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    Björk Insists on Connection, and 11 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Blood Orange, Madison Cunningham, Yeat 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.Björk, ‘Atopos’Multiple Björks converge in “Atopos,” the first single from her album due Sept. 30, “Fossora”; “atopos” is Greek for “out of place” or “amiss.” There’s the brash, declarative Björk, calling for unity and belting, “Thank you for staying while we learn/To find our resonance where we do connect.” There’s the beat-heavy Björk, who collaborated with Kasimyn — an Indonesian disc jockey who is in the duo Gabber Modus Operandi — on a stark, elemental kick-drum syncopation that turns to fierce battering at the end. There’s the nature-loving Björk, who surrounds herself in the video with close-ups of fungi. And there’s the modern chamber-music Björk, who chooses a family of instruments — on this track, six clarinets from bass on up — and writes gnarled, harmonically ambiguous arrangements for them. The song is equally cerebral and visceral — and, in its own way, jolly. JON PARELESBlood Orange, ‘Jesus Freak Lighter’A skittish electronic beat collides with a low, morose guitar riff on Blood Orange’s “Jesus Freak Lighter” — which is to say it’s a little bit New Order, a little bit Joy Division. Though Dev Hynes remains Blood Orange’s creative nucleus, as usual he’s brought on some new collaborators to orbit him on “Four Songs,” a new EP coming out next week; Ian Isaiah, Eva Tolkin and Erika de Casier will all be featured. “Jesus Freak Lighter,” though, is all Hynes, fitting since it conjures a mood of digital-era solitude: “Got carried away,” he sings with a kind of muffled melancholy, “Living in my head, photo fantasy.” LINDSAY ZOLADZPhoenix featuring Ezra Koenig, ‘Tonight’Phoenix harkens back to 2009 on the sleek “Tonight,” not just in the way the group recaptures the sound of the excellent record it released that year, “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix,” but in the cameo appearance from another late-aughts indie-pop luminary, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig. “I talk to myself and it’s quite surprising,” Thomas Mars quips on the chorus; by the second iteration, Koenig adds some backing vocals to keep him company. ZOLADZDeerhoof, ‘My Lovely Cat’What if the spiky San Francisco art-rock band Deerhoof decided to write a Rolling Stones song? “My Lovely Cat” might be as close as they get, with a rowdy, distorted 4/4 guitar riff, a more-or-less march beat and a slide guitar that veers between teasing the rhythm guitar and shadowing the vocal. Satomi Matsuzaki sings, in Japanese, about bonding with her cat in the internet era: “Let’s monitor on pet-cam!/Shall I start Instagram or TikTok?” Of course Deerhoof skews things, with sudden silences, sneaky shifts of key and meter and a final minute of obsessive repetition. But there’s a Stones swagger lurking underneath. PARELESMadison Cunningham, ‘Our Rebellion’Opposites attract, and perplex, in “Our Rebellion” from “Revealer,” the new album by Madison Cunningham. As she tries to defuse a lovers’ quarrel by recognizing differences — “You speak in numbers/I sing in metaphor” — she insists “I’m not trying to simplify you.” That certainly applies to the music: a perpetual-motion weave of deftly picked guitar lines in a brisk 7/4 meter, stacking up and realigning, jabbing and easing off, sometimes running backward, as the crafty wrangling goes on. PARELESJordana, ‘Is It Worth It Now?’Perky synthesizer arpeggios, a confident guitar line and a broad-shouldered drumbeat promise something cheerful. But “Is It Worth It Now?” is actually a snap-out-of-it pep talk for someone deeply depressed: “Disinterest in the things that made you wanna live is sad enough itself, isn’t it?” She has advice — “Swim right into the center of all your doubt” — but the song ends with a question, not a cure. PARELESThe Waeve, ‘Can I Call You’Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall are former members of two very different, if quintessentially British, bands: Blur and the Pipettes. They recently joined forces to form a new duo, the Waeve, and announced that a debut album will be coming next year. The first single, “Can I Call You,” is full of unexpected and sonically adventurous twists and turns: Just when it seems that the song has settled into its groove as a plaintive, folky piano ballad sung by Dougall, a screaming guitar solo from Coxon propels it into a different, and much antsier, register. “I’m tired of being in love, I’m sick of being in pain,” they chant together in a punky cadence, shouting to be heard over a cacophony that now includes Coxon’s blaring saxophone. “Can’t