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    Meet the 2024 Grammys’ Best New Artist Nominees

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    Listen to songs by Ice Spice, Jelly Roll, Victoria Monét and five more competitors for one of the show’s big four awards.Ice Spice.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesDear listeners,Some people swear there’s a curse that comes with winning the Grammy for best new artist, but it’s difficult to believe that when you remember who has actually taken home the trophy.In the past five years, the award has gone to quite a few bona fide superstars-in-the-making, including Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa and Olivia Rodrigo — all of whom are currently nominated for song of the year. Toggle the winners list back another decade and you’ll see some established industry power players like John Legend (best new artist 2006), Carrie Underwood (2007) and Adele (2009). The Grammys even got it right as far back as 1965, when the award went to a group of worthy Liverpudlian newcomers called the Beatles.Today’s playlist is an introduction to the eight artists who stand a chance to join their ranks at this Sunday’s Grammys. They include some names you might already be familiar with, like the overnight rap sensation Ice Spice and the gravel-throated country crooner Jelly Roll, and a few you might not be, like the married Americana duo the War and Treaty and the R&B stylist Coco Jones.The current betting favorite is Victoria Monét, a trusted pop songwriter who has garnered previous Grammy nominations for her work on hits recorded by Ariana Grande and Chloe x Halle. Monét has a total of seven nominations as a solo artist this year, including two for her breakout album “Jaguar II” and one for a collaboration with Earth, Wind and Fire. Personally, I’d be happy to see the 34-year-old mom take home best new artist; I love when someone who’s been toiling in semi-obscurity for years finally gets her moment in the spotlight.But, as you’ll see below, Monét isn’t the category’s elder — one of these artists turns 40 this year, and stands a chance to become the oldest solo act ever to be crowned best new artist.As the Justin Bieber fans who unleashed unnecessary wrath on Esperanza Spalding will tell you, though, the category always holds the potential for an upset. For that reason, I wouldn’t be shocked to see the rootsy 27-year-old singer-songwriter Noah Kahan accept the award, even if his yelpy emotionalism isn’t exactly my thing. Still, best new artist is a rare Grammy category that skews female, which means that if Kahan wins he’d be the first male artist to do so since Chance the Rapper in 2017.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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      How Fred again.. Jolted Dance Music

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThe most rapid ascent in dance music over the past three years belongs to the British producer and songwriter Fred again.., a protégé of Brian Eno and a onetime songwriter for Ed Sheeran and others who has built a formidable catalog using found vocals — from YouTube, Instagram or regular conversation — as the skeleton for high-energy club-pop.Fred’s main innovations aren’t necessarily musical, though. They’re his open-eared and arms-outstretched approach to production, which has made room for a wide range of collaborators, and his sense of live whimsy — whether announcing a last-minute rave with Skrillex and Four Tet at Madison Square Garden, or playing a peculiarly intimate set on NPR’s Tiny Desk series.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about dance music’s new wave of big-tent ambition, how Fred again.. turns unlikely source material into catchy pop, and how far interpersonal good will can go as a music-making tool.Guest:Foster Kamer, the editor in chief of Futurism, who writes for New York magazine, The New York Times and othersConnect 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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      Everything But the Girl’s Long-Awaited Return, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Miley Cyrus, Vagabon, Lonnie Holley featuring Michael Stipe 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.Everything But the Girl, ‘Nothing Left to Lose’Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt released their last album as Everything But the Girl in 1999. They announce a new one with “Nothing Left to Lose,” a song that shows its danceable desolation from its initial bass note and twitchy, echoey drumbeat, even before Thorn arrives to sing, “I need a thicker skin/This pain keeps getting in.” The production opens up a hollow void between throbbing bass tones and just enough single notes to sketch the rhythm and harmony; Thorn’s voice fills it with melancholy longing. JON PARELESSkrillex, Fred again.. and Flowdan, ‘Rumble’Skrillex, PinkPantheress and Trippie Redd, ‘Way Back’On his first singles as a lead artist since 2021, Skrillex explores two different sides of the jungle family tree. On “Way Back,” he takes a pop approach, partnering with the dreamlike vocalist PinkPantheress on a bubbly, quick-stepping flirtation anchored by some anguished pleas from Trippie Redd. On “Rumble,” though, he leans in to a harsher sound more in keeping with the thundering dubstep he first made his name with, but refracted though a jagged lens, with Fred again.. manipulating samples and the grime veteran Flowdan declaiming with cool detachment. JON CARAMANICABizarrap and Shakira, ‘Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53’Shakira’s revenge on her ex-boyfriend of 11 years, the soccer player Gerard Piqué, is as much a canny social media beef as a song. “I was out of your league,” she sings, going on to rap, “So much time at the gym/But maybe work out your brain a bit too.” Dozens of rappers and singers have collaborated with the Argentine producer Bizarrap, but unlike most of his sessions, “Vol. 53” isn’t a beat and a rap; it’s a fully produced electro-pop song with multitracked vocals and a contemptuous, self-branded hook: “A she-wolf like me isn’t for guys like you.” PARELESMiley Cyrus, ‘Flowers’Miley Cyrus exudes a cool confidence on “Flowers,” the breezy leadoff single from “Endless Summer Vacation,” due March 10. At first, the song seems like a brooding breakup post-mortem, but that turns out to be a ruse: “Started to cry, but then remembered I can buy myself flowers,” Cyrus sings, and the mood suddenly lifts. The relatively subdued chorus melody may not demand much of Cyrus, but her vocals are imbued with a laid-back maturity and convincing self-assurance. “I can take myself dancing, and I can hold my own hand,” she sings with her signature huskiness. “Yeah, I can love me better than you can.” LINDSAY ZOLADZParamore, ‘C’est Comme Ça’Latching on to the deadpan, spoken-word sarcasm of post-punk groups like Dry Cleaning, in “C’est Comme Ça” Hayley Williams takes on the isolation and enforced introspection of the pandemic era. “Sit still long enough to listen to yourself/Or maybe just long enough for you to atrophy to hell,” she deadpans over a disco thump with scrubbing guitars. The nonsense-syllable chorus — “Na na na na!” — is where Paramore’s pop-punk reflexes kick in. PARELESVagabon, ‘Carpenter’On her buoyant new single “Carpenter,” Laetitia Tamko, who records as Vagabon, opts for a sound that’s sleeker, lighter and more playful than her previous material. Rostam Batmanglij’s coproduction provides a reset, but the sweet melancholy of Tamko’s vocals gives the song an added emotional weight. “I wasn’t ready for what you were saying,” she sings on this tale of gradual maturity. “But I’m more ready now.” ZOLADZGracie Abrams, ‘Where Do We Go Now?’Here is pop’s verbal compression at its most distilled, to single syllables: “When I kissed you back I lied/you don’t know how long I tried.” Gracie Abrams, the definitive online sad girl, breathily sings, continuing a question — “Where do we go now?” — that has an open-ended answer. PARELESYo La Tengo, ‘Aselestine’The word “Aselestine” sounds like a cross between a crystal and an over-the-counter medication, but in Georgia Hubley of Yo La Tengo’s mouth, it becomes a conduit for mellifluous, vowel-y beauty. “Aselestine, where are you?” she sings with numb serenity. “The drugs don’t do what you said they do.” Like “Fallout,” the previous single from the indie legends’ 16th album “This Stupid World,” “Aselestine” is vintage Yo La Tengo, a timeless, quietly poignant distillation of the band’s singular essence. ZOLADZYahritza y Su Esencia, ‘Cambiaste’The teenage singer Yahritza Martinez of the family band Yahritza y Su Esencia is powerful and peculiar. She sings with preternatural theatricality and