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    Nicki Minaj and Drake Reunite, and 10 More New Songs

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    Hear tracks by Tems, Idles, Adrianne Lenker 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.Nicki Minaj featuring Drake, ‘Needle’Thirteen years ago, on her debut studio album “Pink Friday,” Nicki Minaj recruited her Young Money labelmate and fellow rising star Drake for the galvanizing hit “Moment 4 Life.” They join forces once again on “Needle,” a noticeably more laid-back and atmospheric track from Minaj’s long-teased “Pink Friday 2,” which demonstrates how both of these rappers — and the sound of rap music itself — have changed in the intervening years. Drake calls back to the island cadences of his “Views” era, lilting a somewhat strained metaphor: “You’re like a needle, life’s a haystack.” Minaj raps as if on cruise control, characteristically dexterous (“Poppin’ out like a cork/duckin’ ’em like Björk”) if zoologically confused; Nicki, it was a swan dress! LINDSAY ZOLADZTems, ‘Not an Angel’Afrobeats turns inward in the Nigerian songwriter Tems’s “Not an Angel” — an emphatic good-riddance song with lines like, “I was alone when I was with you,” “All you did was give me nothing” and “Right now it’s going nowhere but the graveyard.” Programmed percussion and a moody guitar lick carry her rising resentment and self-realization: “I’m not an angel — I’m just a girl that knows the truth,” she sings, moving into sync with the beat as she pulls away from her ex. JON PARELESWishy, ‘Spinning’Can a band be classified as shoegaze if its head is in the clouds? Such is the delightful paradox posed by Wishy, a promising new group from Indiana releasing its debut EP “Paradise” next Friday. Echoing the spirit of millennial dream-pop acts like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart and A Sunny Day in Glasgow, Wishy’s latest single “Spinning” layers textured guitar, a driving breakbeat and Nina Pitchkites’s airy vocals to create a sumptuous sound. “Spinning around on the kitchen floor,” she sings. “I don’t know what I’m dancing for.” Prepare to do the same. ZOLADZIdles, ‘Grace’The British band Idles generally play sinewy, irascible post-punk songs, but every so often the singer Joe Talbot confesses to vulnerability, as he does in “Grace.” It’s a secular prayer: “No God, no king/I said love is the thing,” Talbot sings. He both longs for and offers refuge and compassion; behind him, the band gnashes and clatters and eventually erupts, but his determined humility lingers. PARELESElephant Gym featuring Yile Lin, ‘Happy Prince’Elephant Gym, a bass-guitar-drums trio from Taiwan, plays a nimble, jazzy kind of math-rock, paced by the hopscotching bass lines of KT Chang and the guitar counterpoint of her brother Tell Chang. “Happy Prince” is loosely based on a children’s story by Oscar Wilde. With bright-eyed guest vocals by Yile Lin, from the band Freckles, “Happy Prince” breezes along, shifting meters and taking chromatic turns; every so often, it explodes. PARELESNnamdi, ‘Going Crazy’A snippet of children singing “We’re all going crazy” led the Chicago pop experimentalist Nnamdi to come up with “Going Crazy.” It appears at assorted speeds, over assorted chords and drum-machine beats, as he croons in falsetto about how “I been up working harder every night” and “I just want to have a little fun” — a workaholic’s jovial complaints. PARELESUsher and H.E.R., ‘Risk It All’It hardly gets more old-school than “Risk It All,” a duet from Usher and H.E.R. — from the soundtrack to “The Color Purple” — that’s happy to risk vocal close-ups: call-and-response, tag-teaming, overlapping, sharing. Little more than piano chords accompany the duo, who sound like they were singing to each other in real time throughout the song, though they couldn’t resist overdubbing some extra harmony vocals. Even so, there’s an unadorned, intimate physicality to the romantic sentiments. PARELESAdrianne Lenker, ‘Ruined’This sparse, movingly fragile song from the Big Thief frontwoman Adrianne Lenker is a dispatch from the most devastating kind of obsession: “Can’t get enough of you,” Lenker sings in a warbled falsetto. “You come around, I’m ruined.” Accompanied by just a haunting piano and eerie, echoing effects, Lenker’s plain-spoken vulnerability becomes, by the end of the song, a kind of strength. ZOLADZEliza McLamb, ‘16’Eliza McLamb, a songwriter who’s also a podcaster, revisits a period of severe teenage trauma — her mother’s mental illness, her own self-destructive compulsions — in “16”; it’s from her album due in January, “Going Through It.” Deep, sustained synthesizer tones accompany her breathy voice, offering the stability — or numbness — she longs for. PARELESKaren Vogt, ‘We Coalesce’Layers of wordless, echoey vocal loops, with hints of modal melody, are the makings of “We Coalesce,” one of the eerie, undulating pieces Karen Vogt recorded while mourning her cat. PARELESVijay Iyer Trio, ‘Prelude: Orison’If Vijay Iyer’s music was big for you this year, it was probably thanks to “Love in Exile,” the much-beloved album he released with Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily. Though cool-blooded and almost ambient, that LP was swept by an undercurrent of disquiet — a feeling