recalled. “The crowd loved it, relaxed, and she had more or less won them over before we played one song.“Live, she was peerless.” More

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      You Hear the Musical Saw. These Mathematicians Heard Geometry.

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      A scientist who has studied falling playing cards, coiling rope and other phenomena has now analyzed what transforms a carpenter’s tool into a sonorous instrument.Early in the 19th century, an unknown musician somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains discovered that a steel handsaw, a tool previously used only for cutting wood, could also be used to produce full and sustained musical notes. The idea had undoubtedly occurred to many a musically-inclined carpenter at other times in other places.The key is that the saw must be bent in a shallow S-shape. Leaving it flat, or bending it in a J- or U-shape, will not do. And to resonate, it must be bowed at exactly the right sweet spot along the length of the saw. Bowed at any other point, the instrument reverts to being a useful, but unmusical, hand tool.The seated musician grips the handle of the saw between her legs, and holds the tip with either her fingers or a device called an end clamp, or “saw cheat.” She bends the saw into a shallow S-shape, and then draws the bow across the sweet spot at a 90-degree angle with the blade. The saw is then bent, changing the shape of the S to lower or raise the pitch, but always maintaining the S-shape, and always bowed at the moving sweet spot of the curve. The longer the saw, the greater the range of notes it can produce.Now L. Mahadevan, a professor of physics and applied mathematics at Harvard, along with two colleagues, Suraj Shankar and Petur Bryde, has studied the way the saw produces music and drawn some conclusions that help explain, mathematically, its beautiful sounds. The report was published April 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.Studying musical saws may seem an odd choice for a Harvard professor of mathematics, but Dr. Mahadevan’s interests are broad. He has published scientific papers explaining falling playing cards, tightrope walking, coiling rope, and how wet paper curls, among other phenomena that may appear at first glance unlikely subjects for mathematical analysis. In such a list, the musical saw seems no more than a logical next step.To understand the musical saw, imagine an S lying on its side, a line drawn through its center, positive above the line and negative below it. At the center of the S, he explained, the curvature switches its sign from negative to positive.“A simple change from a J- to an S-shape dramatically transforms the acoustic properties of the saw,” Dr. Mahadevan said, “and we can prove mathematically, show computationally, and finally hear experientially that the vibrations that produce the sound are localized to a zone where the curvature is almost zero.”That single location of sign-changing, he said, gives the saw a robust ability to sustain a note. The tone slightly resembles that of a violin and other bowed instruments, and some have compared it to the voice of a soprano singing without words.Dr. Mahadevan acknowledges that while he set out to understand the musical saw in mathematical terms, “Musicians have of course known this experientially for a long time, and scientists are only now beginning to understand why the saw can sing.”But he thinks research into the musical saw may also help scientists better understand other very thin devices.“The saw is a thin sheet,” he said, “and its thickness is very small compared to its other dimensions. The same phenomena can arise in a multitude of different systems, and might help design very high quality oscillators on small scales, and even perhaps with atomically thin materials such as sheets of graphene.” That could even be useful in perfecting devices that use oscillators, such as computers, watches, radios and metal detectors.For Natalia Paruz, a professional sawist who has played with orchestras worldwide, the mathematical details may be less significant than the quality of her saws. She began by playing her landlady’s saw when it wasn’t being used for other purposes. But now she uses saws specifically designed and manufactured to be used as musical instruments.There are several American companies that make them, and there are manufacturers in Sweden, England, France and Germany. Ms. Paruz said that while any flexible saw can be used to produce music, a thicker saw produces a “meatier, deeper, prettier” sound.But that pure tone, whatever its mathematical explanation, comes at a cost. “A thick blade,” she said, “is harder to bend.” More