you just kiss me, then kiss me again?” ZOLADZYeat, ‘Krank’One of several space jams from the new Yeat EP, “Lyfë,” “Krank” is woozy, circular, lewd, lightly dystopian, and 10 percent less inscrutable than the average Yeat song to date. It’s something like growth. JON CARAMANICABryson Tiller, ‘Outside’Bryson Tiller sings with gymnastic verve, never letting the potential power of a lingering note get in the way of a slickly assembled cluster of syllables. Here, he prances and slides atop a beat that borrows heavily from the Ying Yang Twins’ signature salacious hit, “Wait (The Whisper Song).” CARAMANICA​​Lewis Capaldi, ‘Forget Me’The yowling prince Lewis Capaldi has made hay from singing himself hoarse, his hits filled with raw eruptions of schlock so potent they transcend past corn into something far more cooked. Unlike his biggest hits, “Forget Me,” his first new song in about three years, has a slight tempo to it — you aren’t bathing in his pathos quite the same as you once were. The verses amble by amiably, and there’s just the faintest echo of “Man in the Mirror” as the song begins to build. But Capaldi unleashes the full catharsis at the chorus: “I’m not ready/to find out you know how to forget me/I’d rather hear how much you regret me.” The only catch is that the song feels as if it’s rushing him along, urging him not to wallow. And wallowing is where Capaldi thrives. CARAMANICAMarisa Anderson, ‘The Fire This Time’When the 21st-century folk-primitive guitarist Marisa Anderson — no stranger to electric instruments, home recording or multitracking — learned about George Floyd’s death in May 2020, she spent the day recording ‘The Fire This Time’ and quickly put it on Bandcamp for a month as a benefit single. She has re-edited it for her coming album, “Still, Here.” Anderson places steady, mournful fingerpicking behind searching, keening slide-guitar lines and, at the 30-second mark, a police siren that passed by her window as she was recording. It’s a musician working out emotions physically, instinctively, with her fingers on the strings. PARELESMakaya McCraven, ‘The Fours’Jazz, minimalism and a rich sense of unfolding mystery suffuse “The Fours” by Makaya McCraven, the drummer, composer and producer whose next album, “In These Times,” arrives Sept. 23. The track begins with muffled drums and a patient bass vamp, but other instruments keep arriving, slipping into the mix almost surreptitiously and then adding their own layers of counterpoint: cello, viola, piano, harp, saxophone, trumpet, flute, even some flamenco-like handclaps from McCraven. The players collude as sections — strings, horns — or peek out with their own bits of melody; loops mingle with live instruments. The track undulates and thickens, then dissolves before revealing too many secrets. PARELES More

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    Pop Smoke’s Memory Lives On, and 14 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Xenia Rubinos, Swedish House Mafia, Soccer Mommy 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.Pop Smoke, ‘More Time’“Faith,” the second posthumous album from Pop Smoke, includes collaborations with Kanye West, Dua Lipa, 42 Dugg, Future and others. But this track, early in the album, is jarring and stark. Not simply because it’s still eerie to hear Pop Smoke rapping with a blend of menace and joy, but because of its chilling beat — produced in part by the rapper’s longtime collaborator Rico Beats, but also in part by Nicholas Britell, who has scored “Moonlight” and “Succession.” It is a familiar trick, these reverberating keys that stand stern sentry, but no less effective for it. Here is a splash of theater more visceral than any radio hit, any pop crossover. JON CARAMANICAXenia Rubinos, ‘Working All the Time’Xenia Rubinos’s “Working All the Time” is only two minutes long, but it’s as intricate as an arduous jigsaw puzzle. There are waves of skittish synths, air horns straight out of a Funk Flex set on Hot 97, a bridge that sounds like the glitchy maximalism of hyperpop, and last but not least, an interpolation of the traditional rumba “Ave María Morena.” Somehow, Rubinos makes sense of all these disparate pieces using her brassy, featherlight voice. Blink and you’ll miss that it’s a workers’ anthem, too: In one verse, Rubinos sings, “You better keep me poor and busy or I’d be a danger.” It’s a warning for those who try to crush the power of the people. ISABELIA HERRERASwedish House Mafia, ‘It Gets Better’I suppose you can absorb this song on the internet, where it is currently available. But the slick return of Swedish House Mafia — the Brobdingnagian kings of mainstream EDM, the clout champions of biggest-room house music — cries out for an open field, a dizzying