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    Is She Jazz? Is She Pop? She’s Laufey, and She’s a Phenomenon.

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    For Laufey, 2024 was a whirlwind year. 2025 may be even wilder.Last year, the indie singer-songwriter, who cannot be described without a flurry of hyphenated hybrids — Icelandic-Chinese, jazz-pop-classical, TikTok-trad — became a breakout star with a quirky pop style that draws equally from Taylor Swift and the romantic whimsy of midcentury musicals. She won a Grammy Award and attended the Met Gala in a rosé-colored princess gown and, in perhaps the ultimate orchestra-nerd Easter egg, a veil embroidered with a Bach fugue.In an interview this spring, as she prepared to release her third studio album, “A Matter of Time,” Laufey, 26, was still practically glowing over those accomplishments. But seated at a control console at Electric Lady Studios in New York, where she recorded three of the album’s 14 songs, she also cataloged the jitters and anxieties she felt being thrust into the machinery of fame.“I wanted 2025 to be this year where I was less anxious,” she said, “and instead of walking meekly onto the red carpets or meekly into relationships, I wanted to walk with confidence.”“And I wanted to write a country song,” Laufey continued. She paused a beat. “Country-ish,” she amended herself, and then pushed a button to play “Clean Air” — a twangy starting-over ballad that she said was partly inspired by Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris’s “Trio” albums from the 1980s and ’90s.In just a few years, Laufey — her name is properly pronounced with a vowel unfamiliar to most English speakers, but she answers to LAY-vay — has become a phenomenon almost without comparison in contemporary pop. Even in an age of scrambled genres, she stands out as a master code-switcher who cites inspiration from Prokofiev and Chet Baker yet has racked up more than five billion streams with concise, witty earworms that paint a glamorous wonderland shaded with the second guessings of a Gen Z diarist. Despite ruffling some feathers among the conservative gatekeepers of jazz, she has cultivated a vast fan base online and this fall will embark on her first arena tour, including two nights at Madison Square Garden.And she has big fans.Despite ruffling some feathers among the conservative gatekeepers of jazz, Laufey has cultivated a vast fan base. Olivia Rodrigo and Barbra Streisand are among her A-list admirers.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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      Can Indigo De Souza Spin Pop Gold From the Wreckage of Her Past?

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      Indigo De Souza and Elliott Kozel almost canceled their musical blind date.In January 2023, De Souza — a singer and songwriter who had increasingly toyed with borders around indie-rock, soul and pop — flew to Los Angeles from her home in Asheville, N.C., where she’d made her records with old friends. Now she wanted to try meeting strangers in their studios and seeing if, together, they might create a pop anthem. She was anxious, since this “blind session” would be her first. Kozel wasn’t nervous. He’d long done 60 such sessions a year. He had, however, been up late, playing songs in a small club. He was hung over.“He was very grumpy, like the world had beaten him down,” De Souza said during a recent video interview, a day after turning 28, laughing beneath the radiant-green tree canopy of a rural spread where she sometimes stays near Asheville. “He wasn’t putting on any frills. He was showing me exactly who he was. That’s what I needed.”Within an hour, Kozel had found a synthesizer sound and vocal sample De Souza loved. As the music looped, she sat down and, in 10 minutes, wrote “Not Afraid,” an existential examination of life, aging and death, of recognizing the inevitability of them all. Kozel was stunned she could explore her own mortality so readily in front of someone new, let alone sing about it.Though De Souza went to other sessions, she returned only to Kozel to write and record in his garage. With its heroic keyboards, romantic guitars and insistent rhythms, the absorbing 11-track result, “Precipice,” makes good on her longtime ambition to release a sophisticated pop album. It is a vivid and gripping reintroduction, putting her in unexpected conversation with stars like Lorde and Charli XCX.Indigo De Souza’s new album, “Precipice,” makes good on her ambition to release a sophisticated pop record.Perhaps more important, De Souza’s work and camaraderie with Kozel allowed her to write about lifelong struggles with mental illness and abusive relationships with newfound clarity and confidence.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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      Patty Griffin’s Life Fell Apart. Rebuilding Gave Her Music a Jolt.

