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      Nicki Minaj Returns Ready to Rumble, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Kali Uchis and Summer Walker, Arlo Parks, 6lack 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.Nicki Minaj, ‘Red Ruby Da Sleeze’Calm arrogance is Nicki Minaj’s gift. There’s no need to decipher all her allusions because her delivery and production say it all. The track of “Red Ruby Da Sleeze,” based on Lumidee’s “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh),” juggles near-flamenco handclaps, trap drums and choral vocals going “Uh-oh.” Her percussive rhymes are competitive in every realm — linguistic, sexual, financial, culinary (“guacamole with the taco”) — and their utter confidence is still convincing. JON PARELESKali Uchis and Summer Walker, ‘Deserve Me’“Red Moon in Venus,” the third studio album by the cheerfully bilingual Colombian American songwriter Kali Uchis, moves between sensual romance and fierce recriminations. “Deserve Me” is blunt: “I like it better when you’re gone/I feel a little less alone.” Uchis and Summer Walker take turns bad-mouthing the thoughtless lover who’s getting dumped, and harmonize sweetly to remind him, “You don’t deserve me.” The track starts out light and tinkly but keeps adding bassy layers, literally showing the depth of their contempt. PARELESboygenius, ‘Not Strong Enough’The indie-rock trio boygenius — Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker — formed in 2018, under a cheeky moniker that, Dacus said in an interview, was meant to harness some macho overconfidence: “We were just talking about boys and men we know who’ve been told that they are geniuses since they could hear, basically, and what type of creative work comes out of that upbringing.” The group’s stirring, acoustic-guitar-driven new single “Not Strong Enough” once again finds the women in provocative but poetic drag, as they harmonize on a chorus that answers Sheryl Crow: “I don’t know why I am the way I am, not strong enough to be your man.” On a steadily galloping bridge, Dacus leads the trio in a chant that expresses frustration at being “always an angel, never a god.” But by the end of the candid “Not Strong Enough,” boygenius has generated its own kind of strength in vulnerability — and in numbers. LINDSAY ZOLADZArlo Parks, ‘Impurities’The English songwriter Arlo Parks has absorbed Joni Mitchell, hip-hop and much more; it’s no wonder she is willing to enjoy her “Impurities.” Her new track revolves around echoey loops and samples, but she has a paradoxical lesson to impart: “When you embrace all my impurities, then I feel clean again.” PARELESMandy, Indiana, ‘Pinking Shears’On the echoey, percussion-forward “Pinking Shears,” the Manchester art-rockers Mandy, Indiana forcefully and exhaustedly reject an increasingly mechanized world: “J’suis fatiguée” (“I’m tired”) becomes a kind of mantra when chanted by the band’s vocalist Valentine Caulfield. But there’s catharsis and resistance in the industrial abrasion of the sound they create, like a rogue machine created from cobbled-together parts suddenly learning how to talk back. ZOLADZWater From Your Eyes, ‘Barley’The hypnotic “Barley,” from the Brooklyn duo Water From Your Eyes, sounds a bit like a playground chant reimagined by Sonic Youth: “One, two, three, counter, you’re a cool thing, count mountains,” Rachel Brown drones in a charismatic deadpan. The song — and first single from the forthcoming album “Everyone’s Crushed,” which comes out on May 26 — is full of loopy left-turns and unexpected riffs that jut out at odd angles, but Brown and bandmate Nate Amos are, at all times, utterly in command of their strange and alluring sonic universe. ZOLADZ6lack, ‘Since I Have a Lover’6lack positions himself between singer and rapper on “Since I Have a Lover,” which has a looped feeling. He barely projects his voice, but he rides the rhythm of a loping, two-chord guitar track as he promises more than a passing attraction. Will it last? The song suggests a woozy maybe. PARELESPrincess Nokia, ‘Lo Siento’Steady, wistful piano chords carry Princess Nokia through “Lo Siento” (“I’m Sorry”) from her EP due March 14, “I Love You But This Is Goodbye.” It’s not really an apology; as the production blooms into lush, pillowy harmonies, she switches from singing in English to calmly rapping in Spanish, cursing her lover for betrayal and noting, “Thanks for the pain, the pain in my song.” PARELESyMusic, ‘Zebras’A seven-beat rhythm percolates through “Zebras,” a minimalistic but eventful romp by the chamber sextet yMusic. The rhythm hops from key clicks on a bass clarinet to pizzicato strings; it’s juxtaposed with sighing melody lines and hints of a circus band, making the most of its three-and-a-half minutes. PARELES More

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      Karol G’s Songs Conquered the World. On a New LP, She Reveals Herself.

