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      Meshell Ndegeocello’s Magnificent Mix, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Peggy Gou, Killer Mike, Sparklehorse 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.Meshell Ndegeocello featuring Jeff Parker, ‘ASR’The songs on Meshell Ndegeocello’s magnificent new album, “The Omnichord Real Book,” are always in flux. In its seven-and-half minutes, “ASR” hints at fusion jazz, Funkadelic, Ethiopian pop, reggae and psychedelia; the guitarist Jeff Parker, from Tortoise, teases the music forward. As the song accelerates, Ndegeocello sings about pain, heartbreak, healing and perseverance, and she vows, “We’re here to set the clock to here and now.” JON PARELESPeggy Gou, ‘(It Goes Like) Nanana’Peggy Gou is a South Korean-born, Berlin-based D.J. and producer with a penchant for dreamy house beats and a velvety touch. Her latest single “(It Goes Like) Nanana” plays out a bit like her own personal reworking of ATC’s ubiquitous 2000 hit “All Around the World,” but with a kinetic energy that’s distinctly her own. “I can’t explain,” Gou sings over a thumping beat and light piano riff, before deciding she can best express the feeling she wants to describe in nonsense words: “I guess it goes like na na na na na na.” LINDSAY ZOLADZDoja Cat, ‘Attention’Doja Cat returns with a vengeance on the menacing “Attention,” a statement record that puts her pop sensibility aside (at least for now) and leans into her ample skills as an M.C. “Look at me, look at me — you lookin’?” she begins, and for the next few minutes commands the floor with charismatic grit. “Baby, if you like it, just reach out and pet it,” she sings on a hook that recalls ’90s R&B, albeit filtered through Doja’s alien sensibility. The verses, though, are pure venom: “Y’all fall into beef, but that’s another conversation,” she spits with that signature fire in her throat. “I’m sorry, but we all find it really entertaining.” ZOLADZKiller Mike featuring Future, André 3000 and Eryn Allen Kane, ‘Scientists & Engineers’Ambition and achievement, electronics and exaltation all figure in “Scientists & Engineers” from “Michael,” Killer Mike’s first solo album since he formed Run the Jewels with El-P. “Scientists & Engineers” has five producers including James Blake and No I.D. The track pulsates with keyboard chords under the elusive André 3000 (from Outkast), who insists, “Rebelling is like an itch.” The music switches to silky guitar chords for Future, who sings, “It’s better to be an outcast in a world of envious.” And a beat kicks in with trap drums and blipping synthesizers behind Killer Mike, who boasts in quick triplets: “I’m never chillin’, I gotta make millions.” A multitracked Eryn Allen Kane wafts choirlike harmonies — and gospel-tinged sentiments like “I’mma live forever” — while the rappers redefine themselves. PARELESFlesh Eater featuring Fiona Apple, ‘Komfortzone’None other than Fiona Apple decided to collaborate with Flesh Eater, a Nashville avant-pop group, on the mercurial seven-minute excursion “Komfortzone.” Over a low, sputtering programmed beat and outbursts of noise and electronics, Flesh Eater’s lead singer, Zwil AR, sings hopscotching melodies reminiscent of Dirty Projectors. Apple sprinkles in some piano and eventually adds vocal harmonies on refrains like “A field of sunflowers with their backs toward me/I’m on the train.” It’s as willful as it is arty. PARELESSparklehorse, ‘Evening Star Supercharger’Mark Linkous was making his fifth album as Sparklehorse when he died by suicide in 2010. Now his family and a handful of collaborators have completed it, due for a September release as “Bird Machine.” A preview single, “Evening Star Supercharger,” tops unhurried folk-rock with the tinkle of a toy piano, as Linkous cryptically but matter-of-factly considers mortality and depression: “Peace without pill, gun or needle or prayer appear/Never found sometimes near but too fleet to be clear.” In the sky, he calmly watches a star going nova: “Even though she’s dying, getting larger.” PARELESOmah Lay, ‘Reason’The Nigerian singer Omah Lay has split his songs between partying and self-doubt; he has also been featured by Justin Bieber. “Reason,” from the newly expanded version of his 2022 album, “Boy Alone,” has minor chords and grim scenarios: “I don’t know who to run to right now/Army is opening heavy fire.” The beat is buoyant, but the tone is fraught. PARELESDavid Virelles, ‘Uncommon Sense’A low-riding shuffle beat isn’t the Cuban-born pianist, composer and folklorist David Virelles’s most common environment. But “Carta,” Virelles’s new LP, puts him and his longtime first-call bassist, Ben Street, together with Eric McPherson, an innovator and tradition-bearer in today’s jazz drumming. This is the closest Virelles has come to making a standard-format jazz trio