the pianist embraces even further in his other working trio, with the bassist Linda Oh and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey. Their 2021 debut, “Uneasy,” was an itchy and stimulating affair inspired, as Iyer said ahead of its release, by the awareness “that this thing Americans love to call freedom is not what it appears to be.” Well, wait. Is there some paradox lurking here? How is instrumental music that sounds so elevated and indirect supposed to upend our most basic assumptions? To which another question might provide the response: Processing the news these days, have you felt angry, frustrated or helpless? If that resonates, this trio’s music would like to help you make some sense of that sensation — and maybe even sidestep it, pushing toward some kind of confrontation. (“Uneasy” includes “Combat Breathing,” a rhythmic call-to-action inspired by Black Lives Matter organizers.) The new, tempo-slurring “Prelude: Orison,” is languid, diaphanous, harmonically canted. Whenever it briefly resolves, it starts the cycle over again. It’s as if this band wants to both seduce you and discomfit you, stripping you of everything but the ability to think and see for yourself. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO More

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      An Anthem About Hugging Your Friends Again, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Rostam, Marcellus Juvann, Gogo Penguin 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.Frank Turner, ‘The Gathering’Who better than Frank Turner, the punk-intense British folk singer, to underscore the imminent joy of reconnecting with others? Turner is barking on “The Gathering” — which casually features Dom Howard (from Muse, on drums) and an inquisitive guitar solo from Jason Isbell — and fully in pulpit mode: “I’ve been missing the feeling when we close up the gaps between us/It’s better than the best benediction, more bracing than blood lust.” Generally, this sort of earnestness can be wearying (even after a very wearying year-plus of isolation), but Turner succeeds because he sounds like he’s just stomped out of a stuffy meeting to go yell on a street corner, frantic with euphoria. JON CARAMANICALump, ‘Animal’In Lump, which releases an album called “Animal” in July, Laura Marling sets aside her virtuosic acoustic guitar to collaborate with Mike Lindsay, the electronics wizard from the folktronica group Tunng. For the album’s title song, she gives herself terse syllable counts — “All that you want/Is to be heard” — as Lindsay supplies steady pulses and blips. But midway through, the metronomic pulse breaks down and Marling leaves her deadpan monotone to wail, “I need more.” Then she submits once again to the digital grid. JON PARELESKhaira Arby, ‘Ferene’The Malian singer Khaira Arby, who died in 2018, was a clarion vocalist who led an incendiary band, fusing Malian modes and rhythms and combining traditional string instruments — the tehardant and ngoni — with a psychedelic electric-guitar attack. “New York Live,” a newly released recording from her first concert in North America, magnificently captures the spiraling energy of her concerts. Listen to the whole remarkable set, or jump in near the peak with “Ferene,” with its intricate cymbal cross-rhythms, its exultant call-and-response vocals and its bursts of fuzz-toned guitar frenzy. PARELESRostam, ‘From the Back of a Cab’Rostam, formerly of Vampire Weekend, zeros in on the awkward intimacy of a particular moment: the cab ride to the airport, a last bit of togetherness before a strictly defined parting. “I am happy you and I got this hour,” he croons, over a nervous six-beat rhythm and echoey piano chords and guitar tones; the relationship stays tentative, conditional. PARELESRodrigo Amarante, ‘Maré’“Maré” means tide, and in his new single, the Brazilian songwriter Rodrigo Amarante compares destiny to a tidal ebb and flow, singing with a tone of weary acceptance. His music has its own push and pull, with three-against-two rhythms and a tangle of instrumental lines — guitars, percussion, a nasal synthesizer, a horn section, some whistling — that interlock but sound like they might collide at any moment. It sounds charmingly ramshackle; it’s not. PARELESGogo Penguin featuring Cornelius, ‘Kora (Cornelius Remix)’Gogo Penguin looks like a jazz trio — piano, bass and drums — but its music also has plenty in common with the repetition, terse motifs and inexorable evolution of electronica. Its new album, “Gogo Penguin Remixes,” hands over tracks from the 2020 “Gogo Penguin” to electronica wizards like Squarepusher, Machinedrum, 808 State and, on “Kora,” the Japanese producer Cornelius. The original’s pecking, stop-start piano theme hints at the plucking of an African kora; Cornelius extrapolates the implied harmonies of that theme to build a sustained, whooshing, buzzing, superstructure, as if he’s unveiling the tune’s futuristic inner life. PARELESJoe Lovano and Dave Douglas, ‘Life on Earth’The saxophonist Joe Lovano and the trumpeter Dave Douglas recorded the tracks that would become “Other Worlds,” the new album from their quintet, Sound Prints, in January 2020, just weeks ahead of a global shutdown. Most of the tunes on the album were done in just one take, and the band’s natural comfort comes through here. On “Life on Earth,” a swiftly shuffling Douglas tune, the pianist Lawrence Fields plays less and less as the trumpeter’s solo develops, moving from a colorist’s role to that of a jagged percussion instrument. Lovano’s tenor saxophone solo brings a sluice of energy flooding back in, until Fields and the bassist Linda May Han Oh finish off the solo section with briefly suspenseful, dashing statements of their own. