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      The Best Songs of 2025, So Far

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      Ten tracks that push boundaries, uncork emotions and can get the block party started.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs. After six months of listening, here’s what they have on repeat. (Note: It’s not a ranking, it’s a playlist.) Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.Bad Bunny, ‘Baile Inolvidable’Heartache and heritage mingle in “Baile Inolvidable” (“Unforgettable Dance”) from Bad Bunny’s album “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” (“I Should Have Taken More Photos”). The song bridges current and vintage sounds, underscoring the multigenerational continuity of Puerto Rican music. It begins as a blurred dirge of synthesizer lines and Bad Bunny’s vocals, mourning a lost romance; “I thought we’d grow old together,” he sings in Spanish, then admits, “It’s my fault.” But the track switches to an old-school salsa jam, with organic percussion, horns and a jazzy piano. The lessons of the girlfriend who taught him “how to love” and “how to dance” have stayed with him. — Jon Pareles▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeDrake, ‘Nokia’After making headlines for a war of words with Kendrick Lamar, Drake returned with one of his loosest projects.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAfter the conclusion (?) of his war of words with Kendrick Lamar, Drake briefly hibernated, then re-emerged with one of his loosest projects, “Some Sexy Songs 4 U,” with longtime collaborator PartyNextDoor. Its charming center is “Nokia,” a saucy and cheeky electro-rap track that calls back to the sweet woe-is-me plaint of “Hotline Bling,” perhaps the peak of universal-approval-era Drake. — Jon Caramanica▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeB Jacks featuring Zeddy Will, ‘Get Jiggy’A post-drill hip-house throwback that restores lightness to contemporary rap. These two young rappers — B Jacks from New Jersey, Zeddy Will from Queens — find a middle ground between the dance floor and the comedic internet, making a song that works as a party anthem, a meme soundtrack or a savvy entry in the long lineage of club-focused hip-hop. It’s summer block party manna. — Caramanica▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeObongjayar, ‘Not in Surrender’Obongjayar’s “Not in Surrender” finds its way to euphoria.Diego Donamaria/Getty ImagesWe 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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      Sly Stone and the Sound of an America That Couldn’t Last

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      The influential musician, who died on Monday at 82, forged harmony — musical and otherwise — that he wasn’t able to hold together on his own.“Landscape” is just one of those words. It’s lost all mouthfeel. It implies a sort of vastness — “the landscape of history,” “the landscape of man,” “the commercial baking landscape.” As craft, it connotes comeliness: “landscape painting.” In action, it exacts beauty through order: a city’s landscaper.Sly Stone died on Monday, at 82, and there it was again. He “redefined the landscape of pop, funk, and rock music,” declared an official news release. It’s more like landscapes. But who’d deny the gist? I’m sitting here studying a photo of Stone and his band, the Family Stone, five dudes, two chicks, two white, five black. For a racially traumatized America, here was a landscape that redefined “landscape,” too.The band was his idea, as were their songs. What they redefined was how much sound and rhythm you could pack into three minutes — often, into less. The opening 15 seconds of their first hit, “Dance to the Music,” are a blast, like from a launchpad: Greg Errico beats the skins off his drums while Cynthia Robinson screams for you to get up. The horns sound drunk; Freddie Stone’s guitar sounds like it’s responding to a 9-1-1 call.Then at about the 16th second — mid-flight — the ascending party halts and a doo-wop parachute opens. Harmony and tambourine lilt to earth, whereupon we’re exhorted to … dance to the music. Lyrically, all that’s happening here is instruction, pronouncement. “I’m gonna add some bottom,” bellows Larry Graham, “so that the dancers just won’t hide,” before his motorific bass lick starts peeling wallflowers off the wall.This, to paraphrase another Sly gemstone, is a simple song that, musically, teems with, to quote a different gemstone, a vital songwriting and performance philosophy: fun. What else is happening here? Well, the landscapers are celebrating the landscape of themselves. They’re warming up, warming us up, banging out their promise of redefinition. Motown, rock ’n’ roll, gospel, marching band, jazz, lullaby. For about three years, every one their hits was most of all of those: America’s sounds pressed together into radical newness by seven people who dared to embody a utopia that, come 1968, when the band was reaching it apogee, seemed otherwise despoiled. For three years, this band was disillusionment’s oasis.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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      Book Review: ‘Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly,’ by Jeff Weiss

