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      MTV Video Music Awards Recap: Taylor Swift, Doja Cat and More

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      Nicki Minaj hosted and helped close out a nearly four-hour show heavy on performances and reaction shots of Taylor Swift in the audience.The MTV Video Music Awards returned to the Prudential Center in Newark on Tuesday night, as Nicki Minaj hosted a nearly four-hour show that included the members of ’N Sync coming together to present a Moon Person trophy to Taylor Swift (who gushed directly to the boy band, “I had your dolls”) and Sean Combs receiving a global icon honor (and telling the crowd his career had humble beginnings, as a paperboy). The Brazilian pop star Anitta delivered one of the event’s most solid one-liners — “I want to thank myself because I worked so hard,” she said in an acceptance speech — which she also proved onstage, performing both a solo medley and a collaboration with the K-pop group Tomorrow X Together. At the end of the night, the following five moments stood out.Most Memorable Performance: Doja CatOne of pop-rap’s most unpredictable voices turned out the night’s most polished and high-concept performance, capturing the anxiety of return to office in a look perhaps best described as “business sexual” while surrounded by dancers doused in ghoulish red paint. The audience looked confused and a little terrified as Doja Cat glided around the stage nailing her marks, the calm in an increasingly hectic storm.Most Memorable Fake-Out: Olivia RodrigoOlivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire” video dramatizes an awards show performance gone wrong, and though it has 54 million YouTube views, none of those evidently came from V.M.A.s audience members like Selena Gomez, who looked stricken when Rodrigo partly recreated the clip Tuesday night. After the song’s first section, lights seemingly burst onstage and a curtain fell as a “stagehand” ushered the singer away — only to return seconds later grinning and performing another song from her new album, “Guts,” the bouncy “Get Him Back!”Most Memorable Return That (Likely) Didn’t Attract F.C.C. Attention: Cardi B and Megan Thee StallionCardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s first televised performance of their hit “WAP” came at the 2021 Grammys, and their salacious choreography caught the attention of over 1,000 viewers who complained to the Federal Communications Commission, Rolling Stone reported. The duo reunited last week with a fresh collaboration called “Bongos,” and played it relatively safer on the V.M.A.s stage. The censors caught most of the profanities and the audience camera caught one of the night’s many shots of Swift dancing along.Most Memorable 10-Minute Performance Involving Knives: ShakiraPerforming a mega medley to celebrate receiving the video vanguard award, the Colombian pop star didn’t appear to be doing much live singing, but her lengthy number included plenty of choreography, hair flipping, microphone stand tossing, guitar playing, a quick wardrobe adjustment, crowd surfing and a lift bringing her high above the crowd. But a truly eye-grabbing moment came halfway through, when she wielded two knives, dramatically running one across her torso before tossing them aside.Most Memorable Flashback to MTV’s Past: Hip-Hop Anniversary MedleyThe Grammys went big with a tribute to 50 years of hip-hop earlier this year, but MTV’s celebration of rap’s anniversary had some highlights, too: After Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh gave the crowd a lesson on the genre’s beginnings, Minaj emerged with “Itty Bitty Piggy,” one of her beloved early mixtape tracks, then reunited with her mentor Lil Wayne for “A Milli.” LL Cool J commanded the stage for two of his own songs, then went (shell) toe to toe with Run-DMC’s Darryl McDaniels on “Walk This Way.” (The performance mostly elided the 1990s, but Diddy’s eight-minute performance earlier in the night covered that era.) It was a reminder that MTV was once the home of “Yo! MTV Raps,” and used to spend a lot more time on music. More

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      The Rolling Stones Roar Back, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Allison Russell, Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion, Ashley McBryde 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.The Rolling Stones, ‘Angry’There’s no mistaking the time-tested Rolling Stones sound on “Angry,” the first single off “Hackney Diamonds,” the band’s first album of its own songs since 2005. The beat is blunt and brawny. The guitars riff and mesh, but also tangle and tease one another. And Mick Jagger unleashes full-throated indignation as he lets a lover — an angry one — know that they’re breaking up. He’s aggrieved, petulant, wounded and flippant, almost all at once. JON PARELESJoni Mitchell, ‘Like Veils Said Lorraine’This stunning, previously unreleased song from the forthcoming third installment of Joni Mitchell’s archive series (which will cover her early Asylum Records years, 1972 to 1975) begins with a quote about life from the titular character: “It’s veils you tear off one by one.” Another voice disagrees: “No, it’s walls we put up.” Accompanied by resonant, searching piano chords, Mitchell wrestles with these dueling perspectives and as ever, doesn’t settle on an easy compromise but finds the truth between extremes. Recorded as a demo sometime between Mitchell’s intimate 1971 masterpiece “Blue” and “For the Roses,” her labyrinthine 1972 meditation on the emptiness of fame, “Like Veils Said Lorraine” sounds like a bridge between those two eras of Mitchell’s rapidly developing artistry and serves as proof that her archives still contain untold riches. LINDSAY ZOLADZAllison Russell, ‘Eve Was Black’On her remarkable 2021 album, “Outside Child,” Allison Russell recalled childhood abuse and celebrated her survival. Her new one, “The Returner,” is just as strong, and it examines larger forces as well — most directly in “Eve Was Black,” which directly confronts racism and considers the African ancestors of all humans. “Do I remind you of what you lost/Do you hate or do you lust?” Russell sings. “Do you despise or do you yearn/To return, to return, to return back to the motherland?” What starts as a bluesy, folky, foot-stomping tune drifts toward jazz, then grows molten with rage as Russell sings about lynching. The track includes an epilogue; Russell, who grew up in Montreal, sings in French, over a banjo and fiddle, about a family uprooted from Africa to America. PARELESAshley McBryde, ‘Women Ain’t Whiskey’“You can’t just quit me/When you get lonely come pick me back up,” Ashley McBryde sings in “Women Ain’t Whiskey.” It’s a country-meets-U2 march that states the obvious; apparently it needs to be restated, loudly. At least it doesn’t have brand placements. PARELESGuppy, ‘Texting and Driving’J Lebow, of the Los Angeles band Guppy, talk-sings her way through the sinewy punk-pop of “Texting and Driving,” delivering lines like “Texting your dad a curated