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    A Trip Through Trip-Hop’s Past and Future

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    Listen to songs from Portishead and Cibo Matto, plus inheritors like Fcukers and a.s.o.Beth Gibbons of Portishead onstage in 2008.Oliver Hartung for The New York TimesDear listeners,Over the past couple of years, it’s started to feel like every out-of-favor electronic music style from the 1990s is returning at once. PinkPantheress is singing pop songs over drum-and-bass beats. Oklou uses trance synths. Hyperpop has made “uncool” taste a creative virtue. (On the less-out-of-favor, more-commercially-successful end of things, there’s Beyoncé and Charli XCX’s love for “Show Me Love.”)Signs have been building that trip-hop, a genre that reached popularity in the mid-90s by mixing atmospheric hip-hop beats with moody pop vocals, was next up for a resurgence. In one sense, it’s a sound that never fully went away — step into any swanky hotel bar over the past few decades — but it was seen as a creative dead end. “Today, trip-hop is the most toothless of beats-based styles,” the critic Jody Rosen wrote in a 2003 article in The New York Times about Massive Attack, one of the genre’s standard-bearers. “It’s easy listening for hipsters in space-age sneakers.”Well, lace up my space-age sneakers, because this music is sounding good again. Confirmation that I wasn’t imagining things hit my inbox via a recent edition of the always perceptive Herb Sundays music newsletter, which found ample evidence that trip-hop is in the zeitgeist, like Logic1000’s new, low-B.P.M. mix for the long-running DJ-Kicks series. (They referred to the sound as “downtempo,” one of a few related labels, but let’s not get lost in the subgenre soup and just vibe, OK?)Here are six classics from trip-hop’s initial wave and four tracks from current artists who are picking up the torch.A woman in the moon is singing to the earth,DaveListen along while you read.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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      Blackpink’s Genre-Clashing Return, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Blake Shelton, Chloe Moriondo and Madonna.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.Blackpink, ‘Pink Venom’Over the four years leading to its 2020 debut album, Blackpink — Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa, Rosé — became one of K-pop’s biggest global success stories: musically modern, engaged with pop from around the world, versatile. The first single from the group’s upcoming second album, “Born Pink” (due next month) has the comfort of anarchy.  Every four bars, a new approach enters — familiar K-pop elasticity, loose Middle Eastern themes, gaudy rock, West Coast rap, and more. It exists out where maximalism moves past philosophy to aesthetic. JON CARAMANICAMadonna, ‘Get Together’ (Jacques Lu Cont Vocal Edit)The remixes on Madonna’s “Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones,” out Friday, throb, zigzag and shimmer, highlighting the pop superstar’s deep connection to the dance floor — starting with her 1983 single “Holiday” and wrapping with “I Don’t Search I Find,” the glorious house standout on her most recent studio album, “Madame X” (its lyrics give the collection its name). As a full body of work, Madonna’s 2005 LP “Confessions on a Dance Floor” represents her most potent love letter to the form, and the Jacques Lu Cont Vocal Edit remix of its “Get Together,” available digitally for the first time, is a refreshing break from the (still great!) 4 a.m.-at-the-club pound that marks most of the set. Replacing its oozing synths with a snaking guitar riff, the track rides nearly like an indie-rock song that eventually glitches out and finds a way home again. CARYN GANZ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ), ‘[] vȯ)) ̷̨ʅ (۝ʅ(Ɵʅ():::()̵̳̗̊(Ɵʅ()vȯ)) ̷̨ʅ)’This garble of characters is an alias of the innovative electronic music producer Kieran Hebden (also known as Four Tet). His fleet and cheeky new song is indebted to sensual garage and boisterous house. CARAMANICAZedd, Maren Morris and Beauz ‘Made You Say’Like Zedd and Maren Morris’s previous collaboration, the unavoidable pop smash “The Middle,” “Make You Say” is the expertly engineered product of a whole cadre of collaborators: This time around, that includes co-writing credits from the