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOMarcellus Juvann, ‘Wrong’“Hardheaded,” the fascinating new self-produced EP from the Houston rapper Marcellus Juvann, is full of clever, quirky, urgent and oddball beats. They’re uniformly potent, and a strong match for Juvann’s rapping, which he delivers in a lightly croaky, lightly stumbling, lightly swinging voice that telegraphs confidence and disaffection all at once. CARAMANICATrippie Redd featuring Playboi Carti, ‘Miss the Rage’A fan edit of this track has been making the rounds on TikTok, but this version is different, with a new Playboi Carti verse. Trippie Redd remains underappreciated and committed to SoundCloud rap staccato, and Carti sticks with his mewling yelps, all over a beat that suggests a starship shifting into warp gear. CARAMANICAElohim and Big Freedia, ‘Strut’As if 21st-century life weren’t surveilled enough, the Los Angeles producer and songwriter Elohim has enlisted the New Orleans bounce icon Big Freedia to join her in saying that even a sidewalk is a runway, a place to perform and be judged. The beat is downright perky, even if the message is oppressive. Still, sometimes a sidewalk is just a sidewalk. PARELESCarlos Niño, ‘Ripples, Reflection, Loop’Ambient music is having a moment, fed partly by our urge for peace amid the anxiety of a pandemic, but also by a need for contact with the outside world — for physicality and touch. A lot of the quiet-seeking, time-stretching music that’s coming out from artists like Claire Rousay, Lea Bertucci and Ben Seretan isn’t primarily electronic; it lives up to the “ambient” designation more literally, ensconcing voices or instrumentals in the sounds of the outdoors. The Los Angeles-based percussionist and producer Carlos Niño’s new album, “More Energy Fields, Current,” places him and a small coterie of musician friends inside a wider environment, playing loops and gentle improvisations and long synthesizer chords. On “Ripples, Reflection, Loop,” he’s joined by the New Age pioneer Laraaji, the pianist Jamael Dean and the vocalist Sharada, who’s heard from what feels like a distance — and then startlingly, comfortingly up close. RUSSONELLO More

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      Vijay Iyer’s New Trio Is a Natural Fit. Its Album Is ‘Uneasy.’

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      The pianist teamed up with the bassist Linda May Han Oh and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey for a record that came together during a period of tragedy and unrest.The pianist Vijay Iyer composed the title track to his new trio album, “Uneasy,” back in 2011 for a collaboration with the dancer and choreographer Karole Armitage. It was still a few years before the 2016 presidential campaign, when so many of the country’s old wounds and resentments would burst onto public display, but he already felt some undercurrents stirring.“It was 10 years after 9/11, and having been in New York for all that time, any kind of moment of relative peace felt precarious,” he said recently by phone from his home in Harlem. “I’m speaking not just about the attack itself, but all of the aftermath: the blowback, the backlash against communities of color, the atmosphere of surveillance and fear.”“It was the Obama years, so there was a certain kind of exuberance about possibility, and there was also a kind of unease,” he added. “It was a time of the Affordable Care Act and of drone warfare, gay marriage and mass deportations.” With digital surveillance becoming a fact of life, he was struck, as an American-born artist of South Asian descent, by the feeling “that this thing Americans love to call freedom is not what it appears to be,” he said.Another decade has now passed, and the version of “Uneasy” that appears on the album, out Friday, seems to be carrying a mix of heavy thought and rich optimism — a typical blend in Iyer’s work. He’s joined by two slightly younger musicians with sizable followings of their own, Linda May Han Oh on bass and Tyshawn Sorey on drums. As improvisers, they’ve got a few things in common: the ability to play with a lithe range of motion and resplendent clarity, in the style of well-schooled jazz musicians, while stoking a kind of writhing internal tension. Crucial to that balance is their ability to connect with each other in real time, almost telepathically.The title track unfolds ominously over more than nine minutes, starting off in a dark cloud of doubt, with Iyer’s low piano repetitions hovering around a slow, odd-metered pattern. Later, the group upshifts — abruptly, but without totally losing its cohesion — into a quicker, charging section with a wholly different rhythm, Iyer’s right hand darting in evasive gestures while Oh holds down the scaffolding and Sorey adds action and sizzle.The trio first came together in 2014 at the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music, where Iyer, now 49, and Sorey, now 40, serve as artistic directors. The two have been collaborating since 2001, when Sorey wowed Iyer at a rehearsal. During a break, Sorey started casually noodling on the piano, and Iyer soon realized he was playing an excerpt from Iyer’s most recent album. It wasn’t even from the song’s melody; it was part of Iyer’s improvised solo on the recording.