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      Karol G, a global pop star from Colombia, said she wrote 60 songs, maybe more, for her new album, “Mañana Será Bonito” (“Tomorrow Will Be Beautiful”); eventually she winnowed them down to 17.The first ones, she recalled in a video chat from Medellín, Colombia, were full of “anger, sadness, bad love, toxic relationships.” They reflected the fallout of her 2021 breakup with the Puerto Rican rapper and singer Anuel AA, after the end of a romance they had made public with a 2019 duet, “Secreto,” that has since been streamed more than a billion times.Karol G, 32, wrote about feeling betrayed, about temptations and doubts, about partying away the pain, about no-strings sex with an ex. But eventually, she found herself writing wary love songs and counting her blessings. Just a few weeks before the album’s Feb. 24 release, she was wondering if she had been too candid.“I’m being really open with this album, and that gets me a little bit scared, because I’m not a perfect human,” she said from her office in her hometown, where she had just returned to meet her sister’s newborn.Karol G, born Carolina Giraldo Navarro, was wearing an oversized white hoodie, one of 100 that she has decorated by hand for a limited-edition merch sale. Her hair, which has changed color for each album and tour cycle — with her fans attending concerts in matching wigs — was the bold red she unveiled in recent videos.“The album is more Carolina than Karol G,” she said. “Personal things that I had inside me, I was just letting them go in my lyrics. People are going to know about a lot of my personal life with my songs. But I don’t want to have the songs inside me anymore, because I know people can heal a lot of things with music. Writing songs for me is a really good way to heal things that I can’t explain.”Instead of reggaeton’s machismo, Karol G offers cheerful, forthrightly sex-positive femininity.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesShe admitted to prerelease jitters. “Right now, I notice that artists are trying very hard to find a concept, to be very experimental,” she said. “I love that. And that’s a good way to do art. But the concept of this album is just me being me. I really didn’t want people to feel it was like very simple, or just normal. But then we put up the announcement of my album, and there’s already more than 80 million views on Instagram. Now I’m stressed because I think that expectations are very high.”“Mañana Será Bonito” is primed to be a blockbuster in the wake of Karol G’s 2021 album, “KG0516.” That LP included her billion-streaming 2019 collaboration with Nicki Minaj, “Tusa,” and her self-mythologizing 2020 “Bichota,” a word Karol G coined to turn “bichote” — Puerto Rican slang for a drug kingpin — into a feminine noun for, as she says, “a boss bitch,” a sexy and powerful woman.Her new slang caught on. “‘Bichota’ became a movement,” she said. “Las bichotas don’t cry, las bichotas work for themselves, las bichotas are big, las bichotas are strong, las bichotas can do everything. Everybody can have good songs, everybody can have a moment. But to have a movement, it’s a different thing to find. And I think it’s something that you don’t find if you’re looking for it.”Karol G played the main stage of Coachella in 2022, pointedly including a medley of worldwide hits in Spanish from acts who had never performed at the festival, including Selena, Ricky Martin, Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee and Shakira. “It was special for me to say with my show, I’m here now and I feel really proud,” she said. “But I have to say that I’m here because of this music that opened those doors for us to be here.”The core of Karol G’s music is the loping beat of reggaeton. But her songs replace the genre’s usual rapping with inviting pop melodies, delivered in her clear, teasing voice. Instead of reggaeton’s machismo, she offers cheerful, forthrightly sex-positive femininity.With each album, Karol G has also reached beyond reggaeton to collaborate with an international array of guests — a sign of Latin pop’s ever-expanding, border-crossing possibilities. “Right now is a really special moment with Latin music,” she said, “because everybody in the world is like, ‘I don’t care if I know the words or not,’ but they connect with our sounds.”Karol G grew up surrounded by music. Her father — who was her protector and manager in her early career — sang with a band and brought home all sorts of music: “Rock ’n’ roll, salsa, ballads, reggaeton, vallenatos, everything,” she recalled.From an early age, she knew she wanted to sing. As a teenager, she auditioned unsuccessfully for the Colombian edition of the music reality competition “The X Factor,” but soon afterward signed to record with the Puerto Rican label Diamond Music — a contract her father bought her out of two years later. By 2012, she had grown so discouraged that she decided to give up on music and study marketing in New York City.Karol G onstage at an Illinois arena in September 2022. In Latin America, she headlines stadiums.Rob Grabowski/Invision, via Associated Press“My father stopped talking to me for three months,” she recalled. “He was like, ‘No, you can’t do that. You are throwing away seven years of our hard work. I know who you are. I know we can get it. It’s hard, but when we get it, it’s going to be bigger than the rest.’”An advertisement for a music-business conference in Boston caught her eye as she was riding buses in New York. On an impulse, she attended, and it was a turning point. “I know I love music and I do this for passion,” she said. “But the teaching at that conference was how the music can be a really big business, and how you can work like that.”She returned to Colombia, enrolled to study music at the University