sibling D.J. duo Beauz and the thirst trap aficionado Charlie Puth. All throughout, Morris hopscotches nimbly across Zedd’s syncopated arrangement and sing-songy melody, but the song is at its best when it really lets her rip, contrasting the grainy texture of her voice with the sleek surfaces of Zedd’s production. “You got your arms around her when you sleep,” she belts with alluring sass, “but I’m the one you dream about.” LINDSAY ZOLADZIsabella Lovestory, ‘Sexo Amor Dinero’An industrial post-reggaeton thumper about the sweat at the intersection of money and sex. CARAMANICAChloe Moriondo, ‘Fruity’The ever-evolving Chloe Moriondo — a young musician who basically came of age on her YouTube channel — makes an exhilarating pivot to hyperpop on “Fruity,” the first single from her forthcoming album, “Suckerpunch.” The song begins with Moriondo singing in her signature, sweetly muttered register atop some bright, pulsating synths, but as it builds in intensity her vocals become increasingly urgent and start to warp like melting plastic. “So close I can almost taste,” she sings of a “fresh and fruity” crush who she compares to a whole litany of sugary treats, building toward a chorus that’s deliciously hysterical and relentlessly catchy. ZOLADZPony, ‘Peach’It turns out that Pony, the tuneful grunge-pop band from Toronto, is quite aptly named: Earlier this year, the vocalist and guitarist Sam Bielanski announced a new gig: voicing a character in a “My Little Pony” cartoon. The charismatic pull of Bielanski’s vocals are on full display on the group’s new, ’90s-alt-rock-nodding single “Peach,” a bittersweet tale of love bombing and, eventually, cold clarity. “Picturing the salt of the beach,” Bielanski sings on the chorus, as a kind of personal reminder, “’Cause I don’t wanna drown in the taste of this peach.” ZOLADZBlake Shelton, ‘No Body’A sashaying splash of early ’90s power-country revivalism from Blake Shelton, a superstar who’s traversed many styles with ease in his career, but never quite owned one. Here he’s reviving a once-rowdy sound and nodding to Brooks & Dunn (“Don’t wanna scoot the boots with nobody”) — a convincing mimic, as ever. CARAMANICANick Hakim, ‘Happen’“Happen,” from the Brooklyn-based indie musician Nick Hakim, is a hypnotic, woozily romantic ballad that nonetheless contains flashes of melancholic darkness: The muted, sludgy acoustic guitar conjures Elliott Smith, while the close-miked, near-whispered vocals are faintly reminiscent of the softer side of the Deftones. That overcast sound, though, balances out the openhearted nature of Hakim’s lyrics, which are almost devotional in their description of a transformative love. “The sweetest angel fell into my world,” he sings. “She gives me reason, was lost for a damn long time.” ZOLADZ More

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      The Weeknd’s Disco Fever, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Aventura and Bad Bunny, Guns N’ Roses, Aimee Mann 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.The Weeknd, ‘Take My Breath’What would Barry Gibb do? The disco thump, electric piano chords and call-and-response falsetto vocals in “Take My Breath” hark back to vintage Bee Gees by way of a Max Martin production. But leave it to the Weeknd to sketch a creepy bedroom scenario: “Baby says take my breath away/and make it last forever.” He seems to shy away from strangulation — “You’re way too young to end your life,” he warns — but the chorus keeps coming back. Maybe it’s a Covid-19 metaphor. JON PARELESAventura and Bad Bunny, ‘Volví’“Volví” is the kind of mythical collaboration first theorized in group chats and Twitter threads, written about in all caps. This is the world’s greatest bachata boy band and Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, after all. The dream comes to life with a bachata-reggaeton hybrid that bursts with late summer joy. But it also contains the slow-burning envy of bachata: familiar themes of jealousy and possession, the kind of toxic melodrama that makes the genre so addictive in the first place. ISABELIA HERRERAGuns N’ Roses, ‘Absurd’And to think you spent the last week theorizing about Limp Bizkit. Here is the real text to decode: “Absurd” is the first single from Guns N’ Roses in more than a decade. It’s amped-up and nervy, a lightly filtered version of the speedier mayhem that first made them famous. Axl Rose sounds a little bulbous, but