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      Mavis Staples and Levon Helm’s Last Show, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Pusha T, Laura Veirs, Helado Negro 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.Mavis Staples and Levon Helm, ‘You Got to Move’Back in 2011, Mavis Staples and her band visited Woodstock, N.Y., to perform at the barn-studio-theater of the Band’s drummer Levon Helm; they had appeared together at the Band’s “The Last Waltz,” in 1976. Helm’s band joined hers, which included her sister Yvonne Staples on backup vocals, and they recorded the show. More than a decade later, an album, “Carry Me Home,” is due May 20. Staples gave “You Got to Move,” a gospel standard, her full contralto commitment; the guitarists Rick Holmstrom and Larry Campbell traded blues twang and bluegrassy runs. It was just another good-timey show in two long careers, but it would be their last together; Helm died in 2012. JON PARELESPusha T featuring Ye, ‘Dreamin of the Past’Nostalgia is not a concept often associated with Pusha T; even when he’s mining his coke-dealing past for material (and best believe, he usually is), his rhymes have the vivid immediacy of the present tense. But the classic, Old-Kanye production heard on “Dreamin of the Past” — revolving around a sped-up sample of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” — gives the song a halcyon glow that’s playfully at odds with his unrepentant flow. As ever, on this highlight from his latest solo album “It’s Almost Dry,” Push’s lyrics pop with poetic detail (“We hollowed the walls in back of bodegas”) and riotous cleverness: At one point, he boasts of keeping people “on the bikes like Amblin.” LINDSAY ZOLADZShakira and Rauw Alejandro, ‘Te Felicito’​​Robot love, funky bass lines, Rauw Alejandro’s head in a refrigerator: Welcome to Shakira and the Puerto Rican reggaeton star’s first collaboration. “Te Felicito” is a bitter send-off to a paramour whose love has been a charade that marries some of the superstars’ signature gifts: the Colombian singer’s eccentric choreography and Rauw’s penchant for funk-infused reggaeton. The Shak stamp of approval is a sought-after trophy for young artists ascending the ranks of the industry — just another sign that Alejandro is here to stay in all his freaky glory. ISABELIA HERRERAMidas the Jagaban featuring Liya, ‘420’Marijuana anthems abound on April 20. Here’s a lighter-than-smoke one from Nigeria, sung by the always-masked female songwriter Midas the Jagaban and a guest, Liya. The tapping, airborne polyrhythms of Afrobeats, topped by labyrinthine echoed vocals, provide just enough propulsion and haze as the women declare, “Whatever I do/I do it better when I smoke my marijuana.” PARELESPinkPantheress featuring Willow, ‘Where You Are’To capture the way a breakup can upend everything, PinkPantheress enlisted two beat experts — Skrillex and Mura Masa — to share production on “Where You Are,” along with Willow (Smith), who delivers full-throated hooks. They sing about the limbo between wanting to move on and longing to stay together: “I know it will never be the same,” Willow wails. The song is a vortex of obsession, with a brisk beat, a fingerpicking pattern (sampled from Paramore’s “Never Let This Go”) and vocals that diffuse into echoes and wordless syllables as PinkPantheress (breathy) and Willow (desperate and dramatic) toss around all the possibilities of separation, confrontation and wishing for a reunion. PARELESLaura Veirs, ‘Winter Windows’Laura Veirs has been a folk-rock fixture since the early aughts, but over the past few years she’s experienced a great deal of personal and professional change. Shortly before the pandemic, she divorced her longtime collaborator Tucker Martine, who had produced many of her albums — including “My Echo” from 2020, which was partially about their split. Her forthcoming album “Found Light,” due July 8, is her first album without Martine and the first she co-produced herself. Veirs sounds fittingly reinvigorated and inspired on the lead single “Winter Windows,” an antsy, guitar-driven meditation on motherhood and moving on. “I used to watch them watch you light up every room,” she sings, a gritty resilience in her voice. “Now it’s up to me, the lighting I can do.” ZOLADZSorry, ‘There’s So Many People That Want to Be Loved’On the London group Sorry’s charming “There’s So Many People That Want to Be Loved,” Asha Lorenz sings with the sort of sweet, earnest guilelessness that Mo Tucker brought to the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours.” “See them in the nightclubs, barking up the walls, head in their hands in the bathroom stalls,” she notes of all the lonely people she observes. But as the song gradually builds from