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    Review: On ‘Virgin,’ Is Lorde Finally Done With the Spotlight?

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    Her fourth album, “Virgin,” is her most erratic and least convincing. But the pop skeptic has a new target: herself.“What Was That,” the lead single on Lorde’s fourth album, “Virgin,” found one of the most thoughtful and interrogative pop stars of the last decade futzing around with aftermarket Charli XCX-isms in an up-tempo thumper that indicated that, after years of reluctant anti-hits and even more reluctant hits, she finally might be caving in to eagerness.Thankfully, it’s followed by “Shapeshifter,” the album’s best song, which is far stranger, and far more successful. Over a brittle, skittish post-drum-and-bass beat, Lorde sings about sexual hunger, and what parts of yourself you have to release to embrace it. But in the chorus, the song morphs into a metaphor about fame and untouchability, and how unfulfilling those things ultimately are. “I’ve been up on the pedestal,” she sings icily, smearing out the words. “But tonight I just wanna fall.”Were this the through line of “Virgin,” it would make for a fascinating album. A dozen years after “Royals” turned Lorde from a New Zealand bedroom prodigy into a prophet, she’s angling for something of a restart. Sloughing away her celebrity and her preciousness is a bold choice. But “Virgin” is a far emptier album than that hefty premise would imply. It is neither lean-in gratuitous hitmaking, nor philosophical treatise on the lameness of success.It is, in the main, an album of fits and starts, notions that don’t pan out — her most piecemeal work to date. “Man of the Year” begins with a slow plucked guitar and Lorde singing about ego death, and then limply lingers. The singing on “Clearblue,” about unprotected sex, is so heavily digitized and filtered that it lacks any emotional oomph. “GRWM” revisits the theme of erotic liberty — “Soap, washing him off my chest / Keeping it light, not overthinking it” is her opener — but the lyrics about searching for oneself are at odds with the production, which feels like it’s drowning her. Jim-E Stack is a co-producer (with Lorde) on every track; together they’ve chosen erratic eccentricity, with moods that shift so suddenly there’s little to grab onto.Lorde sings conspiratorially, but often on this album, when you listen closely, there’s no secret wisdom being conveyed. The discussion of sexual awakening is promising, but it’s not explored at much depth. And throughout the album, and also its marketing, there’s muddled messaging about gender identity that scans as surface level.Perhaps Lorde is simply a victim of the tyranny of high expectations. For a decade now, she has stood for resistance within the machine — the machine she’d never quite chosen to be a part of, yet which accepted her anyway.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Erykah Badu’s Woozy Flirtation, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Kehlani, Benson Boone, Witch and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Erykah Badu and the Alchemist, ‘Next to You’Erykah Badu floats some companionable requests — “I wanna take walks with you,” “I wanna just talk with you,” “I can’t wait to see you after school” — in this leisurely, woozy, increasingly hypnotic track. The Alchemist’s production gathers countless layers of Badu’s vocals, with and without lyrics, but places most of them at a distance, for a happy tangle of inner voices.Brittany Davis, ‘Sun and Moon’Brittany Davis, a blind, nonbinary pianist, singer and songwriter based in Seattle, recorded their second album, “Black Thunder,” leading a classic jazz piano-bass-drums trio. “Sun and Moon” reaches back to Nina Simone for its husky, organic, bare-bones dynamics. This six-minute song rises ever so gradually, affirming everyday pleasures; “In the sun, my heart is full of joy and light,” Davis sings. “In the moonlight, I’m thankful for the blessings of the night.” The track has a jammy, improvisational feel, with serious purpose behind it.Billie Marten, ‘Clover’The English songwriter Billie Marten calmly savors tensions and contradictions in “Clover”: “You’re raining heavy, I’m almost dry / I’m only learning to love you right.” The tempo is relaxed; keyboards plink and twinkle through mild dissonances. It’s affectionate but watchful: “Don’t push me over, I’m half your size,” she admonishes.Kehlani, ‘Folded’Kehlani dramatizes the most reluctant of breakups in “Folded.” Yes, she’s waiting for her ex to “come pick up your clothes,” neatly folded. But this isn’t the door-closing scenario from Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable.” Kehlani urges, “Meet me at my door while it’s still open” and notes, “It’s getting cold out but it’s not frozen.” Descending chords, a string section, little guitar licks and Kehlani’s voice all convey a world of regret and a chance to reunite.Cari, ‘Luvhiii’Cari Stewart-Josephs, an English songwriter, surrenders to infatuation in “Luvhiii,” from an EP due July 10. “You hit me like a truck,” she