of Antioquia, released songs independently and performed at every opportunity, eventually singing duets with established reggaeton stars like Nicky Jam. Her 2017 debut album, “Unstoppable,” included duets with Bad Bunny and Quavo (from Migos), and it brought her a 2018 Latin Grammy Award as best new artist. Her popularity has only grown since then, stoked by lusty songs like “Mi Cama” (“My Bed”) and “Punto G” (“G-Spot”). In Latin America, she headlines stadiums.Her constant collaborator has been Daniel Oviedo, who records as Ovy on the Drums and has produced the vast majority of her songs. He tailors and refines reggaeton and other beats to suit her voice; he also strives to match her ambitions. “Karol’s mind is always going,” he said in a video chat from Los Angeles. “She always has an objective as to where the direction of the song should be, where the lyrics should go. She’s always thinking what’s the next move, the next step, the next accomplishment?”On “Mañana Será Bonito,” Karol G worked with Finneas (Billie Eilish’s brother and collaborator), the Jamaican dancehall singer Sean Paul, the Bronx-born bachata singer Romeo Santos, the Dominican dembowsero Angel Dior, and her forerunner as a Colombian superstar, Shakira. She also embraces an elder generation of reggaeton with “Gatúbela” (“Catwoman”), a racy duet with Maldy, a Puerto Rican rapper from the duo Plan B, which released its first album in 2002.“I had never done anything with a woman before,” Maldy said in a phone interview via a translator. “But it was very natural. Being with a woman that brings that sensuality made the right combination for the song to have such an impact. She has the charisma to bring reggaeton to another genre. And international collaborations expand reggaeton, to maximize it culturally.”“For me to go to different styles of music, different genres is not hard, because I have music from everywhere that I really love,” Karol G said. Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesKarol G insists that her hybrids and connections are a matter of instinct, not crossover marketing. “For me to go to different styles of music, different genres is not hard, because I have music from everywhere that I really love,” she said. “I’m trying to show the world more what I do, instead of just doing things to open that door. I want to do it with my real identity. If I feel in my mind that a song has that feeling I go that way: ‘This is a rock, this is a salsa, this is a corrido mexicano.’”She had a hit with the Mexican-style waltz “200 Copas” (“200 Drinks”) from “KG0516,” in which she advises a friend to dump a terrible boyfriend and go out drinking. The new album has another one, “Gucci Los Paños,” (“Gucci Towels”) which furiously and profanely rejects an ex-boyfriend’s attempts to get back together. “If we’re going to do a really heartbroken song that needs to sound really angry, for me you have to use Mexican sounds,” she said.Another of the album’s good-riddance songs is “TGQ,” the duet with Shakira — a pairing Karol G had long hoped for. They had sent each other songs in recent years, but none had seemed exactly right. Now, with Shakira singing openly about her own breakup, Karol G thought they might share another song in which she was “letting a lot of anger go.” When Shakira heard it, Karol G said, “She was, like ‘Oh my God, thank you. Those lyrics are perfectly the way I feel right now.’” They completed the song together, and the finished track, a reggaeton-tinged minor-key ballad, seethes in sisterhood.The album doesn’t offer a narrative. Framed by two songs calling for hope — “Mientras Me Cura del Cora” (“While My Heart Heals”), which is built on Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and “Mañana Será Bonito” — the track list wanders amid hookups and kiss-offs, heedless excess and cautious infatuation. In “Cairo,” she chides herself that the one-night stand she planned on has led to real affection: “I’m not in love but I’m almost there,” she sings.“That really happened!” she said. “I was really, like, I’m not going to get in love again. I’m not going to try to build my personal life with anybody. But life just brought somebody to my life that is like making me feel happy again, so that I wanted to share moments with somebody else again.”“That was a new thing that I learned with this album,” she continued. “I was going to be really mad about love and everything. And at the end of the album, now I’m feeling it again. I used to hate it and now I’m loving it again. So let’s be open to that.” More

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      Karol G and Romeo Santos’s Sensual Goodbye, and More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Morgan Wallen, Yves Tumor, Lankum 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.Karol G and Romeo Santos, ‘X Si Volvemos’Two Latin pop songwriters who thrive on breakup drama — Karol G, from Colombia, and Romeo Santos, a stadium-scale headliner from the Bronx with Dominican and Puerto Rican roots — arrange a last tryst in “X Si Volvemos.” Karol G points out “No funcionamos” — “We don’t work” — and “We’re a disaster in love,” but she admits, “In bed we understand each other.” He tells her their relationship is toxic, but wonders if he’s addicted to their intimacy. The musical turf, a reggaeton beat, is hers, but the temptation is mutual. JON PARELESMorgan Wallen, ‘Last Night’The distance between acoustic-guitar sincerity and electronic artifice is nearing zero. Morgan Wallen, the canny country superstar, has what sounds like a loop of acoustic guitar — three chords — backing him as he sings about a whiskey-fueled reconciliation: “Baby, baby something’s telling this ain’t over yet,” he sings, sounding very smug. PARELESSunny War, ‘No Reason’Sunny War, a songwriter from Nashville born Sydney