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      Patty Griffin did not intend to embarrass her mother on her debut album.In the early ’90s, Griffin recorded a series of simple demos to get gigs within Boston’s songwriter circuit. She had written “Sweet Lorraine” — a biographical snapshot of her mother’s rough-and-tumble upbringing — in a flash. But as hubbub grew about the diminutive redhead with the enormous voice, every label interested in Griffin demanded that “Sweet Lorraine” appear on her 1996 debut, “Living With Ghosts.” She’d never thought Lorraine would hear it.“She was so angry, and now that I’m older, I don’t blame her,” Griffin said recently during a video interview from her home in Austin, as her dog, Buster, nuzzled her. “That was stepping across a line.”On her 10 albums since that debut, Griffin has pinballed between post-grunge rock and graceful folk, between Spanish balladry and sizzling blues, even duetting with Mavis Staples before cutting a country-gospel wonder in Nashville. As she wrote about civil rights and bigotry, adventure and lust, she continued to examine her difficult childhood and relationship with Lorraine in many of her most tender but tough songs.Those family tunes culminate on her new album, “Crown of Roses,” out July 25, with the arresting “Way Up to the Sky.” On “Sweet Lorraine,” she blamed her mother’s problems on her past. But on “Way Up to the Sky,” Griffin shoulders some of the blame, singing about being the youngest of seven children who rarely made their mother feel valued amid a collapsing marriage in a cash-strapped household held together by Catholicism and convenience. Lorraine never heard “Way Up to the Sky.” She died in February at 93.“I wanted to know all the secret stuff in her heart, what those days were like when she was sad and lost and broke and unappreciated,” Griffin, 61, said with a rueful chuckle. “It was hard to get that close to it, because she had been so angry with us for so long — especially me.”On the 10 albums since her debut, Patty Griffin has pinballed between post-grunge rock and graceful folk, between Spanish balladry and sizzling blues, even duetting with Mavis Staples before cutting a country-gospel wonder in Nashville.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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      ‘Swag’ Album Review: Justin Bieber Finds His Old Soul

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      “Swag,” a new album of dreamy beats and unexpected collaborations, eschews formulaic pop to lean into the singer’s R&B instincts.In 2007, back when YouTube was in its infancy and Justin Bieber was not far beyond his, he and his mother posted to the platform a series of videos of him singing covers. Mostly, he gave preternaturally tender versions of R&B hits — Ne-Yo’s “So Sick,” Brian McKnight’s “Back at One,” Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” (!) and more. (There is also 40 seconds of “Justin Bieber playing the djembe” for the curious.)All of these videos remain on Bieber’s YouTube channel and the spirit captured in them has remained in his music, even if at times it has appeared to be shoved into the back seat and told to remain quiet while the adults were talking.By the dawn of the 2010s, he was a pop phenom, and a couple of years after that, he was the most successful male pop star of his generation. The more successful he became, though, the more his connection to R&B was pared back. “Journals,” his 2013 EP of lo-fi soul, became a connoisseur’s favorite, but didn’t reorient his trip to the pop stratosphere. On his biggest hits — especially the 2015 pair “Where Are Ü Now” and “What Do You Mean?” — his voice, and how it was filtered, was more eau de toilette than eau de parfum.A decade has passed since then, and Bieber has spent long stretches of that time in a kind of public retreat. He’s had big hits, and he’s toured big rooms, and he’s been an object of tabloid scrutiny and public speculation about his mental health; largely, he’s been a superstar seeking a shadow.“Swag,” Bieber’s seventh studio album, which was released with almost no advance notice last week, is a winning example of an older artist — though, at just 31, it feels lightly ludicrous to refer to Bieber this way — being willing to toss much of the old playbook away, or at least obscure it really well. It is an album of spacey, sometimes slithery soul music — some of it highly digitally manipulated, some of it refreshingly acoustic — that feels like a reversion to Bieber’s core passions refracted through the lens of a performer who has seen too much.The low-pressure environment of this album is tactile — Bieber sings in a variety of modes, he collaborates with unexpected peers, he has standard-length songs and also snippets and skits.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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      Nine Inch Nails Revisits the ’80s, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Robert Plant, Amanda Shires, Blood Orange and more.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.Nine Inch Nails: ‘As Alive as You Need Me to Be’“As Alive as You Need to Be” explains why Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross reclaimed the Nine Inch Nails name for their latest film score, “Tron: Ares.” It’s a complete song and a return to the buzz-bomb synthesizers, stomping march beat, stereo ricochets and gut-wrenching vocals of the band’s heyday — quite suitable, in its late-1980s impact, for the latest sequel to “Tron,” the 1982 movie based on the videogame. The refrain might be a breakthrough for an artificial intelligence: “I can finally feel.”FKA twigs: ‘Perfectly’FKA twigs is still in dance-club mode for this track from “Deluxua,” the expanded version of her “Eusexua” album released in January. She chases euphoria — “Inside my head I have the best time” — over a transparent but insistent house beat topped with ghostly keyboards. Singing delicately but not hesitantly, she’s melting into the moment.Olivia Dean: ‘Lady Lady’On “Lady Lady,” the English pop-soul songwriter Olivia Dean faces change with a little nostalgia and a little hope. “She’s always changing me without a word,” Dean sings, adding, “I was just getting used to her.” Sumptuous keyboards and gently encouraging backup vocals tip the balance toward optimism: “Now we know that dream ain’t coming true / There’s room for something new.”Hermanos Gutiérrez featuring Leon Bridges: ‘Elegantly Wasted’It’s just a guess, but perhaps Leon Bridges was listening to the lilt of a minor-key bolero when he came up with the phrase “elegantly wasted” and built a bolero-meets-soul song around it. The rhythm of that refrain meshes with the guitars and rhythm section of Hermanos Gutiérrez — usually an instrumental band — while Bridges steers the song toward physical longing: “Show me how to taste it,” he pleads.Amanda Shires: ‘A Way It Goes’Retro sounds conjure bitter memories on Amanda Shires’s “A Way It Goes.” A hollow version of a girl-group beat, a distant surf-guitar twang and hovering strings are the backdrop as Shires recalls a shattering heartbreak: She was divorced from the songwriter Jason Isbell in March after a 10-year marriage. “I could tell you I felt like I was dying / Hugged my knees to my chest crying, I couldn’t stop,” she sings. But while the pain is still vivid, so is her determination to leave it behind — to find herself, a year later, “flying happily ever after the aftermath.”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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      Jane’s Addiction Members Sue One Another After Onstage Fight