playlist/Texting God in my head — also known as praying” with sardonic glee. Produced by Sarah Tudzin (a.k.a. Illuminati Hotties), the track is laced with little sonic eruptions — bursts of dissonant guitar, out-of-nowhere backup vocals, outright screams — and there’s plenty of cowbell to kick it along. PARELESCardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion, ‘Bongos’The FCC’s least favorite duo, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, reunite on the unrelenting “Bongos,” their first collaboration since the 2020 succès de scandale “WAP.” Atop a clipped, appropriately percussive beat — bong, bong, bong — the two rappers trade boisterously braggadocious verses and winking, heavily stressed double entendre. “Bongos” feels more like a retread than a reinvention, though Megan — for once, more of a comic than Cardi — gets off a few hilariously memorable lines like “purse so big had to treat it like a person.” ZOLADZPeso Pluma, Jasiel Nuñez and Junior H, ‘Bipolar’Auto-Tune meets acoustic instruments in “Bipolar,” a very 21st-century regional Mexican collaboration by three of its stars: Peso Pluma, Jasiel Nuñez and Junior H. It’s an old-fashioned waltz about a newish situation: giving in to the temptation to check an ex’s social media, but then deciding “I’d rather make money than waste my time with mere stories.” PARELESResidente and Wos, ‘Problema Cabrón’The ever-provocative Puerto Rican rapper Residente harnesses an electric blues shuffle for “Problema Cabrón,” (“Problem Bastard”), a ferocious boast about being a perpetual troublemaker. “The day I die, you’re the ones who will be able to rest in peace,” he taunts in Spanish, over a track that keeps reconfiguring itself, from full band down to piano and finger snaps and back up. Like Residente’s other recent songs, the song arrives with a video; this one has him facing off with an authoritarian police force. The song itself is pure, apolitical insubordination. PARELESYussef Dayes featuring Shabaka Hutchings, ‘Raisins Under the Sun’The London-based drummer Yussef Dayes, the owner of one of the most distinctive backbeats in contemporary music — a taut but shrugging, hi-hat-heavy funk groove, lightly inflected with Afrobeat flavor but rooted in today — has spent years hanging out at the junction of jazz, hip-hop, garage and funk, awaiting his moment. Maybe it has arrived. His debut album, “Black Classical Music,” is both a sprawling declaration of his musical ambitions and a reminder that patience is his biggest virtue. Across 75 minutes, the focus is on catalyzing a vibe. On “Raisins Under the Sun,” he reunites with Shabaka Hutchings — they’ve known each other since childhood, and have collaborated intermittently — on a wafting, two-chord vamp, with Hutchings’s bass clarinet adding a misty layer but never forcing its way to the front. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOTirzah, ‘No Limit’“What’s your limit? What’s my limit?” repeats throughout “No Limit,” an evocatively low-fi track by the English songwriter and electronic producer Tirzah. That question runs alongside drum and piano loops, never to be fully answered; it’s a gateway to intimacy that recognizes all its dangers. PARELESMarika Hackman, ‘No Caffeine’In the verses, the English songwriter Marika Hackman dispenses random self-help advice: “Take a day off work, call your mum/Have a glass of wine, stay away from fun.” At first, there’s little more than a few piano notes chiming behind her. But as instruments assemble around her — double-time bass and drums, doleful strings — it’s clear her desperation is mounting, and the chorus is a reveal: “You got me good/And I feel so stupid.” PARELESLaufey, ‘California and Me’Is this the Samara Joy effect? If Joy’s best new artist win at the Grammys seemed like it could open the gates to a flood of young jazz singers who sound like they’ve leaped out of a reel-to-reel, then Laufey is at the crest of that wave. She’s a 24-year-old Chinese-Icelandic vocalist and multi-instrumentalist with a sepia croon and label support that’s helped her grab streaming listeners by the millions. Laufey’s tunes roll around in a plush, tear-stained bed, channeling the cool-jazz vocalists of the ’50s (think Chris Connor, but without the dangerous passion that haunts her music) by way of indie singers like Angel Olsen and Mitski at their most nostalgic. On “California and Me,” an original, she accepts heartbreak with an enthusiastic sigh, singing over London’s Philharmonia Orchestra: “Left me and the ocean for your old flame/Holding back my tears, I couldn’t make you stay.” RUSSONELLOJames Brandon Lewis, ‘Sparrow’James Brandon Lewis has a way of holding his tenor saxophone poised at the tipping point between a melody and a holler. That’s how Mahalia Jackson sang, too, when shaken by divine inspiration: moving from robust cascades of song to gravelly shouts. Lewis’s new album devoted to the singer, “For Mahalia, With Love,” turns his all-star Red Lily Quintet loose on nine gospel hymns. On its opening track, he combines the oft-covered “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” with an original, “Even the Sparrow.” Playing in unison with the cornetist Kirk Knuffke, Lewis keeps the focus on melodic clarity; it’s a moment of peace and meditation, before the album takes wing. RUSSONELLOVince Clarke, ‘The Lamentations of Jeremiah’Expect drones, not dance beats, from the new solo album by Vince Clarke, the synth-pop expert from Erasure and, before that, Depeche Mode and Yaz. In “Lamentations of Jeremiah,” an unswerving but subtly changing drone tone — with occasional distant-thunder eruptions — underlies the solo cello of the composer Reed Hays, which moves between moody, declarative melodic phrases and strenuous arpeggios, as if it’s wrestling with looming dread. PARELES More

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      Leny Andrade, ‘First Lady of Brazilian Jazz,’ Dies at 80

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      With her soulful, cigarette-tinged contralto and emotive “bossa-jazz” stylings, she mesmerized audiences and critics alike.Leny Andrade, the Brazilian singer who earned an international following with her soulful fusion of samba, bossa nova and American jazz and whom Tony Bennett once called the Ella Fitzgerald of Brazil, died on July 24 in Rio de Janeiro. She was 80.Her death, in a hospital, from pneumonia, was confirmed in a statement by a Rio retirement home for artists where she was living. She had also been treated for Lewy body dementia.Often referred to as “the first lady of Brazilian jazz,” Ms. Andrade (pronounced ahn-DRAH-jay) rose from the clubs of Rio, where she performed as a teenager, to forge a six-decade career, recording more than 35 albums as a pioneer of what she came to call bossa-jazz.In 2007, Ms. Andrade won a Latin Grammy Award for “Ao Vivo,” a live album with the celebrated Brazilian pianist César Camargo Mariano.