Lyndella Ward, sings about a flawed but striving character — maybe herself — in “No Reason,” from her new album, “Anarchist Gospel.” She observes, “You’re an angel, you’re a demon/Ain’t got no rhyme, ain’t go no reason,” as folk-rock fingerpicking, a jaunty backbeat and hoedown handclaps carry her through the contradictions. PARELESYves Tumor, ‘Echolalia’There’s a dreamlike quality about “Echolalia,” the breathy, percussive new single from Yves Tumor’s wildly titled upcoming record “Praise a Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds).” Basically a three-minute swoon, “Echolalia” finds the 21st-century glam rocker dazed with infatuation and, however briefly, cosplaying conventionality: “Just put me in a house with a dog and a shiny car,” Tumor sings breathlessly. “We can play the part.” LINDSAY ZOLADZJames Brandon Lewis, ‘Someday We’ll All Be Free’When Donny Hathaway sang his “Someday We’ll All Be Free,” it was determinedly encouraging. On his new album, “Eye of I,” the tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis makes it both militant and questioning. Chris Hoffman’s electric cello snarls distorted drones and Max Jaffe’s drumming moves between marching-band crispness and rumbling eruptions, while Lewis and Kirk Knuffke, on cornet, share the melody, go very separate ways simultaneously and then reunite, contentious but comradely. PARELESUnknown Mortal Orchestra, ‘Layla’The New Zealander Ruban Nielson, leader of the tuneful lo-fi psych-rockers Unknown Mortal Orchestra, is known for being a prolific songwriter, so it makes sense that the band’s forthcoming “V,” its first release in five years, will be a double album. “Layla” is full of warmth, with a soulful vocal melody, Nielson’s nimble guitar playing and the band’s signature fuzzy tones all contributing to an enveloping atmosphere. “Layla, let’s get out of this broken place,” Nielson sings, conjuring an alluring elsewhere. ZOLADZTemps featuring Joana Gomila, Nnamdï, Shamir and Quelle Chris, ‘Bleedthemtoxins’“Do not fear mistakes,” floating voices advise for the first minute of “Bleedthemtoxins,” a bemused miscellany overseen by James Acaster, an English comedian, actor and podcaster turned musical auteur. His debut album as Temps, “Party Gator Purgatory,” is due in May. The studio-built track is loosely held together by a loping beat, but it rambles at will through Beach Boys-like harmonies, free-form raps and small-group jazz, all thoroughly and cleverly whimsical. PARELESDebby Friday featuring Uñas, ‘I Got It’“I Got It,” from the Toronto musician Debby Friday, is an explosive, pounding, relentlessly calisthenic dance-floor banger with attitude to spare. A pulsating beat flickers like a strobe light as Friday and Chris Vargas of the duo Pelada, appearing here as Uñas, trade braggadocious bilingual verses. “Let mama give you what you need,” Friday shrieks before calmly assuring, “I got it.” ZOLADZCaroline Polachek, ‘Blood and Butter’Sheer, euphoric infatuation courses through “Blood and Butter,” the latest single previewing the album Caroline Polachek is releasing on Valentine’s Day: “Desire, I Want to Turn Into You.” Polachek and her co-producer, Danny L Harle, constructed a song that starts out in wonderment — “Where did you come from, you?” — on its way to declarations like “What I want is to walk beside you, needing nothing.” Springy hand percussion, a bagpipe solo and multilayered la-las sustain the bliss. PARELESRaye, ‘Environmental Anxiety.’Most of the songs on “My 21st Century Blues,” the impressive new album by the English songwriter Raye, are about personal struggles: with romance, with the music business, with drugs, with exploitation. But “Environmental Activity” views the generational big picture: a poisoned planet, a toxic online culture, a rigged economy. The song is elegant in its bitterness, opening with a sweetly sung indictment — “How did you ever think it wasn’t bound to happen?” — leading to a snappy dance beat, a matter-of-fact, half-rapped list of dire situations and a poised chorale sung over church bells and sirens: “We’re all gonna die/What do we do before it happens?” PARELESYuniverse, ‘L8 Nite Txts’Yuniverse, an Indonesian-Australian songwriter, collaborated with the producer Corin Roddick, of Purity Ring, to make a familiar situation shimmery and surreal: “You’re smiling through your lies again/You’re telling me she’s just a friend,” she sings. Her voice is high and breathy, with hyperpop computer tweaks; it floats amid harplike plinks and fragments of deep, twitchy, drill-like beats. Even in the synthetic soundscape, heartache comes through. PARELESJana Horn, ‘After All This Time’The Texas folk singer Jana Horn makes music of arresting delicacy; her songs take shape like intricately woven spider webs. “After All This Time,” from a new album due in April, is a hushed, gently off-kilter meditation full of Horn’s peculiar koans: “Looking out the window,” she sings in a wispy voice, “is not the same as opening the door.” ZOLADZLankum, ‘Go Dig My Grave’The Irish band Lankum amplifies the bleakest tidings of Celtic traditional songs, leaning into minor modes and unswerving drones, harnessing traditional instruments and studio technology. “Go Dig My Grave,” an old song that traveled from the British Isles to Appalachia, is death-haunted and implacable. It begins with Radie Peat singing a cappella, insisting “tell this world that I died for love.” The band joins her with somber vocal harmonies, tolling drone tones, clanking percussion and baleful fiddle slides, a crescendo of dread. PARELES More