emotional heft, yet somehow maintains a youthful casualness. On “Cambiaste,” she yearns in stops and starts, lamenting someone who’s cast her aside. The song moves slowly, almost erratically, as if she’s staggering through sludge in search of refuge. It’s the latest in a slew of Yahritza songs that might be heard as unerringly odd if they weren’t so instinctually pop. CARAMANICAMoneybagg Yo featuring GloRilla, ‘On Wat U On’A tug of war of toxicity between two of Memphis’s finest rappers, “On Wat U On” is unsentimental and testy. Moneybagg Yo is the cad, rapping about needing freedom (“Tryna see me every weekend, damn/I need space to miss you”). And GloRilla is aggrieved, constitutionally fed up — she’s had enough: “I be busting out the windows/got him switching up his cars.” After two minutes of back and forth, there is, notably, no resolution — just recrimination and resentment. CARAMANICAIggy Pop, ‘New Atlantis’Most of Iggy Pop’s new album, “Every Loser,” circles back to the bone-crushing riffs and surly bluntness of his glory days in the Stooges — sometimes pointedly (in “Frenzy” and “Neo Punk”), and sometimes approaching self-parody. But there are glimmers of Iggy’s other eras in songs like “New Atlantis,” a cowbell-thumping, mock-admiring tribute to his current home, Miami. Being Iggy, he appreciates the city for its seaminess and its vulnerability to climate change: “New Atlantis, lying low/New Atlantis, sinking slow,” he sings. PARELESLonnie Holley featuring Michael Stipe, ‘Oh Me, Oh My’The songwriter and outsider visual artist Lonnie Holley previews a new album, “Oh Me, Oh My,” with its elegiac title track: two slowly alternating piano chords underpinned by a bass fiddle and surrounded by echoes and, later, electric guitars and more mysterious sounds. Holley merges preaching and singing, as he declaims “I believe that the deeper we go, the more chances there are for us to understand.” He invokes family and faith, joined by Michael Stipe from R.E.M. intoning, “Oh me, oh my”; it’s thick with atmosphere and memory, offering no conclusions. PARELES More

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      How Fred Again.. Turns Digital Bricolage Into Dance-Floor Weepers

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      The Brian Eno-mentored musician Fred Gibson is amassing a following with tracks built from social feeds and his iPhone. The intricate and emotional results can sometimes even start a party.On a recent Friday night in Manhattan, pandemonium surrounded a waffle truck parked on the corner of 56th Street and 11th Avenue, as thumping beats and the aroma of fresh batter poured from within. An enthusiastic young woman thrust an inflatable giraffe head festooned with a red glow stick through one of the truck’s windows, bopping it to the music. A security guard ripped it away.Inside the vehicle, holding court, stood a grinning Fred Gibson, the 29-year-old British songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist better known as Fred again.., who was following up a show at the Hell’s Kitchen venue Terminal 5 with an ad hoc after-party.“Chaotic,” he later happily proclaimed the impromptu event, where he previewed tracks from his third album, “Actual Life 3 (January 1 — September 9, 2022),” out Friday. “Just great.”“Actual Life 3” is the culmination of music that Gibson — a pop hitmaker for Ed Sheeran, BTS and the British grime star Stormzy — started releasing at the end of 2019, after his mentor Brian Eno urged him to forgo writing for others and prioritize his own work. The result is lush electronica-rooted piano balladry, wistful nu-disco anthems and the occasional U.K. garage firestarter, all threaded with samples culled from the far reaches of YouTube, Instagram and his iPhone camera roll — a sonic bricolage of digitally documented lives.A few days after the concert, Gibson — a smiley, ebullient, occasionally sheepish presence — rolled a cigarette on a West Village bar patio and recalled Eno needling him when he was experiencing a peak of commercial success but had a brewing fear of artistic complacency. He had met Eno at one of the artist’s occasionally star-studded a cappella gatherings as a teenager, and wowed him with his production talents, which led to Eno (“a wizened cliff-pusher,” as Gibson described him) bringing him on as a producer on some of his projects.