“Leny is one of the greatest improvisers in the world,” Mr. Bennett, who died last month, once said. “I love the way she sings. She is an original.”Singing largely in Portuguese, Ms. Andrade brought a richness and emotional depth to icily cool bossa nova tracks, pulse-quickening sambas and soulful ballads, which she infused with a world-weary sultriness.In a review of her American debut in 1983 at the Blue Note jazz club in New York, John S. Wilson of The New York Times praised the emotive power she brought to “Cantador,” a ballad in the intense Edith Piaf tradition. “Miss Andrade sings it in a darker, softer voice than Piaf’s,” he wrote, “with a dramatic effect that comes through even to a listener who doesn’t understand Portuguese.”Ms. Andrade’s career took off in the United States in 1993 after she moved to New York, where she became a popular draw, performing at Birdland and other clubs, sometimes with Mr. Bennett and Liza Minnelli in the audience. The following year, she played at Lincoln Center as well as the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.Her voice, a deep, woody contralto with a seen-it-all air, carried a hint of a rasp from her long love affair with cigarettes. The overall effect could be mesmerizing.“To describe Ms. Andrade as both the Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald of bossa nova only goes so far in evoking a performer whose voice seems to contain the body and soul of Brazil,” Stephen Holden wrote when reviewing a 2008 New York club performance in The Times.“You may think you know ‘The Girl From Ipanema,’” he continued, but “you haven’t really absorbed it until you’ve heard Ms. Andrade sing it in Portuguese; disgorge might be a better word than sing, since, like everything else she performs, it seems to well up from the center of the earth.”For Ms. Andrade, singing brought sustenance. “My soul is everything I can offer the public,” she said in a 2013 interview with the Brazilian music site Esquina Musical. “When I open my mouth, any pain goes away. I sing without fear. My friends and enemies embrace me.”“When I sing,” she added, “I embark on a magic carpet out of here. I travel to Mars.”Leny de Andrade Lima was born in Rio on Jan. 26, 1943. Her father, Luiz de Oliveira Lima, and mother, Ruth Couto de Andrade, divorced when Leny was young. She grew up in Méier, a neighborhood in the city’s North Zone, a hotbed of samba.Mr. Andrade’s debut album, from 1961, drew from a moody samba sound of an earlier era. RCA VictorAt the urging of her mother, Ms. Andrade studied classical piano and singing starting at age 6. She earned a scholarship to the Brazilian Conservatory of Music. Beethoven and Brahms, however, were not her destiny.She became entranced with bossa nova (“new wave” in Portuguese), which fused traditional Brazilian rhythms with American jazz, as it emerged from the beaches of Brazil in the late 1950s. She was also influenced by the samba stylings of the popular Brazilian singer Dolores Durán.“I showed my piano diploma to my mother,” she said in a 2013 interview on Brazilian television, and told her, “‘Forget about opera, classical music. I will sing popular music — because of Dolores Durán.’”Her professional career began at 15, performing at dances with the bandleader Perminio Goncalves, chaperoned by her stepfather, Gustavo Paulo da Silva, since she was still a minor.She later sang with the Sérgio Mendes Trio, a jazz combo, before Mr. Mendes took his detour to international pop stardom with his band Brasil 66. “He said he hated samba; he didn’t play it,” Ms. Andrade told Esquina Musical. “And I said the same about jazz. But we ended up giving in and mixing the two.”She came to embrace jazz and its improvisational wordless singing style known as scat. (In his 1983 Times review, Mr. Wilson praised her scatting “agility that approaches Ella Fitzgerald.”)In 1961, Ms. Andrade released her first album, “A Sensação,” for RCA, moodily drawing from the samba of an earlier era. She hit her stride two years later, fusing bossa nova with traditional jazz on “A Arte Maior de Leny Andrade,” on Polydor.She was married briefly when she was younger and never had children. Information about survivors was not immediately available.As a jazz singer, Ms. Andrade never enjoyed roaring commercial success, but that fact did not disturb her. “I don’t make music for the masses,” she told Esquina Musical. “They don’t have the ability to understand my work. Bad stuff is not in my repertoire.”Flávia Milhorance contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro More

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      Mitski’s Beautifully Moody Meditation, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Jorja Smith, Towa Bird, Wilco 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.Mitski, ‘Bug Like an Angel’Mitski has a gift for singing serenely about troubled thoughts and finding large implications in small images. That’s what she does in “Bug Like an Angel,” a song from her next album, “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We,” due Sept. 15. That bug is stuck to the bottom of a glass — which makes her reflect, in turn, on drinking and a relationship gone stale. The song is subdued and moody, mostly just Mitski and four guitar chords. But when she gets to a life lesson, suddenly a choir appears, as if there’s a chance of redemption after all. JON PARELESTowa Bird, ‘This Isn’t Me’The singer, songwriter and guitarist Towa Bird evokes feelings of social alienation on “This Isn’t Me,” a single from her forthcoming debut album. Out of place at the sort of gathering where there’s “a special spoon for caviar,” she sings in a lilting melody, “Sycophants and luxury, everyone’s a somebody, and I wish you were here with me.” Her vocal delivery is breathy and muted, but beneath that, her nimble guitar playing expresses her inner rage. LINDSAY ZOLADZJorja Smith, ‘Go Go Go’“Go Go Go” isn’t a cheer — it’s a command, as an increasingly fed-up Jorja Smith decides, “I don’t know you that well/And I’m not trying to get to know you,” soon adding, “You gotta go.” Her voice ricochets off a backbeat that’s both pushy and lean, defined by a bare-bones, Police-like trio of drums, rhythm guitar and occasional bass, for a jumping, unapologetic heave-ho. PARELESPost Malone, ‘Joy’Post Malone — despite his face tattoos — has emerged as an old-fashioned rock songwriter, reaching for hooks. He’s also deeply committed to self-pity. “The harder I try/The more I become miserable/The higher I fly, the lower I go,” he sings in the ironically titled “Joy,” a bonus track added to his latest album, “Austin.” The beat pushes ahead, with a bass line that pulses like a 1980s Cure track, but Post Malone stays proudly mired. A choir arrives at the end to savor the word “miserable.” PARELESWilco, ‘Evicted’“Am I ever gonna see you again?” Jeff Tweedy wonders in “Evicted,” a low-key preview of Wilco’s album due Sept. 29, “Cousin.” Apparently not: “I’m evicted from your heart/I deserve it,” he confesses. With a new producer, Cate Le Bon, what starts as basic Wilco country-rock — steady-chugging piano, strummed acoustic guitar — gathers a shimmery psychedelic aura while the singer’s despair deepens. PARELESHalle, ‘Angel’Halle Bailey — half of the sister