laser show, a loss of sense of time and place. Hug a friend; the soundtrack of shared mayhem is upon us. CARAMANICAMahalia, ‘Whenever You’re Ready’A brisk, ratcheting, evolving ska-meets-trap beat carries “Whenever You’re Ready” by Mahalia, a British singer whose mother is Jamaican. It’s a semi-breakup song that flaunts confidence instead of pain. The singer is letting him go because he’s angry at her now, but she’s sure he’ll be back: “You won’t be gone for good,” she sings. “No, I’m not worried.” JON PARELESCaroline Polachek, ‘Bunny Is a Rider’Singing about a woman so elusive that a “satellite can’t find her,” Caroline Polachek makes staccato syllables and short phrases bounce all around the beat, working equally as percussion and melody. They’re just a few of the syncopated layers in a playful yet strategic production — by Polachek and her frequent collaborator, Danny L. Harle from the PC Music circle — that juggles whistling, triangle, birdsong and the giggles and gurgles of Harle’s baby daughter. “I’m so nonphysical,” Polachek exults, over the sustained bass tone that cushions the chorus. Nonsense: The song is built for dancing. PARELESSoccer Mommy, ‘Rom Com 2004’“Rom Com 2004” could have been a straightforward indie-rock love song, vowing “Just let me be yours like no one else before” over a march beat, guitar chords and a chorus with a proud leap in the melody. But Soccer Mommy — Sophie Allison — handed over her demo to the producer BJ Burton with instructions, she has said, to “destroy it.” He obliged with glitches, distortion, speed variations and exposed moments — making the song more appealing because it plays hard to get. PARELESTurnstile featuring Blood Orange, ‘Alien Love Call’From the forthcoming Turnstile album, “Glow On,” comes this shoegaze space-soul collaboration with Blood Orange (Dev Hynes). The video compiles mayhem-esque live footage more in keeping with the hardcore band’s usual rhythms, but perhaps this is the meditation before the rage. CARAMANICADave McMurray, ‘Dark Star’Dave McMurray is a longtime Detroit tenor saxophonist with decades of experience in rock, jazz, pop and R&B, mostly as a side musician. But he’s just released his second album for Blue Note as a leader: “Grateful Deadication,” a tribute to the Grateful Dead songbook. His cover of the classic “Dark Star” channels the epically trippy M.O. of a Dead performance: McMurray declares the melody over Wayne Gerard’s twinkling, distorted guitar; eventually, a dug-in backbeat sets in. Then a coolly grooving section opens up, and the saxophonist dishes out a solo that’s laced with greasy Motor City attitude but still takes its time, as if to bask in the California sun. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOHalf Waif, ‘Swimmer’The songs on “Mythopoetics,” Nandi Rose Plunkett’s new album as Half Waif, suffer and exult in all-consuming love. As “Swimmer” leaps from everyday sensation to all-out devotion and need — “I want to know they can’t take this away from me” — synthesizer arpeggios and vocal harmonies swarm around Plunkett’s ardent voice, like a suddenly racing heartbeat and an uncontainable obsession. PARELESYas, ‘Idea of You’A viscous tar pit of a track — slow, oozing bass tones, sparse drum-machine taps and gaping silences — hints at the difficulty of pulling free from an increasingly destructive relationship. Yas (the songwriter, singer, producer and violinist Yasmeen Al-Mazeedi) sings about being “in love with the idea of you” amid details of mental and physical abuse. The negotiations aren’t quite over; her voice rises to a fragile soprano as she decides, “You think that I want you back — I don’t.” PARELESKoreless, ‘White Picket Fence’Koreless — the Welsh producer Lewis Roberts — swerves between pastorale and rave on “White Picket Fence.” A keening female voice, uncredited and possibly built from samples, floats at first over a stately harpsichord; then fuzzy synthesizers arrive with a pulsing beat under that vocal melody, before it gets stretched and chopped up; then it’s sent back to harpsichord territory. In the video, directed by FKA twigs, club creatures climb out of a futuristic green car alongside a bucolic creek, where fishing ensues; urban artifice meets Nature. PARELESKarol G, ‘200 Copas’To a friend who’s still tearful about her ex, the Colombian songwriter Karol G (Carolina Giraldo Navarro) doesn’t mince words in “200 Copas” (“200 Drinks”); she dismisses the guy with profanities after all the suffering he caused. Yet her 21st-century bluntness gets a traditionalist backing; while the rest of her album, “KG0516,” traverses modern Pan-American pop with all its technological tricks, “200 Copas” is an old-fashioned waltz backed by a few acoustic instruments, nothing