“I know that Fred has sometimes referred to me as a mentor, but actually, it works both ways,” Eno said by phone. “What he’s doing is quite unfamiliar — I’ve actually never heard anything quite like this before. He always seems to be doing it in relation to a community of people around him — the bits of vocal and ambient sounds.”Eno was referring to the basic construction of a Fred again.. song. Many tracks start with Gibson using one of thousands of ambient drones Eno once gave him. From there, he’ll go into his digital scrapbook of found footage. While some samples employ familiar voices — the moaning rap of the Atlanta superstar Future, an Instagram Live freestyle of the rapper Kodak Black, vocals from a call with the Chicago house D.J. the Blessed Madonna — the vast majority are relatively obscure. They include a stadium worker Gibson joked around with after a Sheeran show, audio from a nightclub he recorded with his iPhone, spoken word poets and burgeoning bedroom pop singers he caught glimpses of while scrolling his various social media feeds.Brian Eno, Gibson’s mentor, described his music as “romance, in a sort of maelstrom of emotion.”Peter Fisher for The New York TimesGibson then cuts, distorts, pitch-shifts, stretches or compresses the samples into shimmering cinematic soundscapes, and sings atop them in his soft, pleading croon. Some are cavernous, others dense, but they all retain the deep warmth of something homespun — the ideal foundation for lyrics about feeling too much and not nearly enough that map thin fault lines demarcating love and loss. The result are tracks that leave listeners both laughing and weeping on the dance floor.Gibson estimated that he’s experimented with thousands of different ways to turn the speech of complete strangers into something musical. “You’re constantly trying to create as many vacancies as possible for accidents to happen,” he said. “But at the beginning it was very labored, quite tortured, if I’m honest,” he added. “It felt like I was distorting their spirit.”One track was crafted from footage of a young Toronto-based performance artist named Sabrina Benaim performing her piece “Explaining My Depression to My Mother,” which would go on to become the thumping dirge “Sabrina (I Am a Party).”The source material is a full-tilt confessional characterizing the vicissitudes of anxiety and depression — not exactly the kind of thing obviously complemented by beats from a successful pop producer. “I was anxious with everything I was putting onto these people,” Gibson said. “I felt like I was projecting onto them.”Speaking by phone from Toronto, Benaim remembered hearing the finished track for the first time, after Gibson reached out over Instagram. “It was the wildest thing,” she said and laughed. “It was like I left my body. He handled the emotional center of it so well — he just cared so much about not ruining or soiling the poem in any way. It’s coming from such a careful place.”Romy Croft — a singer-songwriter in the xx who tapped Gibson to produce her own debut solo single, “Lifetime” — worked with Gibson and Haai on “Lights Out,” a song released earlier this year, in nearly the same way. Croft had given Gibson an xx demo that never came to fruition; a year later, Gibson mentioned having done something with it.As she explained in a recent phone call, she was gobsmacked by the result, a dance track that mixes laser squelches, piano chords, a skittering beat and Croft’s wistful vocals. “He had just given it a new lease of life,” Croft said. To her, the record reflects a thematic link in his work: “A thread of emotion and vulnerability within it that ties it together, as well as a lot of joy.”Gibson continues to experiment with turning strangers’ speech into something musical. “You’re constantly trying to create as many vacancies as possible for accidents to happen,” he said. Peter Fisher for The New York TimesEno said he finds many of Gibson’s samples to be “tender and beautiful.” “To marry that with the kind of energetic chaos of the music he does is, I think, a beautiful combination,” he added. “It’s romance, in a sort of maelstrom of emotion.”The new album may be the apotheosis of this aesthetic. Gibson’s first two LPs, made during and immediately after the pandemic lockdown, concerned the illness of a close friend and its aftermath, and are often pensive affairs. “Actual Life 3” is an unfurling of sorts, a more cathartic, misty-eyed dance-floor moment. Its unlikely collaborators include Kieran Hebden, a.k.a. the electronic musician and producer Four Tet, known for the kind of dense, protean electronica compositions that rarely (if ever) abide anything close to a typical pop song’s structure.