duo Chloe x Halle — contrasts celestial perfection with earthly travail in “Angel,” a somber but determined self-affirmation that fuses the church and R&B. “Won’t let the troubles of the world come weigh me down,” she vows. When she sings, “Some might hate and they wait on your fall/They don’t know there’s a grace for it all,” it could well be her dignified response to the racist backlash she received for starring as Ariel in the live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid.” Quasi-classical piano arpeggios roll through the song, and Halle’s tremulous voice leaps up to high soprano notes as she declares herself to be an angel, “perfectly a masterpiece” even with flaws and scars. PARELESNite Bjuti, ‘Singing Bones’Spirit, conjure, necromancy and memory seem to be some of the grounding ideas behind “Nite Bjuti,” the eponymous debut album from a new collective trio (pronounced “Night Beauty”) featuring the vocalist Candice Hoyes, the turntablist and percussionist Val Jeanty and the bassist Mimi Jones. They improvised all 11 tracks in the studio; by the last one, “Singing Bones,” Hoyes is inviting the dead to rise. Over a spare, electronic, six-beat rhythm from Jeanty and a plump, syncopated pattern from Jones’s electric bass, Hoyes almost whispers, then croons: “Rise up, singing bones/Shake yourself together.” Then the song is over, almost before it began. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLODamon Locks & Rob Mazurek, ‘Yes!’“New Future City Radio,” the first duo album from two longtime collaborators, the multidisciplinary artist Damon Locks and the trumpeter Rob Mazurek, was imagined as a pirate radio broadcast from the future. Or maybe from an alternate version of now, where a group of everyday anarchists might still have a fighting chance at repossessing a stray radio frequency. The music is about perception, not optimism. On “Yes!,” a slyly swinging drum loop clangs along beneath a cropped synth sample, until the music cuts out momentarily and Locks enunciates: “They got you where they want you: nowhere/Shrouded in confusion, grasping at straws.” The beat reappears. “When you’re living like this, you can’t envision/Blind to possibility, this is where the plan kicks in.” This album is supposed to make you long for another world, but like a good radio broadcast it also works well as background or ambience — putting questions in your head that you can’t articulate, without elbowing everything else out of your brain. RUSSONELLOKany García and Carin Leon, ‘Te Lo Agradezco’The Puerto Rican singer and songwriter Kany García has lately been dabbling in regional Mexican music; she had a hit 2022 duet, “El Siguiente,” with the Mexican singer Christian Nodal. Now she has another one: “Te Lo Agradezco” (“I Appreciate It”) with Carin Leon, a Mexican singer and songwriter who leans into the drama with tremolos and breaking notes. The song is a furious exchange of accusations, though they are sometimes shared in close harmony; apparently there were lies and betrayal on both sides. The arrangement stays elegant — with a sousaphone bass line, mariachi horns, a guitar obbligato and a hovering pedal steel guitar — while the singers battle. PARELESUsher, Summer Walker and 21 Savage, ‘Good Good’The world is full of scorched-earth breakup songs, but on “Good Good,” Usher, Summer Walker and 21 Savage team up for something considerably rarer: a song about staying on decent terms with an ex. “We ain’t good-good, but we still good,” Usher sings benevolently on the hook, while Walker echoes the sentiment, adding, “We’re happier apart than locked in.” But it’s 21 Savage who makes perhaps the most generous offer: “If you wanna open up a new salon,” he raps, “I’d still help pay for the wigs.” ZOLADZJonathan Suazo, ‘Don’t Take Kindly’Everything on the saxophonist and composer Jonathan Suazo’s new LP, “Ricano” — which finds him mining the intersections between his Puerto Rican and Dominican bloodlines — seems to be spilling energy out the top. This is richly built, effusively played Latin jazz, written from the heart and packed with complexity, always seeking the next level of altitude. On “Don’t Take Kindly,” as Tanicha López sings in billowy open vowel sounds and long, held tones, the ensemble’s three percussionists play around with a rhythm based in Puerto Rican bomba, while Suazo’s alto saxophone douses them in minor blues. RUSSONELLOKnoel Scott featuring Marshall Allen, ‘Les Funambules’The swing is righteously loose and steamy on “Les Funambules,” from “Celestial,” the debut studio album from Knoel Scott, a longtime saxophonist and flutist with the Sun Ra Arkestra. On “Celestial,” Scott’s acoustic quartet is augmented by a special guest: the explosive alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, 99, who has led the Arkestra since Ra’s death. “Les Funambules” means “the tightrope walkers,” but nobody walks a tightrope like this: going every direction at once, limbs kicking out. But the title fits. As Scott and Allen’s saxes trill in wild harmony, you can feel a sense of balance in motion, of poise and danger and control. RUSSONELLO More

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      A Thrilling, Rediscovered Nina Simone Set, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Snoh Aalegra, DeYarmond Edison, Explosions in the Sky 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.Nina Simone, ‘Mississippi Goddam’Just a week after performing at the historically Black Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., supporting James Meredith’s March Against Fear, Nina Simone was on fire as she strode onstage to play for a very different audience at the Newport Jazz Festival on July 2, 1966. Her interactions with the bourgeois New Englanders at Newport were hardly warm: In the middle of an acid-rinsed version of “Blues for Mama,” she dismisses them — “I guess you ain’t ready for that” — and later she hushes them: “Shut up, shut up.” But she pours every ounce of vitriol she’s got into the performance, especially on “Mississippi Goddam.” She’d first released the song in 1964, and two years later it felt as topical as ever. Meredith had just been shot while marching across Mississippi, and unrest was overtaking redlined Black neighborhoods across the country. At Newport, she amends one of the verses to address the oppression of Los Angeles’s Black community: “Alabama’s got me so upset/And Watts has made me lose my rest/Everybody knows about Mississippi, goddamn!” The entire Newport performance is now available for the first time as an album titled “You’ve Got to Learn.” It’s spellbinding, heartbreaking stuff, reminding us just how much Simone would still be lamenting today. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOSnoh Aalegra, ‘Be My Summer’Snoh Aalegra sings about not being able to let go in the forlorn, slowly undulating “Be My Summer.” She confesses, “I can’t change how I feel/Tried moving on but I’m right here where we left off.” The song arrives with a tangle of voices — some harmonizing, a few straying — and they return in choruses that are never quite unanimous, hinting at misgivings behind her pleas to “protect me from the rain.” JON PARELESAma Lou, ‘Silence’“Bring me silence till you start hearing sounds,” the English R&B songwriter Ama Lou instructs in a song that veers between sorrow and spite. The production isn’t silent but it feels sparse and hollow. Her vocals pour out over two chords implied by sustained bass notes and a hollow, stop-start drumbeat. With bursts of vocal melody that hint at prime Janet Jackson, Ama Lou mixes accusations and regrets, making it’s clear that she wasn’t the betrayer. “I believe I was convinced that you were actually all right,” she sings, quivering with disbelief. PARELESBlur, ‘The Ballad’“I just looked into my life and all I saw was that you’re not coming back,” an exquisitely mopey Damon Albarn sings at the beginning of “The Ballad,” a clear highlight from Blur’s new album, “The Ballad of Darren.” Lush backing vocals from the guitarist Graham Coxon and punchy percussion from the drummer Dave Rowntree provide a buoyancy, and layers of sonic details give “The Ballad” a kind of dreamy, weightless atmosphere. LINDSAY ZOLADZbeabadoobee, ‘The Way Things Go’The Filipino-English songwriter beabadoobee keeps a light touch as she whisper-sings about crumbling relationships like the one in “The Way Things Go.” Bouncy, folky guitar picking accompanies her as she claims the romance is only “a distant memory I used to know.” But later she gets down to accusations — “Didn’t think you’d ever stoop so low” — while a faraway orchestra with scurrying flutes floats in around her, a fantasy backdrop for her pointed nonchalance. PARELESDeYarmond Edison, ‘Epoch’Before Bon Iver, Justin Vernon was a member of DeYarmond Edison, which also included Brad Cook, Phil Cook and Joe Westerlund, who would form the band Megafaun. “Epoch,” recorded in 2005 and 2006, is the title track of a boxed set due in August and a harbinger of Bon Iver. It’s a resigned, measured ballad, with cryptic lyrics contemplating mortality and technology: “Out with the new in with the old/The wavelength rests at its node.” And behind the stately melody, the folky acoustic instruments that open the song — a banjo, a tambourine — face surreal echoes and incursions of noise. PARELESThe Mountain Goats, ‘Clean Slate’In 2002, the Mountain Goats — then the solo project of John Darnielle — released one of the most beloved albums in its vast catalog, “All Hail West Texas,” a collection of wrenching character studies bleated into a boombox accompanied by just an urgently played acoustic guitar. More than two decades later, and now with a full band behind him, Darnielle will revisit those same characters on the forthcoming album “Jenny from Thebes.” The first single, the lively “Clean Slate,” suggests that he won’t be returning to the previous album’s lo-fi sound; the new track has a rock operatic grandeur and a ’70s AM radio brightness. The lyrics are full of closely observed desperation and stubborn glimmers of hope — which is to say they’re classic Darnielle. “It’s never light outside yet when they climb into the van,” he sings. “Remember at your peril, forget the ones you can.” ZOLADZGrupo Frontera and Ke Personajes, ‘Ojitos Rojos’There are worse misfortunes than having no space left on a cellphone because it’s filled with photos of an ex. But that’s the situation in “Ojitos Rojos” (“Little Red Eyes”), the latest collaboration by the well-connected Mexican American band Grupo Frontera, from Texas — this time with another cumbia band, Ke Personajes from Argentina. Over hooting accordion and a clip-clop cumbia beat, the singers trade plaints about maxed-out memory capacity and lingering, near-stalker-ish devotion: “Although you tell me no and deceive yourself with another baby/I know I’m the love of your life,” sings Emanuel Noir of Ke Personajes. Is it heartache, or would cloud storage help? PARELESTravis Scott, Bad Bunny, the Weeknd, ‘K-Pop’One beat, three big names and an SEO-optimized title are the makings of “K-Pop,” a calculated round of boasting and come-ons from Travis Scott, Bad Bunny and the Weeknd. The track, produced by behind-the-scenes hitmakers — Bynx, Boi-1da, Illangelo and Jahaan Sweet — hints at crisp Nigerian Afrobeats, and it spurs three distinct top-line strategies. Travis Scott is quick, percussive and melodically narrow; Big Bunny leaps and groans; the Weeknd is sustained, moody and on brand, crooning “Mix the drugs with the pain” and promising vigorous, alienated sex. As in K-pop, hooks are flaunted, then tossed aside when a new one arrives. PARELESExplosions in the Sky, ‘Ten Billion People’The Texas band Explosions in the Sky has been playing instrumental rock — “post-rock” — since the late 1990s, relying on patterns, textures and dynamics to make up for the absence of lyrics. “Ten Billion People” is one of its perfectly paced wordless narratives: clockwork and skeletal to start, swelling with keyboards and guitars, seesawing with stereo dueling drum kits, pausing the beat and then rebuilding toward something more majestic and reassuring. It’s both minimalist and dramatic. PARELES More

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      João Donato, Innovative Brazilian Musician, Is Dead at 88

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      A prolific pianist, composer and arranger who began recording in the 1950s, he was a pioneer of bossa nova but didn’t confine himself to any genre.João Donato, a Brazilian composer, musician and producer who was a pioneer of bossa nova and who went on to cross-pollinate music across the Americas, died on Monday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 88.His death, in a hospital, was announced on his Instagram page. Brazilian news media reported that the cause was pneumonia.Mr. Donato was in the coterie of Rio de Janeiro musicians — among them Antonio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto and the guitarist Luiz Bonfá — who developed the subtle swing and harmonic sophistication of bossa nova in the mid-1950s.But Mr. Donato didn’t confine himself to any genre. In a recording career that extended from the 1950s into the current decade, he released some three dozen albums as a leader and collaborated with a wide range of artists on many more. Although he was best known as a keyboardist, he was also a singer, accordionist and trombonist.As a pianist, Mr. Donato was known for his blend of a frisky, restlessly syncopated, harmonically intricate left hand with relaxed, sure-footed right-hand melodies. As a composer, producer and arranger, he constantly — and playfully — fused and stretched idioms and production styles. He once said he had a “sweet tooth for funky ideas.”Mr. Donato played MPB (as Brazilian popular music is widely known; the letters stand for “música popular brasileira”), jazz, funk, salsa, American pop and pan-American hybrids that were entirely his own. He worked with generations of Brazilian musicians, including the singer and movie star Carmen Miranda; the singers Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento and Marisa Monte; and the rapper Marcelo D2.He also