“He was just this 20-year-old,” Iyer said. “So I already knew, like, oh, this is a bona fide genius right here.” (Indeed, in the years since, both Iyer and Sorey — who is now as well known for his long-form compositions as he is for his drumming — have been awarded MacArthur “genius” grants. They have also both become professors of music at Ivy League institutions.) Sorey joined the collective trio Fieldwork, with Iyer and the saxophonist Steve Lehman, and their partnership blossomed.In 2013, Iyer took over as artistic director at Banff — a creative enclave in Alberta, Canada, where students gather every year for a three-week improvisation workshop — and he found himself inviting Sorey to teach alongside him each year. Eventually, he formalized their relationship as a partnership, welcoming Sorey as his co-director.Oh, 36, had collaborated here and there with both Iyer and Sorey before also becoming a regular instructor at Banff. She said she appreciated the fluidity of the divide between instructors and students that the workshop fostered. Speaking by phone from her home in Australia, Oh recalled the poetry of how Iyer encouraged students to think about the notes they played on their instrument in relationship to the range of their own speaking voice.Playing Iyer’s compositions, she said, can be like working out “beautiful little puzzles,” and she called Sorey an ideal teammate.“It’s a lot of fun to tread that line between what is inbuilt in that structure and what we can sort of dialogue on, and have a conversation over that,” she said. Sorey is “so thorough with the inbuilt things in the composition, but he’ll create these sparks that you really don’t expect,” she continued. “It’s just constant energetic dialogue.”Oh also has a knack for establishing sturdy foundations without sinking into a pattern. Playing together, she said, “We can be reactive and proactive at the same time.”The group started recording in 2019, but Iyer didn’t cull the tracks they’d recorded into an album until the following year, when the name “Uneasy” felt even more painfully apt. Elianel Clinton for The New York TimesIyer was quick to emphasize the importance of Sorey’s supportive style, calling it remarkable for an artist who has so much to say on his own terms. He described starting to nod toward one song in the middle of playing another, maybe just flicking at a phrase, and then feeling Sorey immediately dive into it, anticipating his next move, as if to catch him. “Because he hears everything, it means we can just do anything,” Iyer said.In an interview, Sorey said he always felt “most at home in situations where it’s only three players,” describing this particular trio as “basically one organism.”“That feeling of intimacy leads to a certain type of trust where there can be no wrong done,” he said.The group entered the studio in 2019, but Iyer didn’t cull the tracks they’d recorded into an album until the following year, when the name “Uneasy” felt even more painfully apt. “It was under the conditions of the hell that was 2020: tragedy and loss and the political battle of the century,” he said. “Then, on the other hand, an incredible uprising of, particularly, young people fighting for justice for Black people, and for everybody. That is imagining a future.”Some of the song titles speak to this theme: “Children of Flint” refers to the water crisis in Michigan; “Combat Breathing” was composed in 2014 in solidarity with Black Lives Matter activists, and presented as part of a “die-in” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But so do the sounds themselves — tetchy and bristling, while evincing an inspiring level of unity and compassion.When it came time to choose the cover art for the album, Iyer rejected nearly a dozen suggestions from Manfred Eicher, the head of ECM Records, before settling on a black-and-white double-exposure by the Korean photographer Woong Chul An. It shows the Statue of Liberty, blurry and gray, seemingly caught between the clouds in the sky and another puff of clouds hanging just above the sea.“When I saw it, I didn’t know how to feel about it,” Iyer said. “For one thing, what does it mean for me to have this on my album cover? What does this even represent?”Ultimately, he was attracted to the hazy ambivalence that the image conveys. “This one is a distant image of the Statue of Liberty, not as this looming prideful symbol but as almost what looks like this rejected figure,” he said, pointing to the fact that France had offered the statue to the United States in celebration of the end of chattel slavery here.“As this symbol tends to represent freedom in America, it is also tied to abolition,” he said. “So the fact that those concepts are bound is, I felt, important to highlight. They seemed to sit in an uneasy relation to one another, freedom and its opposite.” More