sings, “And I never will get enough.” A loping bass line, jazzy piano chords and a faraway but insistent tambourine arrive, enfolding Cari’s multilayered vocals in a trip-hop haze as she succumbs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lorde’s Anthem of Transformation, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Miley Cyrus featuring Brittany Howard, Thom Yorke, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Lorde, ‘Man of the Year’“I’ve become someone else, someone more like myself,” Lorde sings, somewhere between pride and astonishment, in “Man of the Year,” the second single from her album due in June, “Virgin.” It’s a crescendo of self-transformation, from quietly plucked cello to full-band stomp, as Lorde seizes the masculinity within herself. In the video clip, she flattens her breasts, taping them down with duct tape; she ponders, “Who’s gonna love me like this?” and then proclaims, “Now I’m broken open / Let’s hear it for the man of the year.”Miley Cyrus featuring Brittany Howard, ‘Walk of Fame’“Walk of Fame,” from “Something Beautiful,” the new Miley Cyrus album, turns the proverbial morning-after walk of shame into something prouder: “I walk the concrete like it’s a stage.” The song is mostly formulaic disco, thumping away. But the voice of Brittany Howard — adding little responses and wordless overlays, then promising “You’ll live forever”— gives it some gravity.Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, ‘Urges’Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, an dedicated electronic-pop experimenter, toys with and displaces dance-floor rhythms in “Urges,” from her coming album, “Gush.” She whisper-sings “I keep getting urges /What if I just let them move through me like this” while brittle programmed syncopations, disembodied voices and distant, tootling arpeggios materialize around her voice; even as the sounds disintegrate, the pulse is danceable.Santana and Grupo Frontera, ‘Me Retiro’Two generations of Mexican American musicians — the Texas band Grupo Frontera and the guitarist Carlos Santana — make a natural combination in “Me Retiro” (“I’m Leaving”), a song about trying to drink away a heartbreak. Santana sits in with the Grupo Frontera band and, rightly, takes over; his guitar slices through the clip-clop beat and accordion chords and compounds the sorrows that Adelaido “Payo” Solís III sings about.Obongjayar featuring Little Simz, ‘Talk Olympics’Obongjayar — Steven Umoh, a Nigerian musician based in London — has a new album, “Paradise Now,” that’s full of inventive, Pan-African electronic grooves like the zippy staccato propulsion of “Talk Olympics.” With an octave-bouncing bass line and the sounds of balafons, drums, synthesizers and sampled voices, Obongjayar and Little Simz take turns complaining about someone who’s far too chatty: “I let you speak, that was my mistake,” Little Simz notes; Obongjayar adds, in his sweetest falsetto, “Shut up! Shut up!”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      April Showers Bring May Flowers, the Playlist

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      Hear songs by Lana Del Rey, SZA, Waxahatchee and more.Lana Del ReyMario Anzuoni/ReutersDear listeners,This is Dani Blum, a health reporter and sometime music writer at The New York Times, filling in for Lindsay this week.May is when music leaks outside, when songs start to seep out of car windows, when clusters of speakers clog parks. This always feels like a kind of benediction to me, or a reward for the long slog of murky, soggy spring.You know the saying about the seasonal blossoming — so with that in mind, I put together a playlist focused on flowers, but also on the quiet, thrumming hope that comes this time of year. Call it post-spring, pre-summer, the sweetest form of seasonal purgatory. This playlist features songs from across the last decade, including older tracks from Lorde and Lana Del Rey — two artists whose new music I’m most excited to hear this summer — as well as an understated track from the queen of last summer, Charli XCX.I bloom just for you,DaniListen along while you read.1. Faye Webster featuring Father: “Flowers”The Atlanta-based indie singer Faye Webster can tell an entire story with the quake in her voice. Her vowels seem to cave in as she sings, “Can you just give me all your time?/ I’m gonna try give you mine.” It’s a simple couplet that binds the song together, equal parts pleading and reassuring.