recorded with Eddie Palmieri, Michael Franks, Mongo Santamaría and Ali Shaheed Muhammad from A Tribe Called Quest. Throughout his life, he sought new grooves.The president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said on Twitter: “João Donato saw music in everything. He innovated, he passed through samba, bossa nova, jazz, forró, and in the mixture of rhythm built something unique. He kept creating and innovating until the end.”Mr. Donato’s debut album, released in 1956, was produced by Antonio Carlos Jobim, another innovator of bossa nova.João Donato de Oliveira Neto was born on Aug. 17, 1934, in Rio Branco, the capital of the state of Acre. He began playing accordion and writing songs as a child. In 1945, he moved with his family to Rio de Janeiro, where he began performing professionally in his teens.Mr. Donato began leading his own groups in the early 1950s while also working as a sideman. He played accordion on Luiz Bonfá’s first album, released in 1955, as part of a studio band that also included Antonio Carlos Jobim. Mr. Jobim produced Mr. Donato’s debut album, “Chá Dançante” (1956), and Mr. Donato wrote songs with João Gilberto, including “Minha Saudade,” which became a Brazilian standard.But by the end of the 1950s, Mr. Donato’s preferred style had grown so complex that audiences complained that they couldn’t dance to it, and he had difficulty finding work in Brazil. He accepted a job backing Carmen Miranda at a Lake Tahoe resort, and relocated to the United States.As the 1960s began, he was welcomed by Latin and jazz musicians. He recorded with Cal Tjader, Astrud Gilberto (who died in June), Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaría and Eddie Palmieri. (He played trombone in Mr. Palmieri’s La Perfecta, a brassy salsa band Mr. Palmieri called a “trombanga.”)The vibraphonist Dave Pike recorded an entire album of Mr. Donato’s compositions, “Bossa Nova Carnival,” in 1962, and the saxophonist Bud Shank put Mr. Donato in charge of his 1965 album, “Bud Shank & His Brazilian Friends.” “This is João Donato’s baby,” Mr. Shank wrote in the liner notes. “I’ve turned all the problems over to him and I just relax and play.”On his own albums for U.S. labels, Mr. Donato drew on jazz and Caribbean influences as well as Brazilian ones. His pivotal 1970 album, “A Bad Donato,” was a radical turn toward funk, merging Brazilian-rooted melodies and rhythms with electric keyboards and wah-wah guitars. The keyboardist and arranger Eumir Deodato, who worked with Mr. Donato on that album, went on to have a worldwide Brazilian funk hit with his version of “Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001).”Mr. Donato’s album “A Bad Donato,” released in 1970, merged Brazilian-rooted melodies and rhythms with electric keyboards and wah-wah guitars. Mr. Donato returned to Brazil in 1973. There, a friend persuaded him to record songs with lyrics rather than solely instrumentals, including his own modest but earnest vocals. His tuneful, easygoing 1973 album, “Quem É Quem,” was not an immediate hit, but it has been widely praised over the years; in 2007, Brazilian Rolling Stone placed it among the 100 greatest Brazilian albums.Mr. Donato’s new lyricists included two of the leading figures in the determinedly eclectic Brazilian cultural movement known as tropicália: Caetano Veloso, who put Portuguese lyrics to “O Sapo” (“The Frog”) to turn it into “A Rã,” and Gilberto Gil, who supplied lyrics for many of the songs on Mr. Donato’s 1975 album, “Lugar Comum.” Mr. Donato also wrote songs with lyrics by his younger brother, Lysias Ênio Oliveira.For the next two decades, Mr. Donato recorded almost entirely as a sideman. The singer Gal Costa recorded “A Rã” for her 1974 album, “Cantar,” and hired Mr. Donato as an arranger and bandleader for that album and her subsequent tour.Mr. Donato also recorded extensively with important Brazilian musicians like Jorge Ben, João Bosco, Chico Buarque and Martinho da Vila. He continued to perform his own music and released a live album, “Leilíadas,” in 1986. But he didn’t return to making his own studio albums until “Coisas Tao Simples” (“Such Simple Things”), released in 1994, even as he continued to do session work with songwriters including Bebel Gilberto and Marisa Monte.The albums Mr. Donato made after resuming his solo career were unpredictable and diverse. Some returned to his bossa nova-jazz fusions; some featured singers, including Wanda Sá, Paula Morelenbaum, Maria Tita and Joyce. Others had titles reflecting Mr. Donato’s fondness for musical hybrids, like “Bluchanga” (2017) and “Sambolero” (2010), which won a Latin Grammy Award for best Latin jazz album. He also received a Latin Grammy for lifetime achievement in 2010.In 2017, Mr. Donato made an album of synthesizer-centered funk, “Sintetizamor,” with his son, João Donato, known professionally as Donatinho, who survives him. Other survivors include his wife, Ivone Belém, and his daughters, Jodel and Joana Donato. He lived in Rio de Janeiro.In 2021, Mr. Donato collaborated with Jazz Is Dead, the Los Angeles-based project of Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge, on the album “Jazz Is Dead 7.” In 2022 he released “Serotonina,” an easygoing pop-jazz album featuring his electric piano and clavinet.On Twitter, Mr. Veloso summed up Mr. Donato’s music admiringly. It was, he wrote, “the highest achievement of extreme complexity in extreme simplicity.”Ana Ionova More

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      Billie Eilish’s ‘Barbie’ Ballad, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Troye Sivan, Jamila Woods, C. Tangana 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.Billie Eilish, ‘What Was I Made For?’Billie Eilish draws a connection between the public’s consumption of pop stars and plastic dolls on “What Was I Made For?,” a sparse, forlorn piano ballad from the “Barbie” soundtrack: “Looked so alive, turns out I’m not real,” she sings in a quivering whisper. “Just something you paid for.” The song hews closer to the more traditional, crooner-inspired fare on Eilish’s album “Happier Than Ever” than to the rest of “Barbie the Album,” which features upbeat tunes from Dua Lipa and Charli XCX. Still, Eilish knows how to tease out the pathos and a subtle sense of macabre from a particular kind of feminine malaise. “I’m used to float, now I just fall down,” she sings, making life in plastic sound less than fantastic. LINDSAY ZOLADZMargaret Glaspy, ‘Memories’Margaret Glaspy sings as if every word is a struggle in “Memories,” a song of sheer grief and loss: “I’m lonesome without you/but I’m a wreck thinking about you.” Her voice arrives behind the beat and then leaps onto the note; the vocal quivers, cracks and sometimes breaks, conjuring emotions that are still raw. JON PARELESJamila Woods featuring duendita, ‘Tiny Garden’Jamila Woods sings about incremental, ordinary but genuine feelings of love in “Tiny Garden”: “It’s not gonna be a big production/It’s not butterflies and fireworks,” she sings. “It’s gonna be a tiny garden/But I feed it every day.” As she describes a real