“He pulls me in a direction I wouldn’t normally be working in,” Hebden said on a recent FaceTime call. Gibson’s songs, he explained, are “great melodies and chord sequences, elegantly done. The work that has been done is considered. It doesn’t always sound ridiculously slick — there’s nothing very cynical about it. It’s quite direct, and honest; it just feels deeply refreshing, isn’t hidden away, and isn’t super mysterious.”“But,” Hebden paused, “the mystery of it is: How can anybody make it look so easy?” He laughed.At the waffle truck earlier this month, after playing the last in a series of then-unreleased songs to his increasingly hyped crowd, Gibson told Hebden — who was among his mischief-makers that night — to pick a final song. Hebden looked at him knowingly, and changed tracks. Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” blasted over the speakers. The crowd exploded into verse, and Gibson danced along, laughing. The musicians made their way out of the truck and back into the venue thronged by fans, another memory made in the night, soon to be posted for posterity — potentially, the start of another song. More

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      Abba Previews First Album in 40 Years, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Charli XCX, Bobby Shmurda, Japanese Breakfast 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.Abba, ‘Don’t Shut Me Down’Before Max Martin’s hit factory ruled radio playlists, another Swedish pop phenomenon had its run: Abba, which is reuniting after nearly 40 years. A new album, “Voyage,” is due on Nov. 5 and quasi-concert dates are scheduled in London in May; the singers will be digitized images backed by a live band. Though the verses of “Don’t Shut Me Down” are about a woman surprising an ex with her return, the choruses also recognize the strangeness of Abba’s reappearance: “I’m not the one you know/I’m now and then combined,” Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad sing, backed and produced by Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson. “And I’m asking you to have an open mind.” Meanwhile, the music reclaims familiar ground: a strutting march with gleaming orchestration and scrubbing disco guitars, stolid and earnestly tuneful. JON PARELESCharli XCX, ‘Good Ones’Charli XCX oscillates between big-gesture pop and artier impulses, but “Good Ones” swings the pendulum back to pop. It’s produced by Oscar Holter, from the Max Martin stable that also concocted the Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” and it looks back directly to the 8th-note synthesizers of the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” Hopping between registers, Charli XCX indicts herself — “I always let the good ones go” — neatly and decisively. PARELESJuls featuring Niniola, ‘Love Me’Everything is rhythm in “Love Me”: the shakers and hand drums, the squiggles of electric guitar, the overlapping call-and-response of the blithely syncopated Nigerian singer Niniola and a saxophone that eventually claims the last word. Juls, a Ghanaian-British producer, neatly balances 1970s Afrobeat, the hand-played, steady-state funk perfected by Fela Anikulapo Kuti, with the multitrack transparency of 20th-century Afrobeats. Even after the song erupts midway through, the groove keeps its sly composure. PARELESFred again.., ‘Billie (Loving Arms)’Sonically rich, big-tent-pop ambitious, soulful house music from Fred again.., a singer and songwriter who has worked with Ed Sheeran and Stormzy, was mentored by Brian Eno and has a soft spot for bright dance music that’s almost physically cheerful. JON CARAMANICATokischa and Rosalía, ‘Linda’On “Linda,” Rosalía — a white European woman who has dominated Spanish-language pop over the last few years — turns to the Dominican musician Tokischa and dembow for street cred. Tokischa is the genre’s resident insurgent, an iconoclast who makes government officials, homophobes and upper-class puritans clutch their pearls. It’s no surprise that “Linda” runs like a sexed-up playground chant; over a dembow-flamenco concoction, the two stars trill, “Nos besamo’, pero