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      The rock band’s singer confronted its guitarist during a show last year, leading to the cancellation of its reunion tour.Members of the rock band Jane’s Addiction are suing one another after an onstage physical altercation led to the cancellation of the remainder of last year’s reunion tour.Jane’s Addiction, which formed in 1985 and is perhaps best known for the MTV hit “Been Caught Stealing,” was performing in Boston when the singer Perry Farrell confronted the guitarist Dave Navarro. A video showed Mr. Farrell slamming his shoulder into Mr. Navarro and appearing to throw a punch before he was physically restrained.The encounter in September abruptly ended the first tour by the band’s original members in 14 years. The fallout continued on Wednesday when they filed dueling lawsuits in Los Angeles Superior Court.Eric Avery and Stephen Perkins — the band’s bassist and drummer — joined Mr. Navarro in a lawsuit accusing Mr. Farrell of assault, battery, emotional distress, negligence, breach of fiduciary duty and breach of contract. Mr. Farrell and his wife, Etty Lau Farrell, responded with a complaint against the men that alleges assault, emotional distress and breach of contract.Christopher Frost, a lawyer for Mr. Navarro, Mr. Avery and Mr. Perkins, said in a statement that Mr. Farrell’s actions left the rest of the band on the hook for an unfulfilled tour and record deal. “They have been wronged, want the accurate story told and they deserve a resolution,” he said.Mr. Farrell’s legal team said in a statement that the band’s lawsuit was a clear example of its desire to isolate and bully him. “It’s a transparent attempt to control the narrative and present themselves as the so-called ‘good guys’ — a move that’s both typical and predictable,” the statement said.The lawsuit led by Mr. Navarro said the band had suffered a “swift and painful death at the hands of Farrell’s unprovoked anger and complete lack of self-control.” It also claimed that Mr. Farrell’s behavior failed to meet the band’s standards.“Perry forgot lyrics, lost his place in songs he had sung since the 1980s and mumbled rants as he drank from a wine bottle onstage,” the lawsuit said.After the onstage fight last year, the band canceled the 15 remaining dates of its North American tour. Mr. Navarro said on social media that “the mental health difficulties of our singer” were to blame, while Mr. Farrell apologized to his bandmates, saying that his “breaking point resulted in inexcusable behavior.”Mr. Farrell offered more details in his lawsuit, saying that his bandmates had participated in a yearslong “bullying campaign” against him that included harassing him onstage.During performances, the lawsuit said, his bandmates would try to undermine him by playing their instruments so loudly that he could not hear himself sing. More

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      Connie Francis, Whose Ballads Dominated ’60s Pop Music, Dies at 87