album, though it’s still not exactly that. On the opener, “Uncommon Sense,” McPherson’s shuffle kicks in after 25 seconds of solo piano, and Virelles has already led things down a tense path, changing keys capriciously while building up a foundation for the Cubist phrase at the center of the tune. McPherson’s elegantly splattered drum style, using traditional grip to roll his rhythms out as close to the ground as possible, gives solid support to Virelles while he toys with contemporary-side influences: the bodily elocution of Don Pullen’s piano playing, the harmonic splintering and superimpositions of Craig Taborn, the rhythmic restraint of a Gonzalo Rubalcaba. You wouldn’t need to be told this album was recorded at Van Gelder Studio to realize it’s speaking with jazz history — the antique, the modern and what’s barely come into shape. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOBen van Gelder, ‘Spectrum’“Manifold,” a new album from the rising bandleader Ben van Gelder, celebrates the voice. The voice of his saxophone, the voice of the pipe organ, the human voice, the collective voice of an eight-piece band. Each has its own grain. The organ has its own prominent side-narrative in jazz history, but the Amsterdam-based van Gelder is culling from a different stream, closer to contemporary classical composers like Arvo Pärt and György Ligeti, using dissonance and space. The Veracruz-born vocalist Fuensanta sings no words on “Spectrum,” the album’s rangy centerpiece track; she joins the horns, sounding almost like another reed instrument. Beneath them, Kit Downes toggles between minimalism and high-rising waves on the pipe organ. RUSSONELLOElliott Sharp, ‘Rosette’The composer Elliott Sharp has been devising systems of pitch and structure since the 1970s. His latest album, “Steppe,” is inspired by geography. It’s music for six overdubbed vintage electric steel guitars, microtonally tuned and arrayed in stereo, exploring texture and resonance. “Rosette” is built from quick, cascading, staggered, overlapping little runs. It’s bell-toned and spiky, crumbling and reassembling. PARELES More

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      Chloë Tangles With Future, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Bettye LaVette, Abra, Tyler, the Creator 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.Chlöe and Future, ‘Cheatback’Chloe Bailey contemplates getting even for infidelity — “pulling a you on you” — in “Cheatback,” an almost-country ballad like Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” from her debut album, “In Pieces.” Backed at first by basic acoustic guitar chords, she thinks through the details. “Say I’m with my girls while he spendin’ the night,” she sings, and “I might make a video.” Future semi-apologizes — “Should’ve never let you down, feelin’ embarrassed/Temptation haunting me” — and asks her to “Make love, not revenge,” knowing he hasn’t lost her yet. JON PARELESGeorgia, ‘It’s Euphoric’“You don’t have to say nothing when you start to feel something,” the British pop musician Georgia sings on this dreamy, upbeat reverie, co-produced with Rostam Batmanglij, which captures the buzz of new love. She settles for a simple, repeated refrain of “it’s euphoric,” giving that last word a prismatic luminosity. LINDSAY ZOLADZAbra, ‘FKA Mess’Save for recent, one-off collaborations with Bad Bunny and Playboi Carti, the self-proclaimed “darkwave duchess” Abra has been quiet since her head-turning 2016 EP “Princess.” The throbbing, six-minute “FKA Mess,” though, is a promising return to form: The bass-heavy track is murky and echoing but cut through with infectious melody and a kinetic beat. It sounds, in the best way possible, like a strobe-lit, after-dark dance party in an abandoned mall. ZOLADZBettye LaVette, ‘Plan B’Bettye LaVette taps into deep blues and the anxiety of age in “Plan B,” a Randall Bramblett song from her coming album, “LaVette,” produced by the drummer and roots-rock expert Steve Jordan. “Plan B” is wrapped around a minor-key guitar riff and a production that harks back to both Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” and, yes, Pink Floyd’s “Money.” LaVette, as always, is raspy and indomitable. Even as she sings “My mojo’s busted and I ain’t got a spare,” it’s clear she’s tough enough to keep going. PARELESKassa Overall featuring Nick Hakim and Theo Croker, ‘Make My Way Back Home’The drummer, singer and rapper Kassa Overall wishes for the “family that I never knew” and a place “where the love is real” in “Make My Way Back Home,” a dizzying jazz-hip-hop production that never finds a resting place. Multitracked trumpets, flutes, keyboards and voices cascade across the drummer’s light, ever-shifting beat, building chromatic harmonies that continually elude resolution — a structure of endless longing. PARELESTyler, the Creator, ‘Sorry