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      Rosalía Issues an English Request, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Fever Ray, Chloë, Cécile McLorin Salvant 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.Rosalía, ‘LLYLM’Just before the first chorus of Rosalía’s airy new single “LLYLM,” the Spanish phenom sings, “Lo diré en ingles y me entenderás” — I will say it in English and you will understand me. There’s a brief moment of silence before Rosalía launches into a lilting, pop-radio-friendly hook, sung, yes, in English: “I don’t need honesty, baby, lie like you love me.” In the context of the song, it’s a plea to an uncaring partner, but in the grander scheme of Rosalía’s career, it’s also a playful wink at the idea of an English-speaking crossover hit. The nimble “LLYLM” pivots restlessly between these two worlds, and finds Rosalía — for now at least — having it both ways. LINDSAY ZOLADZFever Ray, ‘Kandy’The eerily alluring “Kandy” is almost a Knife reunion. Though it’s technically by Karin Dreijer’s shapeshifting solo project Fever Ray, it’s one of four songs on the upcoming album “Radical Romantics” that was co-written and co-produced by Karin’s brother and Knife bandmate Olof Dreijer. (It even features the very same synthesizer Olof used on the pulsating “The Captain,” from the Knife’s classic 2006 album “Silent Shout.”) Still, thematically, “Kandy” is of a piece with the other promising glimpses of “Radical Romantics” that Karin has previously offered, at once dark and hypnotically sensual: “After the swim,” the musician sings in a low croon, “she laid me down and whispered, ‘All the girls want kandy.’” ZOLADZClark, ‘Town Crank’Christopher Stephen Clark, the English musician who records as Clark, has built a huge, polymorphous catalog of instrumental music that ranges from stark, austere techno to exquisite chamber-music soundtracks. But he hasn’t sung lead vocals until now — on “Town Crank” from an album due in March, “Sus Dog,” with Thom Yorke of Radiohead as executive producer. “Town Crank” hurtles into motion, starting with dry, jittery acoustic guitar before mustering a full sonic barrage: a relentless electronic bass line, blasts of drums and distortion, orchestral flurries. Clark’s voice turns out to be like Yorke’s, a high, pensive tenor shading into falsetto; he sometimes multitracks it into Beach Boys-like harmonies, while his lyrics offer stray bits of sage advice: “Nothing comes about without a little tweaking.” JON PARELESCécile McLorin Salvant, ‘D’un Feu Secret’Cécile McLorin Salvant, one of her generation’s finest jazz singers, throws a high-concept curveball on her coming album, “Mélusine.” It retells a European folk tale — about love, a curse, broken promises and reptilian transformations — in songs new and old. “D’un Feu Secret” (“Of a Secret Fire”) is indeed old. It was composed in 1660 by Michel Lambert. “I could be cured If I stopped loving/But I prefer the disease,” it vows. McLorin sings it like an early music performer, poised and delicate with feathery ornaments. But the accompaniment, from her longtime keyboardist and collaborator Sullivan Fortner, is on synthesizers, savoring the anachronism. PARELESChlöe, ‘Pray It Away’The Beyoncé protégé Chlöe — of the sisterly R&B duo Chloe x Halle — goes full church girl on the fiery “Pray It Away,” the first single from her upcoming debut album, “In Pieces.” An unfaithful lover brings Chlöe to her knees and makes her wrestle with cravings for vengeance but, as she puts it in breathy vocals stacked to heaven, “I’ma just pray it away before I give him what he deserves first.” ZOLADZASAP Rocky, ‘Same Problems?’ASAP Rocky mourns the many rappers who have died young by questioning himself: “Am I a product of things that I saw?” he sings. “Am I a product of things in my songs?” His self-produced track is a haunted waltz, seesawing between two perpetually unresolved chords, with ASAP Rocky’s doleful voice cradled and answered by vocal harmonies from Miguel. “How many problems get solved if we don’t get involved?” he wonders. PARELESKimbra featuring Ryan Lott, ‘Foolish Thinking’Kimbra, a singer and songwriter from New Zealand, had her global triumph in 2011 as the duet partner (and comeuppance) for Gotye in “Somebody That I Used to Know,” which won the Grammy for record of the year. Since then, she has persevered with her own kind of electronic pop, and in “Foolish Thinking” she collaborates with Ryan Lott, a.k.a. Son Lux. It’s a clear pop structure with an eerie refrain — “thought I could remove the pain/but that’s my foolish thinking” — delivered in an echoey, shadowy production, full of furtive keyboard patterns and variously miked vocals, sketching the longings of a partner who’s loyal but utterly confounded. PARELESRickie Lee Jones, ‘Just in Time’Rickie Lee Jones takes on jazz standards on “Pieces of Treasure,” an album due April 28. Her version of “Just in Time” by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Styne, a song about last-chance romance — “The losing dice were tossed/My bridges all were crossed” — is simultaneously thankful and teasing. With Mike Mainieri’s vibraphone scampering around her voice, Jones places her phrases slyly behind the beat, pausing to land each note just in time. PARELESJobi Riccio, ‘For Me It’s You’“Everyone has a person they sing their love songs to,” Jobi Riccio sings in “For Me It’s You,” a slow, terse, old-fashioned country waltz complete with a plaintive fiddle. It just gets torchier as that love goes unrequited. PARELESSamia, ‘Breathing Song’Deep trauma courses through Samia’s “Breathing Song,” from her new EP, “Honey.” Over stark, sustained keyboard chords, she sings “Straight to the ER/While I bled on your car”; the driver asks, “It wasn’t mine, right?” The chorus, sharpened by Auto-Tune, is “No, no, no” — it’s simultaneously denial, reassurance and proof of life. PARELES 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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      75 Years Ago, Latin Jazz Was Born. Its Offspring Are Going Strong.