more. The lyrics are decidedly impolite, but the predicament she sings about is not new. The new video has her leading a beach-bonfire singalong: solidarity against undeserving men. PARELESTainy and Yandel, ‘El Plan’“Dynasty” is a new collaborative album from Tainy and Yandel, two titans of reggaeton celebrating 16 years of eminence. With its sinister harpsichord, muted marimbas and a piercing dembow riddim, “El Plan” recalls the mid-00s reggaeton that required listeners practice dancing in front of the mirror. It’s all about the thrill of an after-hours dance-floor chase — the electrifying, will-it-or-won’t-it-happen energy of a night at the club. “Estoy esperándote y tú perreando sola,” Yandel says. “I’m waiting for you and you’re dancing alone.” Luckily, he knows he’s at the whim of his partner: “Pero tú dime cuál e’ el plan.” You tell me what the plan is. HERRERAMas Aya, ‘Momento Presente’It is easy to reference folkloric sounds, but have little to offer other than mere nostalgia. The instrumentalist Brandon Valdivia, better known as Mas Aya, escapes this fate masterfully on “Momento Presente.” More than a mere collision of past and present, the track is a study in the power of harnessing ancestral knowledge. Over six and a half minutes, Valdivia braids a skittish footwork beat with a flurry of Andean pan flutes, arpeggiated synths and polyrhythms. Halfway through, the voice of an elder reflects on centuries of protest, a reminder that the work of liberation is part of a continuum. One moment the song is celestial, transporting the listener 40,000 feet into the air. In another it is meditative, urging us into quiet introspection. HERRERAMatt Mitchell and Kate Gentile, ‘Trapezoids | Matching Tickles’In recent years the pianist Matt Mitchell and the drummer Kate Gentile have developed a book of pithy, one-bar-long compositions, which they play with small ensembles under the name Snark Horse. Through intense improvisation, taking equal cues from free jazz and metal, they morph and distend and scramble these little melodic fragments. On Friday, Snark Horse released its first album — a boxed set spanning no fewer than 49 tracks and five-and-a-half hours, mostly recorded at a three-day session in late 2019. “Trapezoids” is a Gentile composition, a crooked and incessant spray of notes, with Jon Irabagon’s saxophone further destabilizing the mix. It’s paired on this track with “Matching Tickles,” a Mitchell piece, which he plays more softly and abstractedly, as if it were the echo of another idea. RUSSONELLO More

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    Gwen Stefani’s Ska-Pop Flashback, and 10 More New Songs

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe PlaylistGwen Stefani’s Ska-Pop Flashback, and 10 More New SongsHear tracks by Sturgill Simpson, John Carpenter, Elle King and others.Gwen Stefani returns to the familiar sounds of her band, No Doubt, on a new single, “Let Me Reintroduce Myself.”Credit…Kevin Winter/Getty Images For IheartmediaJon Pareles, Jon Caramanica, Giovanni Russonello and Dec. 11, 2020Every 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.Gwen Stefani, ‘Let Me Reintroduce Myself’[embedded content]When the brash, sneering No Doubt frontwoman Gwen Stefani emerged in the mid-90s to break up the boys-club monopoly of alternative rock, it would have been hard to predict where she’d be now, at 51. She is arguably even more of a household name than in the “Tragic Kingdom” days, but occupies a space at the deadest center of centrist pop — a fixture on a broadcast TV singing competition that is (somehow) in its 20th season, and an occasional (if sonically ill-suited) duet partner with her country-star fiancé. Her new single, the not-so-subtly-titled “Let Me Reintroduce Myself,” gestures back to Stefani’s middle period of, roughly, “Rock Steady” through “Hollaback Girl,” assuring the skeptical listener that she’s still “the original, original old” Gwen. A few clunky verse lyrics protest a bit too much (“It’s not a comeback, I’m recycling me”), but when her brassy voice rises to match the ska instrumentation of the chorus, there’s a fleeting rush of that old No Doubt magic. LINDSAY ZOLADZTroye Sivan, Kacey Musgraves and Mark Ronson, ‘Easy’The neon-kissed “Easy” was already a highlight off the Australian pop sweetheart Troye Sivan’s recent EP, “In a Dream,” but a new mix by Mark Ronson and guest vocals from Kacey Musgraves kick it into another gear. Ronson’s production expands the song’s spacious atmosphere, accentuating an echoing New Order bass line, starry synth flourishes and cavernous percussion. For all her disco flirtations on “High Horse,” Musgraves has never lent her benevolent croon to a song so straightforwardly poppy before — but she