Not Sorry’Repentance turns to belligerence in “Sorry Not Sorry,” a new song from “Call Me If You Get Lost: The Estate Sale,” the expanded version of Tyler, the Creator’s 2021 album. At first, over a sumptuous 1970s soul vamp (from “He Made You Mine” by Brighter Shade of Darkness), Tyler admits to mistakes: “Sorry to my old friends/the stories we could’ve wrote if our egos didn’t take the pen.” But he’s definitely not abandoning that ego; as the track builds, remorse turns to pride and sarcasm: “Sorry to the fans who say I changed — ’cause I did.” PARELESMadison McFerrin, ‘God Herself’In “God Herself,” Madison McFerrin — like her father, Bobby McFerrin — revels in all the music that can be made without instruments: vocals, breaths, percussive syllables, finger snaps. “God Herself” is a multitracked, close-harmony construction that draws on gospel to equate carnality and spirituality: “Make you want to come inside and pray to stay for life,” McFerrin vows. “You gonna see me and believe in God herself.” It’s meticulously calculated to promise delight. PARELESKelsea Ballerini, ‘If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too)’Kelsea Ballerini promises to give a friend an alibi — paying attention to both the physical and the digital — in “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too).” It’s a foot-stomping country tune about friendship and perjury. “Hypothetically, if you ever kill your husband/Hand on the Bible, I’d be lyin’ through my teeth,” Ballerini sings, with bluegrassy fiddle and slide guitar backing her up. It’s a successor to songs like the Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl,” but it’s no direct threat, just a contingency plan. PARELESJess Williamson, ‘Hunter’The Texas-born singer-songwriter Jess Williamson — who released a collaborative album last year with Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, under the name Plains — yearns for connection on the bracing, country-tinged “Hunter,” the first single from her upcoming album, “Time Ain’t Accidental.” The song oscillates between muted disappointment and, on a surging chorus, defiant hope: “I’ve been known to move a little fast,” Williamson sings. “I’m a hunter for the real thing.” ZOLADZ More

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      Miley Cyrus and Brandi Carlile’s Raw Duet, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Bartees Strange, Nicki Nicole, Caroline Rose 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.Miley Cyrus featuring Brandi Carlile, ‘Thousand Miles’From Miley Cyrus’s new album, “Endless Summer Vacation,” comes this rugged, low-to-the-ground duet with the polished roots-rock yowler Brandi Carlile. Both are capable of broad vocal theatrics, but it should be said, Carlile is holding back here, in order to allow Cyrus the space to ruminate in this song about failure: “I’m not always right/but still I ain’t got time for what went wrong.” In her post-Disney career, Cyrus has flirted with various forms of adulthood in terms of performance — sexual defiance, hippie experimentalism and so on. But she’s perhaps at her most appealing when applying restraint. JON CARAMANICANicki Nicole, ‘No Voy a Llorar’Latin R&B enjoys a whiff of hyperpop helium in “No Voy a Llorar” (“I’m Not Going to Cry”), a preemptively defensive breakup song. The 22-year-old Argentine songwriter Nicki Nicole insists she’s fully prepared if things go wrong. “When you leave, I’m not going to suffer,” she predicts. The song’s chord progression could have come from the 1950s, but its production is as contemporary as its brittle attitude. Her pop soprano gets pitched further upward as the track begins; elusive background vocals and synthesizers puff their syncopations around the beat. Even the exposed voice-and-piano coda, the sincere payoff, gets computer-tweaked. JON PARELESBaaba Maal featuring the Very Best, ‘Freak Out’The Senegalese songwriter Baaba Maal, with an extensive catalog behind him, has lately been heard worldwide with vocals on the soundtracks of the Black Panther films. He collaborated with the African-tinged English group the Very Best on “Freak Out,” from his coming album, “Being.” Ignore the song’s psychedelic title. The lyrics draw on an old proverb from Maal’s culture, the Fulani, instructing that someone who has deep knowledge should say neither too little nor too much. Its music merges programmed and hand percussion with a desert drone, an electric-guitar lick and the backup vocals of the Very Best’s Malawian singer, Esau Mwamwaya. It’s both up-to-the-minute and resolutely grounded in traditional wisdom. PARELESEladio Carrión featuring Future, ‘Mbappe’ (Remix)Last year, the Puerto Rican rapper Eladio Carrión had a hit with “Mbappe” a drowsy and delirious Migos-esque boast. Future appears on this remix with a pair of verses that are somehow both utterly