all around him, things are moving exceptionally quickly. JON CARAMANICANelly featuring Breland and Blanco Brown, ‘High Horse’As surely as Nelly brought Midwest melody to hip-hop and seeded more than a decade of imitators, he did the same in country music, thanks to his “Cruise” remix with Florida Georgia Line. His Nashville inheritors have been rapper-singers, Black artists who are beginning to find success close to the center of the Nashville mainstream. Here, Nelly teams up with a couple of them, Breland and Blanco Brown, and all together, these three country performers — to varying degrees, but all sincere — somehow arrive at pristine disco-country. CARAMANICAIsabella Lovestory, ‘Vuelta’A pair of light-up platform stilettos and a bubble gun make appearances in Isabella Lovestory’s “Vuelta” video, helping turn a minimalist clip into a hyperpop dream. Lovestory’s lyrics are all singsong playground rhymes: “Baby, I’m lonely/Why don’t you hold me?/All I want to do tonight is dance.” The track is simple but coy, enough to remind you of the joy that Y2K girl groups like Dream and in-store soundtracks from Limited Too brought you back in the day. HERRERALakou Mizik and Joseph Ray, ‘Bade Zile’“Bade Zile” is a traditional Haitian voodoo song that calls to spirits. It gets an electronic update on “Leave the Bones,” an album-length collaboration by Lakou Mizik, a band from Haiti whose long-running project has been to preserve traditional songs by modernizing them, and the producer Joseph Ray, who shared a Grammy as part of the dance-music group Nero. Men and women toss the traditional chant back and forth, then unite and echo; hand-played percussion rides a four-on-the-floor beat, and the energy multiplies. PARELESRed 6xteen, ‘Armageddon’The Dominican drill artist Red 6xteen unleashes “Armageddon” with a cadence that lies low to the ground. But it doesn’t take long for her to stunt: Her voice mutates into squeaky, high-pitched taunts, only to transform into a breakneck dash. An orchestral outro finds her meditating on loyalty and her place in the game. The two-and-a-half minute track functions like an exhibition of Red’s potential, a promise to infuse Dominican hip-hop with the edge it needs. HERRERABrian Jackson, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge, ‘Baba Ibeji’In the American musical record, the composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist Brian Jackson has been too easily overlooked. As the other half of Gil Scott-Heron’s musical brain throughout the 1970s, Jackson helped create some of the most lasting (and perpetually relevant) music of that era. But since he and Scott-Heron parted ways in the early ’80s, Jackson has rarely put out recordings of his own. When Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge started their Jazz Is Dead project, a series of collaborations with elder musicians, they sought out Jackson first. The fruits of that 2019 session have now been released as “JID008,” a short album of instrumental pieces, all composed collectively, carrying hints of Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew” and “Get Up With It” sessions, and of more recent work by the guitarist Jeff Parker. On the buoyant “Baba Ibeji,” whose name refers to a pair of holy twins in the Yoruba religion, Jackson’s Rhodes shines with the same quiet magnetism that defined it half a century ago. Nothing’s overstated; close listening is rewarded. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOAimee Mann, ‘Suicide Is Murder’The warmth of waltzing piano chords, supportive cellos and “ooh”-ing backup vocals accompanies Aimee Mann in “Suicide Is Murder.” But her lyrics are clinical and legalistic, considering the physical practicalities and weighing “motive, means and opportunity”; instead of proffering sympathy, she coolly reminds a listener that a suicide is a “heartless killing spree.” PARELESAmelia Meath and Blake Mills, ‘Neon Blue’Amelia Meath’s quietly confiding voice usually gets cleverly minimal electronic backup as half of Sylvan Esso. Working instead with the guitarist and producer Blake Mills, she’s backed by brushed drums and syncopated acoustic guitar, along with electronic underpinnings and what might be horns or simulations, in a waltz that conjures the elusive allure of a smoky bar crawl. It’s the cozily experimental first release from Psychic Hotline, a label run by Sylvan Esso with its manager. PARELES More