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lorde Returns With a Nostalgic Breakup Anthem, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Haim, Young Thug, Cazzu and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Lorde, ‘What Was That’In her first solo song in four years, after her boffo duet with Charli XCX, Lorde skips back past the guitar-picking, Laurel Canyon sound of her 2021 album, “Solar Power,” to the keyboards and pumping electronics of her 2017 “Melodrama.” She sings about coming to terms with a breakup and missing past pleasures with someone — kisses, MDMA, a perfect cigarette — but she might also be speaking to her pop audience: “Since I was 17, I gave you everything.” She brings tremulous drama to the vocals, but despite the synthetic firepower available to Lorde and her fellow producers — Daniel Nigro (Olivia Rodrigo) and Jim-E Stack (Bon Iver) — the track is oddly muted and rounded-off, even where it could explode. Maybe that choice will make more sense within a full album.Haim, ‘Down to Be Wrong’Keys left behind, door locked, plane boarded — Danielle Haim sings about a decisive breakup in “Down to Be Wrong” from Haim’s next album, “I Quit,” due June 20. As the song begins, with a chunky beat and a few guitar notes at a time, perhaps there’s a hint of hesitancy in her voice. But as more instruments kick in and the miles of distance increase, her voice gets rougher and her certainty only grows. “I didn’t think it would be so easy till I left it behind,” she realizes, and her sisters’ vocal harmonies fully agree.Jeff Goldblum and the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra featuring Ariana Grande, ‘I Don’t Know Why (I Just Do)’Of course Ariana Grande can sing an old jazz standard. She glides through a song from 1931 (by Fred Ahlert and Russ Turk) that has been recorded by the Andrews Sisters, Frank Sinatra and Kate Smith. Grande is one of the guest singers on Jeff Goldblum’s album with the vintage-style Mildred Snitzer Orchestra; Goldblum, her “Wicked” co-star, is on piano, playing a modest, leisurely solo. But the track is hers — a poised, guileless, gently escalating complaint about unrequited affection: “You never seem to want more romancing / The only time you hold me is when we’re dancing.”Ashley Monroe featuring Marty Stuart, ‘The Touch’Understatement, so rare in current country production, burnishes “The Touch,” a song that promises lasting love. “As long as we’re together, it’s more than enough,” Ashley Monroe sings over Marty Stuart’s lone acoustic guitar, which is virtually the only accompaniment for the first half of the track. Harmonies blossom and more guitars (and Shelby Lynne on bass) eventually join, but the mood stays pristine.Wisin and Kapo, ‘Luna’“Luna” hits a very sweet spot between Afrobeats and reggaeton as Wisin, from Puerto Rico, and Kapo, from Colombia, harmonize on a friendly flirtation: “Just you and me in this room on a trip to the moon.” The production (by Daramola, a Nigerian musician based in Miami, and Los Legendarios, from Puerto Rico) is an ever-changing matrix of percussion sounds, electronics and vocal harmonies arriving from all directions. It’s pure ear candy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Best Songs of 2024

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      Listen to 68 tracks that made major statements, boosted big beefs, propelled up-and-comers and soundtracked the party this year.Jon Pareles | Jon Caramanica | Lindsay ZoladzJon ParelesA Little Strife, a Lot of RhythmHere’s a dipperful of worthwhile tracks from the ocean of music released this year. The top of my list is big-statement songs, ones that had repercussions beyond how they sound. Below those, it’s not a ranking but a playlist, a more-or-less guided cruise through what 2024 sounded like for one avid listener. I didn’t include any songs from my list of top albums, which are worth hearing from start to finish. But in the multiverse of streaming music, there are plenty of other possibilities.1. Kendrick Lamar, ‘Not Like Us’Belligerent, accusatory and as tribalistic as its title, “Not Like Us” wasn’t an attack ad from the 2024 election. It was the coup de gras of Kendrick Lamar’s beef with Drake, a rapid-fire, sneering assault on multiple fronts. Its spirit dovetailed with a bitterly contentious 2024.2. Beyoncé, ‘Texas Hold ’Em’“Texas Hold ’Em” isn’t just an invocation of Beyoncé’s home state. It’s a toe-tapping taunt at the racial and musical assumptions behind country music as defined by record labels and radio stations. Rhiannon Giddens picks an oh-so-traditional claw-hammer banjo intro and Beyoncé — raised in Texas — promises “a real-life boogie and a real-life hoedown,” singing about drinking and dancing and daring gatekeepers to hold her back.3. Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Please Please Please’Sabrina Carpenter delivers a sharp message on the slick “Please Please Please.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesComedy is tricky in a straight-faced song, but Sabrina Carpenter’s eye-roll comes clearly through the shiny pop of “Please Please Please.” The singer tries to placate and possibly tame a boyfriend who sounds more obnoxious in every verse. “I beg you, don’t embarrass me,” she coos; eventually she reaches a breaking point.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Billie Eilish, Lorde and More Are Singing Out About Body Image