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      Ms. Francis, who had a natural way with a wide variety of material, ruled the charts with songs like “Who’s Sorry Now” and “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You.”Connie Francis, who dominated the pop charts in the late 1950s and early ’60s with sobbing ballads like “Who’s Sorry Now?” and “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You,” as well as up-tempo soft-rock tunes like “Stupid Cupid,” “Lipstick on Your Collar” and “Vacation,” died on Wednesday. She was 87.Her publicist, Ron Roberts, announced her death in a post on Facebook. He did not say where she died or cite a cause.Petite and pretty, Ms. Francis had an easy, fluid vocal style, a powerful set of lungs and a natural way with a wide variety of material: old standards, rock ‘n’ roll, country and western, and popular songs in Italian, Yiddish, Swedish and a dozen other languages.Between 1958 and 1964, when her brand of pop music began to fall out of favor, Ms. Francis was the most popular female singer in the United States, selling 40 million records. Her 35 Top-40 hits during that period included 16 songs in the top 10, and three No. 1 hits: “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool,” “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own” and “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You.”She was best known for the pulsing, emotional delivery that coaxed every last teardrop from slow ballads like “Who’s Sorry Now?”, and made “Where the Boys Are” a potent anthem of teenage longing. Sighing youngsters thrilled to every throb in “My Happiness” and “Among My Souvenirs.”“What struck me was the purity of the voice, the emotion, the perfect pitch and intonation,” said Neil Sedaka, who wrote “Stupid Cupid” and “Where the Boys Are” with Howard Greenfield. “It was clear, concise, beautiful. When she sang ballads, they just soared.”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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      Drake Returns With Reinforcements at Wireless Fest in London

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      At the end of the first night of Wireless Festival on Friday, after Drake had been hoisted out over the tens of thousands of fans who had taken over the bottom half of London’s Finsbury Park while Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” blared over the speakers and fireworks brightened the night sky, he asked the audience, and also festival organizers, for a little indulgence. Curfew was firm, but art has its own clock.This year’s three-day Wireless Festival, at Finsbury Park in London, was given over to Drake and his many spheres of influence.Emli Bendixen for The New York TimesBoom, there was Lauryn Hill, suddenly onstage performing the feisty Fugees classic “Ready or Not.” Drake had dropped down into the pit below the stage, and was looking up at Hill with joyful awe. He popped back onstage while Hill performed her biting kiss-off “Ex-Factor,” which formed the base for one of his breeziest songs, “Nice for What,” which he performed alongside her until the festival cut their mics off.This year’s Wireless Festival was a three-day affair given over to Drake and his many spheres of influence, and in a weekend full of collaborations and guest appearances spotlighting various corners of his very broad reach, this was perhaps the most telling. During her career, Hill has been a ferocious rapper, a gifted singer, a bridge between hip-hop and pop from around the globe. She is the musician who, apart from Kanye West (now Ye), provided perhaps the clearest antecedent for Drake and the kind of star he wished to be: eclectic, hot-button, versatile, transformative.Drake on night three with the British rap star Central Cee, one of many guests who shared the stage.Emli Bendixen for The New York TimesApart from a few dates on an Australian tour earlier this year that got cut short, this was Drake’s first high-profile live outing in over a year. That public retreat came in the wake of last year’s grim and accusation-filled battle with Kendrick Lamar — in which Lamar’s Not Like Us,” which suggested Drake had a preference for too-young women, became a pop anthem, a Grammy winner and a Super Bowl halftime showstopper, as well as the focus of a lawsuit by Drake against Universal Music Group, the parent company both rappers share.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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      Billy Jones, Baby’s All Right Owner and NYC Nightlife Impresario, Dies at 45

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      He opened Baby’s All Right and three other nightclubs, a restaurant and a record store in a dozen years, helping the city maintain its cultural verve.As a recent college graduate in the early 2000s, Billy Jones lived with his parents in Richmond, Va., but his fantasy life was elsewhere: in Williamsburg, the Brooklyn neighborhood that had become the world capital of indie rock. The closest he could get was visiting his local Barnes & Noble, where he would read magazines covering New York’s music scene.Then one day in 2002, he made the leap: He was leaving home, he told his father. He and the high school friends who made up his band, Other Passengers, had decided to try to make it big in New York.In Williamsburg, Mr. Jones began working as a barista, with dreams of indie-rock stardom. It wasn’t so far-fetched. At a cafe down the block, another barista, Kyp Malone, would soon gain renown as a singer and guitarist with the group TV on the Radio.There was passion in the moans of Mr. Jones’s singing, but he did not become a rock star. In time, the Williamsburg concert venues that had launched some of his peers — clubs like 285 Kent, Glasslands, Death by Audio — all closed. Rents in the neighborhood had skyrocketed. Aspiring young musicians left.And instead of achieving his own dreams, Mr. Jones wound up doing something else: He made it possible for other people to keep dreaming.In 2013, he and a friend, Zachary Mexico, opened Baby’s All Right, a club at 146 Broadway in Williamsburg. It became, as The New York Times wrote in 2015, the “nightlife preserver” of the neighborhood. It was a small enough venue to offer major acts an indie spirit that they could no longer find elsewhere in New York City, yet big enough to make unproven musicians feel that they had made it.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