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      A concert at Town Hall this week that will be led by Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra celebrates the legacies of Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo and Chico O’Farrill.In the fall of 1947, Dizzy Gillespie called on his friend, the trumpeter-arranger Mario Bauzá, in search of a conga player for an upcoming Carnegie Hall concert where he planned to debut songs exploring the connection between Afro-Cuban music and jazz. Bauzá suggested Chano Pozo, a swaggering master of Yoruba rhythms, who had just arrived from Cuba.It was a wildly fortuitous introduction: Dizzy and Chano’s team-up would mark a watershed moment in jazz history, what many refer to the birth of Latin jazz. Although neither musician could communicate in the other’s language, they shared a cultural connection, and suddenly bebop, Gillespie’s rebellious jazz experiment, became Cubop.Arturo O’Farrill, leader of the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, which he formed in 2001 for Jazz at Lincoln Center, has long contemplated that meeting. It was a collaboration that united African diasporas, north and south, reconstructing ties broken by the slave trade. “There’s a saying, I’m sure you’ve heard it,” he said in a recent video interview, “where Dizzy says, ‘I don’t speak Spanish and Chano doesn’t speak English, but we both speak African.’”This Saturday at Town Hall, O’Farrill will commemorate that moment, just over 75 years ago, when Dizzy and Chano bonded over their ancestral past and took the music into the future, as well as the role his father, Chico, played in that evolution. The concert, which pays tribute to “The Original Influencers,” celebrates a Town Hall show similar to the Carnegie performance that took place in December 1947, and will feature O’Farrill’s 18-piece orchestra, as well as special guests Pedrito Martínez on percussion, Jon Faddis on trumpet, Donald Harrison on saxophone, the singers Daymé Arocena and Melvis Santa, and O’Farrill’s two sons, Adam and Zack, on trumpet and drums.The Cuban-born Chico O’Farrill was the son of Irish and German immigrants to the island and was so taken with the fusions previously explored by Bauzá as musical director of Machito and His Afro-Cubans, that he convinced the impresario Norman Granz to commission and record his “Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite,” featuring Charlie Parker, Buddy Rich and Flip Phillips, in 1950.“My father was fully European, living in an African country — because, you know, Cuba’s basically an African country — and also falling in love with jazz,” O’Farrill said. “He was the perfect person to be in all three worlds.”The elder O’Farrill joined up with Gillespie in the following years and became one of Latin jazz’s chief arrangers and orchestra leaders. Gillespie became Faddis’s mentor soon after he arrived in New York as an 18-year-old aspiring trumpeter. On Saturday, he will perform the “Manteca Suite,” Chico’s elaborate rearrangement of the Gillespie-Pozo classic written with Gil Fuller, “Manteca.” Faddis’s close association with Gillespie made him privy to Chico’s relationship with Pozo, who was tragically murdered in Harlem in 1948.“Mario Bauzá would take Dizzy up to Spanish Harlem to hear bands like Alberto Socarrás’s, and sit in,” Faddis said in an interview. “The collaboration with Chano was really important — I know there are many things that Chano taught him and the musicians in his band.”Pozo clued in Gillespie’s band to the dense polyrhythmic patterns that permeate the Afro-Cuban music that he learned as a street drummer in the Black Cayo Hueso neighborhood of Havana. In his autobiography “To Be, or Not … to Bop,” Gillespie expressed a desire to recapture lost elements of African tradition, writing that he “always had that Latin feeling” but that his musical ancestors remained “monorhythmic,” because drums were not tolerated by U.S. slave masters, while the Afro-Cubans “remained polyrhythmic.”Gillespie and Pozo shared other cultural bonds, too. “I think when you hear Dizzy and Chano play the Afro Cuban Suite, you hear the pattern of call and response,” Faddis added. “One of the main connectors between that Afro-Cuban lineage and American jazz is what you hear in the work songs, the prison songs and even the spirituals — the call and response in the church.”Gillespie and Pozo’s reunion of different diasporic African traditions through jazz had many antecedents, particularly in New Orleans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when King Oliver and Lorenzo Tio visited Havana with a military band and absorbed Cuban influences. The ragtime pianist Jellyroll Morton famously referenced “tinges of Spanish” in his playing, and in New York, Bauzá had been steadily absorbing jazz techniques and sharing Cuban rhythmic tradition as musical director of the Chick Webb orchestra in the 1930s.Both Gillespie and Bauzá had yearned to escape the predictability of danceable Latin ballroom and big band music, and in 1947, just as Gillespie was perfecting his notion of bebop, Pozo’s intervention helped jazz became an international genre. It would put Gillespie on a path that defined the rest of his musical career. By 1988, Dizzy founded the United Nations Orchestra, which over the years featured Latin jazz stars like Paquito D’Rivera, Giovanni Hidalgo, Arturo Sandoval, David Sánchez and Miguel Zenón among many others.Pedrito Martínez, who will be performing two songs from his 2013 self-titled debut at the Town Hall concert, is evidence of Cubop’s internationalist legacy. He was inspired by Pozo, and even grew up in the same neighborhood in Havana. “I learned to play rumba in the street, like Chano did,” Martínez said in an interview. “He was someone from the marginal world who didn’t speak English, but he opened up doors for all of us.”Martínez had collaborated with Faddis in Steve Turre’s “Sanctified Shells” band, and had Faddis guest on his most recent album, “Acertijos.” He sees the connection between Afro-Cuban and jazz music as a kind of mystical fusion of spirit