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      In a scrappy new memoir, Jeff Weiss blurs fact and fancy as he recounts his stint as a bit player in the celebrity-industrial complex.WAITING FOR BRITNEY SPEARS: A True Story, Allegedly, by Jeff WeissIn 2023, the pop princess Britney Spears published her autobiography, “The Woman in Me.” In its pages, Spears had choice words for the paparazzi who pursued her at the heights and depths of her fame. She described them as enemy combatants, the ghosts in a Pac-Man game, sharks who sensed blood in the water. They were, she wrote, “an army of zombies” who treated her with “disregard” and “disgust.”She hated them. She feared them. Jeff Weiss, by his own account, was one of them.In the 2000s, Weiss worked as an occasional reporter for a couple of tabloids. (He was also cited for trespassing on Brad Pitt’s property, ostensibly at the bidding of People magazine.) He details these exploits — with grandiosity and rue — in “Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly.” It is not a novel, not yet a memoir. A roman à clef? Probably. Autofiction? Sure. It is also, in its most engaging moments, a bedazzled biography of Spears herself, as glimpsed across the dance floor, or through a long lens.Weiss, if you believe him, first met Spears when he sneaked into the “ … Baby One More Time” video shoot, which was held at his Venice, Calif., high school. The first glimpse of a pigtailed Spears ensorcelled him. A few years later, sprung from college and lightly adrift, Weiss found himself flung into her orbit again. Zhuzhing his résumé and shushing his qualms, Weiss persuaded a tabloid to hire him as a Hollywood party and celebrity reporter. (Context clues suggest that the tabloid was Star; in the book, Weiss calls it Nova.)This is a book that wears its antecedents on its sleeve, or perhaps low on the brow, like a Von Dutch hat. There’s new journalism here and gonzo journalism, as well as more literary stabs at the mournfulness of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the contempt of Nathanael West. Parts of the book read like a retread of “Miss Lonelyhearts,” doused in apple martinis. Other sections suggest link-rotted LiveJournal entries. In broad strokes, it is a story of a young man’s disillusionment, a West Coast “Sweet Smell of Success,” if success smelled like Victoria’s Secret body mist.These strokes are indifferently compelling. Weiss falters in building stakes or sympathy for the self he describes. A 22-year-old college grad distracted from working on his novel? Oh no! And there is a cloying quality to his repeated insistence that he is too pure, too talented to do the work of a tabloid reporter. Many of us who make a life in journalism have done as bad or worse, without ever expensing our drinks.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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      Sly Stone, Maestro of a Multifaceted, Hitmaking Band, Dies at 82

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      Sly Stone, the influential, eccentric and preternaturally rhythmic singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer whose run of hits in the late 1960s and early ’70s with his band the Family Stone could be dance anthems, political documents or both, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 82. The cause was “a prolonged battle with C.O.P.D.,” or lung disease, “and other underlying health issues,” according to a statement from his representatives.“Sly was a monumental figure, a groundbreaking innovator, and a true pioneer who redefined the landscape of pop, funk, and rock music,” the statement said.As the colorful maestro and mastermind of a multiracial, mixed-gender band, Mr. Stone experimented with the R&B, soul and gospel music he was raised on in the San Francisco area, mixing classic ingredients of Black music with progressive funk and the burgeoning freedoms of psychedelic rock ’n’ roll.The band’s most recognizable songs, many of which would be sampled by hip-hop artists, include “Everyday People,” “Dance to the Music,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Family Affair,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime” and “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).”Mr. Stone, second from left, with the other members of Sly and the Family Stone in 1970.GAB Archive/RedfernsWe 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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      Roger Nichols, Songwriter Behind Carpenters Hits, Dies at 84