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      Billie Eilish, Charli XCX and Lorde are among a group of young women who are revealing, in their music, the pressure they have felt to look thin.Taken together, the first two song titles on Billie Eilish’s third album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” form a provocative pair: “Skinny” and “Lunch.”“People say I look happy/Just because I got skinny,” Eilish sings on the opener, her melancholic croon accompanied by a single, murky guitar. “But the old me is still me and maybe the real me,” she adds, “and I think she’s pretty.”That lyric is a gut punch. It’s also indicative of a subtle shift among the current generation of female pop stars, who have recently been acknowledging — often in stark, striking and possibly triggering language — the pressure they have felt to look thin.Taylor Swift, who first opened up about her past struggles with disordered eating in a powerful sequence in her 2020 documentary, “Miss Americana,” sings about it on her 2022 track “You’re on Your Own, Kid,” a compassionate ode to her younger self: “I hosted parties and starved my body, like I’d be saved by the perfect kiss.” Last month, in a guest appearance on the remix of Charli XCX’s “Girl, So Confusing,” Lorde confessed that fluctuations in her weight had led her to stay out of the public eye. “For the last couple years, I’ve been at war in my body,” she sings, heartbreakingly. “I tried to starve myself thinner, and then I gained all the weight back.”For several years, conversations about weight in mainstream pop have centered around an artist bold enough to speak up about it and absorb the stinging backlash: Lizzo. In her lyrics, on social media, and in her shapewear line, the singer and rapper has played up self-love, becoming a face of the body positivity movement. Earlier this year, however, she told The New York Times that she had “evolved into body neutrality.” “I’m not going to lie and say I love my body every day,” she said.Part of the vitriol Lizzo has faced is rooted in racism, and it is impossible to divorce a dialogue about body image from race, and the different ways Black, brown and white bodies are dissected, denigrated and idolized. Latto recently spoke out about how online criticism led her to have plastic surgery at 21 to enhance her buttocks. Last year the rapper, who is biracial, said, “When I didn’t have my surgery, they’re like, ‘Oh, she shaped like her white side.’” SZA, speaking to Elle about her own, similar, procedure (which she sang about on her hit 2022 album, “SOS”), said, “I didn’t succumb to industry pressure. I succumbed to my own eyes in the mirror.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Charli XCX and Lorde End the Rumors on a Refreshing Remix

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      Lorde adds guest vocals to Charli XCX’s “Girl, So Confusing,” a song that muses on the complexities of female friendship, and helps create something revelatory.To a lot of people these days, “ambivalent pop music” is an oxymoron. Catchy hooks tend to streamline complex emotions into universal, legible sentiments, temporarily dividing the world into teams: the heartbreakers vs. the victims, the happy vs. the sad, the boys vs. the girls. Infectious as they are, many of the songs on Charli XCX’s incisive sixth album, “Brat,” refuse to take sides, making them difficult to discuss in the explainer-generating, SEO-baiting grammar of modern pop standom. How refreshing.Charli never mentioned Lorde by name on the album’s knotty ninth track, “Girl, So Confusing,” but all signs pointed to her being the somewhat socially awkward, poetry-loving doppelgänger to whom the song is addressed. (“People say we’re alike, they say we’ve got the same hair,” Charli sings, winking at those of us who remember when an interviewer asked her about writing Lorde’s “Royals.”)It was less clear how we were supposed to understand this song in the limited and polarized language of 2020s musical fandom, which pits female pop stars against one another like pro athletes while still insisting that they “support women” at all times with a benevolent grin. “Sometimes I think you might hate me, sometimes I think I might hate you,” Charli babbles atop a strobe-lit A.G. Cook beat, one of the many “wait, are you even allowed to say that anymore?” moments on “Brat.” The song strains the vocabulary of clickbait. Is this a “diss track” or the start of a “feud”? Are the girlies fighting? And if they are, what could Lorde possibly be doing in the V.I.P. section of Charli’s recent show?It’s complicated, and — blessedly — so is the surprise remix on which Lorde appears, firing off her first new lyrics in three years. After Charli unloads her feelings and projections in that first verse, Lorde responds with the run-on intensity of a late-night voice note: “You’d always say, ‘let’s go out,’ but then I’d cancel last minute,” the New Zealander confesses, “I was so lost in my head and scared to be in your pictures.” She then reveals, devastatingly, that she’s been “at war with my body,” insecure about fluctuations in her weight, and that the enigmatic aura she’s created is actually a stifling defense mechanism. That she does it all so succinctly in a cadence that effortlessly matches Cook’s beat should make everyone excited for her next album, whenever it arrives.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More