worlds. “I’ve seen a lot of Thelonious Monk videos, and he looked like a rumbero,” Martínez said, referring to the way Monk would sometimes perform a spinning dance that suggested Yoruban dance and spirit possession. “He stood up to dance and played the piano with one hand and then the other. Jazz has a very spiritual connection to Afro-Cuban music, because it’s a way of feeling, of giving reverence to the ancestors.”The rediscovery of common spiritual roots between African Americans and the Afro-Latin American diaspora is what keeps the Afro-Cuban jazz concept grounded and coherent. While there have been many debates about whether American jazz’s melodic and harmonic traditions and Afro-Caribbean rhythmic techniques dominate, it’s always been a back-and-forth conversation, an inter-hemispheric musical negotiation. It’s no surprise that Pérez Prado and Tito Puente’s mambo rose quickly in the wake of Gillespie and Pozo’s Cubop, and that it’s possible to hear Prado mambo elements in the early work of the Afro-futurist pioneer Sun Ra.What’s clear is that there’s no going back. “There are a lot of purists who want to keep jazz, jazz as jazz, they don’t want to mess with it,” O’Farrill said. “But I’ve been fighting this battle for 30 years, and I’m like, no, no, no. Jazz and Latin are the same trunk of the same tree. But it looks like we can never resolve this discussion. It can only go on and be explored to the end of time.”“Dizzy, Chano and Chico: The Original Influencers, 75 Years Later at Town Hall,” featuring Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, runs at Town Hall on Saturday at 8 p.m.; thetownhall.org. More

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      The Year of Bad Bunny

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicSaying that 2022 was the year of Bad Bunny somehow doesn’t quite do his success justice. His LP “Un Verano Sin Ti” was the most streamed album of the year, breaking several records along the way. He was the year’s top grossing touring act — including two sold-out shows at Yankee Stadium. “Un Verano Sin Ti” is the first release performed entirely in Spanish to be nominated for album of the year at the Grammys.The year was also the culmination of a creative arc that began with eccentric Latin trap, detoured through pop-punk and has now arrived at smooth, historically minded reggaeton maximalism, placing Bad Bunny at the center of Latin pop, or rather magnetically moving the center in his direction.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the historical Latin pop crossover that set the table for Bad Bunny’s success, the ways he’s embraced social and political causes in both direct and indirect fashion, and how his success has expanded the possibilities for Spanish-language musicians across genres and countries.Guests:Leila Cobo, chief content officer for Latin music at BillboardCarina del Valle Schorske, contributing writer at The New York Times MagazineConnect 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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      The Year Pop’s Men Dismantled Their Masculinity

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      In 2022, stars including Harry Styles, Jack Harlow and Bad Bunny offered liberated takes on gender, but also risked pandering. Are men OK?In April, during his headlining set at Coachella, the reigning pop prince Harry Styles invited a surprise guest, Shania Twain, to the stage to sing a provocatively chosen duet: “Man, I Feel Like a Woman.”Clad in a low-cut, silver sequined jumpsuit, Styles strutted, twirled and belted out the cheeky anthem’s lyrics. “This lady taught me how to sing,” he told the raucous crowd of over 100,000 when the song was over. “She also taught me that men are trash.”The performance was fun, headline-generating and relatively radical: It is difficult to imagine Styles’s generational predecessor, Justin Timberlake — or even Timberlake’s successor, Justin Bieber — playing so fast and loose with gender roles. That is partially because the Justins embraced hip-hop and R&B — genres where such experimentation is often less welcome — more directly than Styles ever has. But it’s also because the cultural forces that shape the norms and expectations of what a male pop star can and should be are evolving.While the year in music was dominated by a handful of female powerhouses (critically, by Beyoncé’s widely praised dance-floor odyssey “Renaissance” and commercially, by Taylor Swift’s moody synth-pop juggernaut “Midnights”), the top male pop stars — Styles, Bad Bunny and Jack Harlow — all found success while offering refreshingly subversive challenges to old-school masculinity.Styles and Harlow seem cannily aware of how to position themselves as heartthrobs in a cultural moment when being a man — especially one that scans straight and white — can seem like a minefield of potential missteps, offenses and overextended privilege. Bad Bunny, even more subversively, ripped up the English-language pop star’s rule book and offered a more expansive vision of gender and sexuality.Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican superstar whose summery smash “Un Verano Sin Ti” spent more weeks atop the Billboard chart than any other album this year, has gleefully rejected the confines of machismo. Instead, he has embraced gender-fluid fashion, called out male aggression in his songs and videos and even made out with one of his male backup dancers during a performance at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards — decisions that carry extra weight considering his aesthetic-hopping pop is rooted in reggaeton, a genre that has leaned on heteronormativity.Bad Bunny has gleefully rejected the confines of machismo.Isaac Esquivel/EPA, via ShutterstockStyles, too, has won fans and admirers by treating his gender presentation as something of a playground, whether that means wearing a dress on the cover of “Vogue,” refusing to label his sexuality or flipping the familiar script of the older male auteur/younger female muse in his much publicized relationship with his “Don’t Worry Darling” director