but undemonstrative connection and the testing phase of a romance — “You want to be sure that I want you/Not just someone fun to do” — the track pulses with keyboard chords and rises with gospelly backup vocals, promising that there’s a true spiritual link. The artist duendita joins her near the end, more than willing to “watch all the purpose we place multiply slowly over time.” PARELESTroye Sivan, ‘Rush’Troye Sivan — the Australian pop musician, ex-YouTuber and rare musician who actually proved to be a watchable screen presence on “The Idol” (ahem!) — returns triumphantly with “Rush,” a sweaty, kinetic, gloriously hedonistic summer dance-floor anthem with a lightly NSFW video to match. Sivan’s breathy vocals dance atop an insistent beat and house-inspired piano riff, while a chorus of deep male voices chant the song’s infectious hook: “I feel the rush, addicted to your touch.” At last, Xander is free! ZOLADZSid Sriram, ‘The Hard Way’Born in India, Sid Sriham grew up in California, studying Carnatic (South Indian) music with his parents while soaking up American R&B and jazz. He built a career in India, singing Bollywood hits along with Carnatic ragas. For his American debut album, “Sidharth,” due Aug. 25, Sriham veered toward the experimental, working with the producer Ryan Olson (from Poliça) and musicians including Justin Vernon (Bon Iver). “The Hard Way” is a lovelorn ballad — “I would do anything, anything, anything to make you smile,” he insists — that’s chopped up and placed within a jittery electronic exoskeleton: racing double-time beats, pitch-shifted vocals, bursts of multitracked harmony. It’s bold; he could easily have chosen a more commercial, less thorny approach. PARELESYard Act, ‘The Trench Coat Museum’It is a law of nature that there is never too much cowbell. Yard Act, the post-punk band that could almost be LCD Soundsystem with a British accent and a social-media update, has re-emerged after its debut album. That means post-punk nostalgia folded in on itself like origami. “The Trench Coat Museum” imagines that there might be such an institution — celebrating a garment that’s assertive, concealing, protective, too long and too evocative — in a spoke-sung eight-minute track that easily gives way to its early 1980s groove: beat, bass riff, turntable scratching, clawing rhythm guitar, synthesizers and Latin percussion that definitely includes cowbell. The open secret of post-punk is that no matter how cynical the vocal gets, the song is always about the groove. PARELESC. Tangana, ‘Oliveira Dos Cen Anos’C. Tangana, the Spanish songwriter who started as a rapper and has delved ever deeper into the musical past, stays out of the foreground of his latest project, a hundredth-anniversary song for a soccer team from Galicia, Real Club Celta de Vigo; his father is from the town of Vigo. “Oliveira Dos Cen Anos” (“Hundred-Year-Old Olive Tree”) is rooted in Galician folk tradition but underpinned by electronics. C. Tangana is one of the songwriters and co-producers and the director of a sweeping, scenic video; Galician musicians sing lead vocals. An ardent choral anthem, with folk-song lyrics vowing love and loyalty, gives way to a traditionalist six-beat stomp, with a fierce cameo from the drumming, singing women of As Lagharteiras, along with a glimmering harp interlude and a stadium-sized singalong. “I will always be here,” men shout. “Celta forever! PARELESLoraine James featuring RiTchie, ‘Déjà Vu’“Not everything is quite audible,” the rapper and singer RiTchie calmly observes in “Déjà Vu.” The producer Loraine James constructed a perpetually disorienting mix of jolting electronic glitches, soothing piano and furtive snippets of percussion and synthesizer. RiTchie, from the group Injury Reserve, layers on multiple vocals, sung and spoken, and sounds completely unfazed by his surroundings: “You just gotta soak it all in,” he advises. PARELESOxlade featuring Dave, ‘Intoxycated’Oxlade, a singer and songwriter from Nigeria, and Dave, a rapper from England with Nigerian roots, commiserate about straying lovers and social media in “Intoxycated.” Oxlade decides “love is overrated” after seeing his girlfriend with another guy on Instagram; Dave reflects, “Love’s easy to find, harder to hold/Most stories end and start with a phone.” A minor-key Afrobeats groove with little guitar curlicues sums up the mood: sleek and resigned. PARELESJlin, ‘Fourth Perspective’The composer and producer Jlin — Jerrilynn Patton — built head-spinning electronic music out of percussive sounds, so it made perfect sense for her to write music for live acoustic performance by the ensemble Third Coast Percussion, which appeared on the group’s 2022 album, “Perspectives.” Now, Jlin has reworked those compositions for her own mini-album “Perspective,” due in September. Her new version of “Fourth Perspective” brings back electronic sounds, moving a ghostly, plinking, minimalistic waltz toward the ratchety, foreboding terrain of trap. PARELESmaJa, ‘A Vivir en Desacuerdo’MaJa — the Dominican songwriter Maria-José Gonell — sings about contentedly being a fish out of water in “A Vivir en Desacuerdo” (“To Live in Disagreement”). Her airy voice makes her seem tentative at first, but the production — by her songwriting collaborator Gian Rojas — radiates growing confidence, as a beat slips in and electronics sparkle ever more brightly. She’s not diffident; she’s above it all. PARELES More

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      Taylor Swift Revises a Lyric on ‘Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)’

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      Hear tracks by Prince, Rauw Alejandro, First Aid Kit 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.Taylor Swift, ‘Better Than Revenge (Taylor’s Version)’“Speak Now,” from 2010, was Taylor Swift’s third album, and it is now the third to be rereleased as a rerecorded “Taylor’s Version.” But all along, the album was a declaration of independence: It was the first she wrote entirely on her own, as a rebuttal to critics — perhaps like the one she cuts down on the sugary, spicy “Mean” — who suggested that Swift’s co-writers had a bigger hand in her previous successes than she’d let on. “Speak Now” remains one of Swift’s best and most sharply penned albums: The line “You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter,” from the chorus of the great opening track “Mine,” is often held up as an example of Swift’s lyricism at its most expertly concise.But “Speak Now” is an album of excesses, too; some of them are glorious — like the epic kiss-off “Dear John” or the romantic grandiosity of “Enchanted” — and some of them are the authentic artifacts of a 19-year-old’s somewhat myopic sensibility. “Mean,” which punches down, is guilty of that, and so is the acidic rocker “Better Than Revenge,” which has the most significantly revised lyrics in a “Taylor’s Version.” “He was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches,” Swift sings on this 2023 update, a clumsier and less direct lyric than the original: “She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress.” The