sounds so at home that it’s worth wondering if this hints at a potential post-“Golden Hour” direction. ZOLADZJohn Carpenter, ‘The Dead Walk’The director John Carpenter is a full-fledged musician who has also composed the scores for many of his films. “The Dead Walk” is from an album due in 2021, “Lost Themes III,” of music without movies. It’s a martial, suspenseful, pumping, minor-key synthesizer melody, with a guitar overlay, that has its beat drop out midway through, for blurred piano arpeggios, only to resume with even more ominous intent. JON PARELESGeorge Coleman Quintet, ‘Sandu’In 1971, seven years after his tenure with Miles Davis’s famed quintet, the saxophonist George Coleman was revving up his career as a bandleader in his own right. On this newly discovered live recording, “The George Coleman Quintet in Baltimore,” Coleman — an inveterate weight lifter — drives the band like a personal trainer, while syncing up with the colorful trumpet phrasing of Danny Moore and the brawny Midwestern swing of Larry Ridley’s bass. On “Sandu,” a classic Clifford Brown blues, Moore nods to its author with a few upturned, pretty lines, but he’s working out his own shapes. On Coleman’s solo, his fits of circular breathing seem to call back to the old R&B saxophone hollerers of generations before. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOFunkmaster Flex featuring King Von, ‘Lurkin’The first single from the forthcoming Funkmaster Flex compilation — 1990s back! — is a taut example of the storytelling rap that made the Chicago rapper King Von, who was killed last month, such a compelling talent. JON CARAMANICABenny the Butcher, ‘3:30 in Houston’Benny the Butcher raps “3:30 in Houston” from a wheelchair — the result of getting shot last month in an attempted robbery. At first, he’s laughing a little — after all, he notes, he’s been on the other side of a robbery in his day. But midsong, as he relives the moment of the attack, the mood sours:Rolls-Royce truck basically stood outOnly one mistake, I ain’t have a lookoutQuarter in jewels, shopping at WalmartTake me out the hood but can’t take the hood outSoon, it’s a deadpan revenge tale, including the suggestion that someone’s “pinkie finger’s getting sent to me.” CARAMANICAKing Princess, ‘Pain’“Cheap Queen,” Mikaela Straus’s 2019 full-length debut as King Princess, was a relatively subdued affair, full of mid-tempo tunes that telegraphed laid-back cool. So the in-your-face energy of her latest single “Pain” is certainly a departure, but it works: The kinetic maximalism of the song’s early 90s touchstones — a “Freedom! ’90” keyboard riff; some “Tom’s Diner” do-do-dos — keep the song from wallowing in the muck of its moody subject matter. “I can’t help turning my love into pain,” Straus croons. The playful music video, directed by Quinn Wilson, conjures some cartoonishly masochistic imagery, with that titular word suddenly appearing like the bam and pows in an old “Batman” episode. ZOLADZSturgill Simpson, ‘Oh Sarah’“Oh Sarah” is a desolate Southern soul ballad on Sturgill Simpson’s 2016 album, “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth,” losing itself in the loneliness and transience of the road: “Too old now to learn how to let you in/so I run away just like I always do.” On “Cuttin’ Grass — Vol. 2 (Cowboy Arms Sessions),” his second album of bluegrass remakes from his catalog, it’s far more reassuring, rooted in string-band picking. It’s a vow of enduring love despite the separations: “Don’t worry baby, I’ll come home.” PARELESElle King, ‘Another You’Bitterness seethes and crests as the string section swells in Elle King’s “Another You,” a knife-twisting response to a message from a despised ex. In the verses she details his failings, almost singing through clenched teeth; in the chorus, she belts with vindictive joy about a new romance, proclaiming, “It wasn’t hard to fill your shoes.” PARELESEl Perro del Mar featuring Blood Orange, ‘Alone in Halls’“I’m going through changes,” El Perro del Mar — the Swedish composer and singer Sarah Assbring — sings and speaks, again and again, in “Alone in Halls,” over two organlike chords that feel like inhales and exhales. She’s joined, now and then, by the voice of Blood Orange (Dev Hynes). Aren’t we all going through changes? PARELESMoontype, ‘Ferry’“I wanna take the ferry to Michigan,” Margaret McCarthy sings, buoyed by oceanic guitar distortion on the chorus of “Ferry,” the first single from the Chicago indie-rock trio Moontype’s upcoming debut album. “Ferry” marries the woozy swoon of Beach House with the rising sweep of a Galaxie 500 song, though McCarthy’s voice cuts through the haze with direct emotional lucidity. ZOLADZAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More