somo’ homie’” (“We kiss each other, but we’re homies”). This is the kind of song that sparks necessary reflection about race, power and collaboration — conversations about who these cross-cultural team-ups are designed to make rich, and who, if anyone, they intend to liberate. ISABELIA HERRERABobby Shmurda, ‘No Time for Sleep (Freestyle)’Bobby Shmurda’s first post-prison song — seven years after his breakout single “Hot ___” made him a star — feels like burning off excess energy. This six-minute freestyle is a workout; it’s delivered with a doggedness reminiscent of the fervor of Meek Mill, but leaves little room to breathe. The stakes here are purposely low. Releasing a song like this — no chorus, intense rhymes, cluttered flow — lightens the pressure that would come with seeking to score another hit as massive as his first. For now, he just wants to rhyme. CARAMANICAMartox featuring Gian Rojas, ‘Pausa’All cool grooves and saccharine strings, Martox’s “Pausa” is best enjoyed with a spiked seltzer. The Dominican duo, alongside the producer and vocalist Gian Rojas, collage disco grooves and syncopated bass lines into a prismatic beachfront boogie. HERRERAJhay Cortez, ‘Tokyo’The second track on Jhay Cortez’s new album, “Timelezz,” exemplifies a small rebellion happening in Spanish-language pop. At times, the production is aquatic; at others, its twinkling synths resemble a midnight drive through the streets of the Japanese capital. With a thumping four-on-the-floor rhythm, the track is another sign that reggaeton’s major players are embracing the textures of house music, and stretching the genre’s boundaries beyond the realm of stale pop. HERRERAJapanese Breakfast, ‘Glider’In “Glider,” a song she wrote for the video game Sable, keyboard patterns enfold Michelle Zauner, the singer, musician and producer who records as Japanese Breakfast. There’s wonderment in her voice as she sings about an excursion into the unknown: “It feels like everything is moving/Around me.” The keyboards start out plinking like music boxes, soon to be joined by sustained, cascading chords, an ever-thickening structure that can’t constrain her delight. PARELESAoife O’Donovan, ‘Reason to Believe’In a live-streamed home performance last year, the virtuoso folk singer Aoife O’Donovan played the 10 songs on Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” front to back. She accompanied herself alone on acoustic guitar, as Springsteen had on the original album in the early 1980s, but that’s about where the similarity ends. The original album was desperate and dark, with doubt coursing through its tracks like murky blood; O’Donovan treats them as canon, saluting Springsteen’s songcraft with clear, pitch-perfect articulation and affable delivery. The approach is suited best to “Reason to Believe,” the finale, a Springsteen classic that contemplates the mysterious pull of resilience. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLORuby Landen, ‘Pt. 1’Ruby Landen’s blend of Celtic-tinged acoustic-guitar fingerpicking and bowed strings — cello and fiddle — echoes the introspection of songwriters like Nick Drake. But she has her own story to tell, with an unassuming but pointed voice, in songs like “Pt. 1.” It’s an anatomy of a failed relationship — “Was it the safety of my presence that made you come undone?” — that she relays patiently and quietly. Then she segues into a modal, accelerating instrumental coda, picking behind fiddle and steel guitar, that needs no words to capture the underlying pain. PARELESNate Smith featuring Joel Ross and Michael Mayo, ‘Altitude’On drums, Nate Smith is in the business of inspiriting. Far from flashy, he’s an ebullient technician who keys into the subtleties of his bandmates’ playing and laces joie de vivre into his own. Smith, 46, just released “Altitude,” a breezy original and the latest single from a forthcoming album, “Kinfolk 2: See the Birds.” His band, Kinfolk, is joined here by a pair of young and prodigious improvisers: the vibraphonist Joel Ross and the vocalist Michael Mayo. The music video captures the group recording the song in the studio, just before the coronavirus pandemic struck; when Mayo digs into a short scat solo, improvising flawlessly in little rhythmic zags in the lower register and high-flying longer notes, you can see — and hear — him passing inspiration back and forth with the drummer. RUSSONELLO More