unassuming to epic, “There’s So Many People” becomes less a lament and more a celebration of communal human longing — a feeling to be cherished, and, ironically, shared. ZOLADZRavyn Lenae, ‘M.I.A.’It’s been four years since the Chicago R&B singer Ravyn Lenae dropped her “Crush” EP, a Steve Lacy-produced release that stitched her sky-high vocals with funky bass lines and delicious electro-soul textures. For “M.I.A.,” her first single from her debut album “Hypnos,” Lenae pairs with the producer Sango for something a little more breezy. Over a buoyant, syncopated Afrobeats production, a gleaming synth expands and contracts under Lenae’s airy falsetto, as she coos about finally making it: “I’m gonna run the town, ain’t nothing in my way.” HERRERARuth Radelet, ‘Crimes’“Is it easy to start over?” Ruth Radelet wonders on the chorus of her debut solo single, and it’s safe to assume that’s an autobiographical sentiment. For nearly two decades, Radelet was the frontwoman of the moody electro-pop group Chromatics, who disbanded last summer amid drama surrounding a mysterious (and possibly nonexistent) final album. On the glassy, synth-driven “Crimes,” though, Radelet sounds ready to wipe the slate clean. The verses have a bit of a steely bite (“I know what they’re telling me is true/I know I could never be like you”), but the lush chorus is awash in her signature, dreamy melancholy. ZOLADZHelado Negro, ‘Ya No Estoy Aquí’Helado Negro’s music may be dreamlike and crepuscular, but don’t confuse his songs for simple lullabies. “Ya No Estoy Aquí,” his latest single, revisits the celestial meanderings that have defined his work: soft, pulsing drum loops and wobbling, echoing synths. The Ecuadorean-American artist sings about isolation and melancholy alongside harmonic melodies from the Chicago singer-songwriter Kaina. “Ojalá me estoy volviendo loco/Por lo menos tengo con quien puedo hablar/alucinaciones,” he intones (“Hopefully I’m going crazy/At least I have someone to talk to/Hallucinations”). Underneath that soothing exterior, Helado Negro’s music holds a special power: the capacity to engage difficult feelings. HERRERALou Roy, ‘U.D.I.D.’The Los Angeles songwriter Lou Roy regularly juggles euphoria and disillusionment. Her debut album, “Pure Chaos,” is due April 29, and in “U.D.I.D.” — “You don’t I don’t” — she probes a relationship that seems about to fissure. “I always want you here/but I’m starting to get the deal,” she sings. The track, which she co-produced with Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties, has an upbeat 4/4 pop thump, but some sonic elements — vocals, keyboards, guitar chords — linger like contrails, hinting that the romance may already be a memory. PARELESCharles Mingus, ‘The Man Who Never Sleeps’One heavy day in 1973, Columbia Records dropped every jazz musician on its roster besides Miles Davis. The bassist and composer Charles Mingus (whose 100th birthday would have been on Friday) was among them. So were Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans. But just months before that, the label had arranged to have a performance by Mingus’s new sextet recorded at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London. The tapes were ultimately shelved. They’ll finally be released on Saturday, Record Store Day, as the triple-disc set “The Lost Album From Ronnie Scott’s.” On “The Man Who Never Sleeps,” Mingus is lit up by the antic virtuosity of the young trumpeter and Dizzy Gillespie protégé Jon Faddis, barely 19, who had just joined the band. Just before Columbia would press a final symbolic seal on an entire jazz generation, you can hear a torch being passed. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOFred Moten, Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver, ‘The Abolition of Art, the Abolition of Freedom, the Abolition of You and Me’“Freedom is too close to slavery for us to be easy with that jailed imagining,” the poet and theorist Fred Moten says in a coolly controlled voice, speaking over the rustle of Gerald Cleaver’s drums and the dark pull of Brandon López’s open bass strings. There’s a doom-metal energy here, and Sun Ra’s relationship to darkness — as a substance. López hangs on the high strings for a moment at the end of Moten’s phrase, aware that the thought needs time to settle and land, then comes home to the root of the minor key. In the past 20 years Moten has become perhaps the leading thinker on Black performance, writing volumes of poetry and theory that dance with the ways in which Diasporic expression resists definition and capture. “The Abolition of Art” is the first track from a new album, “Moten/López/Cleaver,” putting that engagement directly to music and sacrificing none of its complexity or wit. RUSSONELLO More