rote and also grossly charming, rapping about the place where carnality and expensive jewelry intersect, and the elation of toxic love. CARAMANICANF, ‘Motto’NF has always rapped as if full of anxiety, and on a core level, that hasn’t changed on “Motto,” a clever narrative about unshackling oneself from the stressors of pop music success. But over classicist boom-bap production amplified with a whimsical swing and some of the howling dynamics of rock groups like Imagine Dragons, “Motto” feels somehow lighter. In his early career, NF sounded as if he was internalizing all the pressures of the world, but now he sounds free and calm, dismissing those same pressures with a shrug. CARAMANICABartees Strange, ‘Daily News’“Daily News” was tucked away on the vinyl version of the album Bartees Strange released in 2022, “Farm to Table.” Now it’s streaming, and it sums up and expands the album’s moods and dynamics. Strange sings about alienation, numbness and anxiety — “I can feel the weight/Crashing over me again” — as electric-guitar lines coil and intertwine around him. A bridge finds him even more alone — reduced to nervous, isolated vocals — but someone rescues him. Perhaps it’s a partner; perhaps it’s an audience. “I’ve found you,” he exults, in a full-band onrush of drums, saxophone and tremolo-strummed guitars, and the connection sounds rapturous. PARELESCaroline Rose, ‘Tell Me What You Want’A breakup could hardly be messier or more noisy than the one Caroline Rose depicts in “Tell Me What You Want.” “I am just pretending not to lose my mind,” she explains, in a track that swerves between acoustic-guitar strumming and full grunge blare. She blurts both “I can’t bear to lose you” and “Boy you’re going to hate this song!” She wonders if she should hold on; she wants to smash everything and move along. The video clip, a drunken trek through Austin, Texas, spells out all of her conflicting impulses. PARELESAngel Olsen, ‘Nothing’s Free’The steadfastness of vintage soul carries Angel Olsen through “Nothing’s Free,” as she sings about an unspecific but primal revelation. Slow gospel organ and piano chords, bluesy saxophone and patiently hand-played drumming sustain her amid — and in a long closing instrumental, beyond — something that sounds both life-changing and inevitable, as she sings, “Nothin’s free like breaking free/out of the past.” PARELESNoia, ‘Verano Adentro’Noia is Gisela Fullà-Silvestre, a songwriter from Barcelona who’s now based in Brooklyn. In “Verano Adentro” (“Summer Inside”), she wafts her voice over an amorphous, ever-shifting electronic backdrop. At first it’s tentative — chords and pauses, the clatter of a rainstick — but other, more ominous sounds crowd in: distorted guitar, insistent drums, rumbly low arpeggios. Nothing ruffles her as she basks in bliss: “All I need is an ocean, all I need is time,” she coos. PARELESSarah Pagé, ‘Premiers Pas Au Marécage’“Premiers Pas Au Marécage” translates as “First Steps in the Swamp,” and it’s a meditation on evolution — formlessness into forms — by Sarah Page, a harpist and composer from Montreal. She mingles electronics and plucked strings in this piece, which opens with yawning, amorphous sounds and recordings of Hungarian frogs, then deploys a quintet of Japanese kotos to join her in a measured, echoey waltz and march, a tentative climb toward order. PARELES More

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      Future Earns an Eighth No. 1 Album With ‘I Never Liked You’

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      The Atlanta rapper’s latest release had the largest numbers of the year so far, but big new LPs from Bad Bunny and Jack Harlow will register on next week’s chart.For most of the year so far, sales of new music have been pretty unremarkable, with even the No. 1 album posting modest numbers week after week. But those doldrums may now be over, with a hit new LP by the rapper Future and a slew of high-profile releases coming — including a surprise release by the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny that is poised to make a big splash on next week’s chart.This week, “I Never Liked You” became the eighth chart-topping album by Future, an Atlanta rapper who has been a mainstay on the charts for a decade. With guest appearances by Kanye West (now known as Ye), Gunna, Young Thug, Drake, Kodak Black and others, the album had the equivalent of 222,000 sales in the United States, more than any release this year, according to the tracking service Luminate. That total is a composite number attributed mostly to streaming, with songs from the album getting nearly 284 million clicks in its opening week.Those numbers may well be eclipsed next week by Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” which was released on Friday with little advance notice. Bad Bunny is a global streaming colossus — he has been Spotify’s top streaming artist for the last two years — and “Un Verano” broke that service’s record for the most clicks around the world for an album in a single day (topping Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy” last year). Another big new album released last week: “Come Home the Kids Miss You,” by Jack Harlow, the Kentucky rapper who joined Lil Nas X on last year’s No. 1 song “Industry Baby.”Also this week, the Weeknd’s “Dawn FM” rises 33 spots to No. 2 after its arrival on vinyl, matching the album’s chart high from when it was released in January. Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous” is No. 3, Miranda Lambert’s new “Palomino” is No. 4 and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” is in fifth place.Other major albums on the horizon include Kendrick Lamar (Friday), Harry Styles (May 20), Post Malone (June 3), BTS (June 10) and Luke Combs (June 24). More

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      Cécile McLorin Salvant Branches Out, and 7 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by FKA twigs and the Weeknd, Leon Bridges and Khruangbin, Animal Collective 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.Cécile McLorin Salvant, ‘Thunderclouds’The headline here isn’t that the cream-of-the-crop jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant has serious creative appetites that run beyond the American-songbook-and-curios repertory, which she has so famously explored. That was becoming clear, slowly but surely, over the past few years. It’s that when she focuses instead on her own writing, and shifts away some from straight-on modern jazz, she also softens the archness and the neatness of her delivery. There’s a new, expanded range in both the music and the expression. “Thunderclouds” will help you clock the shift: an up-tempo lullaby of wistful, wounded hopefulness, its shapely chord changes carried loosely by the band and its bouncy rhythm nodding to Caribbean-infused jazz. “Sometimes you have to gaze into a well to see the sky,” Salvant sings, repeating the phrase as if to convince herself. The song comes from a forthcoming album, “Ghost Song,” due in March; it’ll be her first for Nonesuch Records and her first to feature primarily originals. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOLeon Bridges and Khruangbin, ‘B-Side’In a Texas alliance, the soul singer Leon Bridges is backed by Khruangbin, a trio from Houston that has soaked up global rhythms. “B-Side” is from a collaborative EP due in February. Khruangbin supplies mid-tempo, two-chord Afrobeat funk, with terse bits of rhythm guitar answered by tootling organ chords, as Bridges croons in falsetto about much he misses a distant lover. It sounds like a slice of a jam that went on much longer. JON PARELESAnimal Collective, ‘Walker’Plinking, cascading xylophone and marimba sounds and the nasal, pumping string tones of a hurdy-gurdy circle through “Walker,” a meditation on getting through grief that’s named after the songwriter Scott Walker. It’s less dizzying and more patient than much of Animal Collective’s catalog, and for its final minute, only plinks and stray words remain, like shards of mourning. PARELESTierra Whack, ‘Sorry’The high-concept miniaturist Tierra Whack has been releasing a series of three-song genre-testing EPs: “Pop?,” “Rap?” and now “R&B?,” which relies on slow-ticking drum machines and electronic tones. “Sorry” is cast as a phone message, “one last conversation” with someone who won’t answer. The synthesizer chords are frayed and quivery as her apologies tumble out — heartfelt but apparently too late. PARELESFKA twigs featuring the Weeknd, ‘Tears in the Club’Miserablism and sensualism pair elegantly in this collaboration between FKA twigs and the Weeknd. For twigs, an impressionistic singer, this marks her most pointed and theatrical vocals, and the Weeknd, who has long embraced deviant sadness on a grand scale, dials it back ever so slightly to match the beatifically aghast mood. JON CARAMANICARvssian and Future featuring Lil Baby, ‘M&M’On “M&M,” the Jamaican producer Rvssian serves up an ominous synth that sounds like a video game console on its last legs, tinny and fading. Lil Baby matches it with a needling singsong verse, and Future approaches it with an indignant wheeze. CARAMANICATyondai Braxton, ‘Dia’Tyondai Braxton’s new electronic track, “Dia,” emerges after a long silence. It has an insistent but implied beat, many layers of overt and implied syncopation, and a determination to keep changing. PARELES24kGoldn, ‘More Than Friends’Around 14 months ago, 24kGoldn was at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 with his breakout single “Mood.” Now he’s remaking Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend.” It’s a cheeky success that feels like a grim concession. CARAMANICA More