Olivia Wilde, who is 10 years his senior. None of it has been bad for business: Styles’s “As It Was” was the year’s longest-reigning Billboard No. 1 and, globally, Spotify’s most-streamed song of 2022.But there’s also an increasingly fine line between allyship and pandering, one that fans aren’t shy about calling out online. Styles and Bad Bunny have been accused of the very contemporary crime of “queerbaiting,” or cultivating a faux mystique around one’s sexuality to appeal to an L.G.B.T.Q. fan base. To overemphasize straightness and alpha-male stereotypes, though, presents its own risks, especially in a post-MeToo moment. What’s a man to do?Harlow, the 24-year-old Kentucky-born rapper, spent 2022 trying to figure it out. A technically dexterous rapper with an easy charisma and a head of Shirley Temple ringlets, Harlow is known for making artistic choices that spotlight his skills and convey his seriousness as an MC. He’s also cultivated a persona as an irrepressible flirt with a particular attraction to Black women. He famously shot his shot with Saweetie on the BET Awards red carpet, repeatedly popped into Doja Cat’s Instagram live broadcasts and even parodied his reputation during a star-turning “Saturday Night Live” hosting gig, when he played himself in a skit that imagined him seducing Whoopi Goldberg on the set of “The View.”Harlow’s music, too, actively cultivates the female listener. As he explained in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, “I always think about if I was in the car and the girl I had a crush on was in the shotgun and I had to play the song, would I be proud to play the song?”Jack Harlow’s music focuses on a kind of glorification of the female listener.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesThroughout his second album, “Come Home the Kids Miss You,” Harlow paints himself as stylish and sensitive, a man who keeps his nails clean and discusses his romantic encounters in therapy. In the grand tradition of his elder Drake, Harlow often uses the pronoun “you” to directly and intimately address women in his songs. His biggest solo hit to date, “First Class,” which spent three weeks at No. 1 this spring, turned “Glamorous,” Fergie’s blingy 2007 hit about luxury and hard-earned success, into a chivalric invitation for a lady to come enjoy the good life on Harlow’s dime: “I could put you in first class,” he clarified.Stylistically, Harlow’s music is worlds away from Styles’s, but both share a kind of glorification of the female listener, a lyrical attentiveness to her pleasure and a subtle insistence that they are more caring partners than all those other men who, in Styles’s parlance (and on superhumanly empathetic ballads like “Boyfriends” and “Matilda”), are “trash.”In some sense, this is certainly progress. Consider that Timberlake’s early aughts success involved the excessive vilification of his ex Britney Spears, or that a performance that pantomimed a kind of hyper-heterosexual dominance over Janet Jackson had virtually no effect on his career, but nearly ended hers. Harlow’s collaboration with and public support for the gay pop star Lil Nas X and even his fawning over his female peers are worlds away from his predecessor Eminem, who negotiated his complex stance as a white man in a predominantly Black genre by punching down at women and queer people. Misogyny and homophobia aren’t exactly good for business anymore — and thank goodness.It’s hard to imagine these men making the same mistakes as their forebears, and overcorrection is in some sense welcome, given the alternative. (Bad Bunny, again, has taken even bolder risks, like vehemently criticizing the Puerto Rican government in response to island-wide blackouts.)But even responsibly wielded privilege is still, at the end of the day, privilege. And Styles’s and Harlow’s music often betrays that by its relative weightlessness, its sense of existence in a space free of any great existential cares. Styles’s songs in particular seem hollowed out of any introspection; most of the ones on “Harry’s House” pass by like cumulus clouds. The focus of Harlow’s music vacillates between girls and ego, with few gestures toward the riskier political statements he’s made on red carpets (decrying homophobia) and on social media (attending protests demanding justice for Breonna Taylor). That failure to see oneself as part of a larger problem is a symptom of privilege, too. Even if he’s wearing sequins, a man declaring that “men are trash” is just a very subtle way of saying “not all men.” What about the guy saying it?On “Part of the Band,” a moody, verbose single released this year by the British band the 1975, the frontman Matty Healy imagines overhearing a snippet of chitchat between two young women: “I like my men like I like my coffee/Full of soy milk and so sweet it won’t offend anybody.” The implication is that Healy is decidedly not one of those men, and it’s indeed hard to imagine a listener — particularly a non-male one — making it through all 11 tracks of the 1975’s soft-focused “Being Funny in a Foreign Language” without cringing at something Healy says. (Just one example: “I thought we were fighting, but it seems I was ‘gaslighting’ you.” Yeesh.)But in Healy’s musings, there’s something often lacking in Harlow’s or Styles’s music: a genuine sense of self-scrutiny, and an active internal monologue about what it means to be a man at this moment in the 21st century. Healy’s songs are, as the critic Ann Powers put it in an astute essay tracing the cultural lineage of “the dirtbag,” excavations of “the curses and blessings of his gendered existence.” Under his relentless microscope, straight(ish) white masculinity is, blessedly, freed from its status as the default human condition and instead becomes a curiosity to poke and prod at, exposing its internal contradictions and latent anxieties.“Am I ironically woke?” Healy wonders later in “Part of the Band.” “The butt of my joke? Or am I just some post-coke, average, skinny bloke calling his ego imagination?” Cringe if you want. He’s man enough to let the question hang there in the air. More