change is unfortunate, and perhaps the beginning of a slippery slope of self-editing. The previous lyric was sanctimonious and nasty, yes, but it was also a historical document of Swift’s point of view at 19, and that of many young women who, being raised in a misogynistic society, are taught to blame the other girl before they learn how to curse “the patriarchy.” LINDSAY ZOLADZFirst Aid Kit, ‘Everybody’s Got to Learn’First Aid Kit is a duo of Swedish sisters, Johanna and Klara Söderberg, whose vocal harmonies are so perfect they can seem unreal. They have thoroughly studied 1970s Laurel Canyon folk-pop, with its gleaming, precisely blended electric and acoustic guitars. “Everybody’s Got to Learn,” from the expanded version of the 2022 album “Palomino,” sounds like parental advice from Fleetwood Mac. Over earnest folk-rock guitars and what grows into a hefty girl-group beat, the song reflects on the missteps that lead to maturity — “The blues and the bliss/you’ll hit and you’ll miss” — and promises, “You’re gonna see this through.” JON PARELESPrince, ‘All a Share Together Now’The latest find from Prince’s vault is “All a Share Together Now,” a song he recorded in 2006 but never released in any form. Prince sings about generational responsibilities — “the debt of the ones before us must be paid” — in a taut, bare-bones funk workout built around a jumpy bass riff. Live drums kick the beat around and a note-bending guitar teases out terse licks that are simultaneously lead and rhythm. It’s a homily disguised as a jam. PARELESRauw Alejandro, ‘Cuando Baje el Sol’Rauw Alejandro’s new album, “Playa Saturno,” eases back on the electronic experiments of his 2022 album, “Saturno,” in favor of earthy, party-ready reggaeton. But in “Cuando Baje el Sol” (“When the Sun Goes Down”), Alejandro and his fellow producers complicate the reggaeton thump with plenty of spatial and sonic mischief. Sampled and warped vocals, echoey synthesizers, turntable scratching and eruptive percussion all ricochet around his promises of hot times after sunset. PARELESKaisa’s Machine, ‘Gravity’Is “Taking Shape” — the latest album by the bassist Kaisa Mäensivu and her quintet, Kaisa’s Machine — a journal, or a workbook? Original tunes like “Shadow Mind” (a listless ballad) and “Eat Dessert First” (the LP’s eager, clattery final track) bespeak a confessional urge, but they can’t help spotlighting Mäensivu’s conservatory chops and wily compositional tactics. When wizardry takes the wheel — especially in jazz, and especially today — the voice underneath it can end up muffled in the trunk. Mäensivu deserves credit for seeking a healthy balance. “Gravity” is the album’s only track without a piano, slimming down this band of young aces to just bass, drums, guitar and vibraphone. Moving at a fast, nine-beat clip, Mäensivu’s bass line squares up firmly in a minor key, easing you into a space of feeling before the tune’s harmonic center starts shifting around. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOAnohni and the Johnsons, ‘Why Am I Alive Now?’The title is a plain-spoken survivor’s lament, ostensibly about living through a time of environmental collapse: “I don’t want to be witness,” Anohni wails, “seeing all of this duress, aching of our world.” But within the context of Anohni and the Johnsons’ piercing new album “My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross” — which features a photo of the band’s namesake, the gay activist Marsha P. Johnson, on its cover — that question is also haunted by the ghosts of the queer community. By the end of this loose, mournful soul song, Anohni finds a hopeful answer to that titular inquiry: She’s here to tell these stories, to draw attention to these causes, to sing this song. ZOLADZLittle Dragon featuring Damon Albarn, ‘Glow’Surrounded by swirling, twinkling, glimmering arpeggios, Little Dragon’s Yuki Nagano sings about sheer rapture: “Glowing in the dark to find streams of stars to taste.” Midway through, and inexplicably, Damon Albarn arrives from a different, bummed-out dimension, with apologies for being “Under the spell of the eyes that paralyze.” Having provided a little ballast, he vanishes in a download spiral and Nagano returns, still glowing and utterly unperturbed. PARELESFito Páez featuring Mon Laferte, ‘Sasha, Sissi y el Círculo de Baba’Fito Páez, Argentina’s most celebrated — and perpetually eccentric — rocker, decided to remake all the songs on his definitive 1992 album, “El Amor Después el Amor” (“Love After Love”), three decades later for the album “EADDA9223,” joined by duet partners including Elvis Costello, Nathy Peluso and Marisa Monte. “Sasha, Sissi y el Círculo de Baba” — a tale of passion and crime — used busy disco-funk guitar back in 1992. But the new version — trading vocals with the dynamic, torchy Chilean belter Mon Laferte — uncovers the retro bolero underlying the song. With reverb-laden guitar and a trumpet obbligato, Páez and Laferte revel in the drama together. PARELESTkay Maidza & Flume, ‘Silent Assassin’The Australian electronic music producer Flume usually juxtaposes bouncy, consonant chords with a little noise. But the track he brought to the Australian rapper Tkay Maidza is pure irritation: buzzes, distortion, wavery tones, a drone that bristles with dissonance. Maidza tops it with a speedy, shifty, percussive boast, racing through lines like “I’m a jigsaw, not a quick fix” and “I’m tactical, no attachments/I’m doing it for the passion.” From any angle, it’s combative. PARELESPJ Harvey, ‘Lwonesome Tonight’Polly Jean Harvey meticulously constructed a narrative, a sound and a language — based on the local dialect in Dorset, where she grew up — for “I Inside the Old World Dying,” her first album since 2016. The music is folky but fringed with electronics; her vocals are high and eerie, nearly disembodied. In “Lwonesome Tonight,” she sings about encountering a mystically charismatic figure: “Are you Elvis? Are you God?/Jesus sent you, win my trust,” she sings, and at the end she’s left wondering: “My love, will you come back again?” PARELESBrian Blade & the Fellowship Band, ‘God Be With You’Over the past quarter-century, Brian Blade’s Fellowship has come to feel more like a brotherhood than an ensemble, accruing a repertoire of original music that will stand the test of time along with an unmistakable sound: a mix of country, jazz and gospel that exudes a feeling of choral warmth, despite not using any vocals. But beyond that, they’ve stood up against (and basically outlived) a few insidious trends in jazz: When so many fine improvisers seemed be reconciling themselves to a future where the audience might become an afterthought, Blade and Fellowship had no time for that. The group’s fifth album, “Kings Highway,” begins with “Until We Meet Again,” a slowly seductive Blade original that makes reference to a William G. Tomer hymn; it ends with “God Be With You,” a short and elegant rendition of the Tomer piece itself. We can only hope that those valedictory titles aren’t telling us something about Fellowship’s future. RUSSONELLO More