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      With Paul Williams, he wrote enduring 1970s soft-rock classics like “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays.”Roger Nichols, a California songwriter and musician who, with his pop-alchemist partner Paul Williams, wrote an advertising jingle for a bank that turned into “We’ve Only Just Begun,” a milestone hit for the Carpenters and a timeless wedding weeper, died on May 17 at his home in Bend, Ore. He was 84.His death, from pneumonia, was confirmed by his daughter Caroline Nichols.Mr. Nichols was best known for his collaborations with Paul Williams, the songwriter, lyricist and all-around celebrity known for songs like “Rainbow Connection,” Kermit the Frog’s forlorn anthem from “The Muppet Movie” (1979).With Mr. Nichols focusing on the music and Mr. Williams conjuring up the words, the duo churned out silky pop nuggets like Three Dog Night’s “Out in the Country” (1970), which rose to No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100; “Traveling Boy,” which Art Garfunkel released in 1973; and “I Never Had It So Good,” recorded by Barbra Streisand in 1975.But it was with their work for the Carpenters, the hit-machine sibling duo Karen and Richard Carpenter, that Mr. Nichols and Mr. Williams scaled the heights of pop success.“We’ve Only Just Begun” peaked at No. 2 in 1970, sold more than a million copies of sheet music and served as a timeless showcase for Ms. Carpenter’s spellbinding contralto vocal stylings.The single “We’ve Only Just Begun,” by Mr. Nichols and Paul Williams, rose to No. 2 on he music charts and became a staple of weddings. A&M RecordsWe 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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      Andy Bell of Erasure’s Magical Mystery World

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      The frontman, whose first solo album in 15 years recently arrived, explains why he’s a fan of gems, psychics and snails.For years, Andy Bell of Erasure has been drawn to women of a certain age. “Women like Catherine Deneuve or Deborah Harry have this innate royalness about them, this sense of fully being,” he said. “I’ve always admired that.”Imagine his joy, then, when, upon turning 60 last year, he began to feel that way about himself. “It’s almost like seeing yourself from the outside and appreciating who you are,” Bell said by video call from his vacation home in Majorca, Spain. “How lovely to feel that way!”The feeling gave Bell so much confidence, it helped inspire him to release his first solo album outside of his hit band in 15 years. Titled “Ten Crowns,” after the Tarot card that signifies finding balance in your life, the album extends Bell’s legacy of making effervescent dance music, but with a twist. Instead of working with Vince Clarke, his usual partner in Erasure, he paired with the songwriter, producer and remixer Dave Audé. “It did feel a bit like cheating,” Bell said with a laugh.The prime subject of the songs — love — echoes the theme of Erasure’s classic synth-pop hits of the ’80s like “Oh, L’Amour” and “Chains of Love.” (The band will celebrate its 40th anniversary next year.) As usual, the new songs sharply contrast ecstatic music with yearning lyrics. “For me, love is an unreachable destination,” Bell said. “To love someone unconditionally is almost an impossible task.”It’s far easier, he finds, to love the things that make up his list of 10 essential inspirations. Interestingly, none have anything to do with music. Instead, they show a heightened sense of the visual world though, to Bell, they’re intimately related. “I definitely see things as sounds,” he said. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Anything 3-DI love that illusion. It brings you to a place where reality meets fantasy. I think my interest stems from when I first saw Andy Warhol’s “Flesh for Frankenstein” with Joe Dallesandro. What’s not to like?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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      Lil Wayne Gets Earnest With Bono, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Sabrina Carpenter, Ethel Cain, Sudan Archives 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.Lil Wayne featuring Bono, ‘The Days’“I ain’t gettin’ younger, but I’m gettin’ better,” Lil Wayne declares in “The Days,” a rock anthem about survival and seizing the moment: “If my days are numbered, treat every day like Day One.” None other than Bono shares the song, starting and ending it and singing about “the days that tell you what life is for,” while the production emulates U2’s grand marches. Elsewhere on his new album, “Tha Carter VI,” Lil Wayne offers his usual punchlines and free associations; here, he’s unabashedly earnest.Water From Your Eyes, ‘Life Signs’The Brooklyn duo Water From Your Eyes revels in musical jump cuts and not-quite-sequiturs. “I am coming apart / I’m becoming together, true to form,” Rachel Brown sings in “Life Signs” from an album due in August. Nate Amos’s guitars leap from wiry, hopscotching math-rock lines to brute-force distortion and back; Brown deadpans through monotone verses, but offers a wistful melody in the chorus. By the end of the song, somehow it all makes sense.Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Manchild’Sabrina Carpenter lightheartedly and brutally dissects what might be called a himbo in “Manchild.” In a track that starts as synth-pop and ends up as country-rock, she mock-appreciates how “your brain just ain’t there” with a guy who can’t charge a phone, much less satisfy her. “I like my men all incompetent,” she claims, barely suppressing a giggle.Addison Rae, ‘Fame Is a Gun’Who could be better than Addison Rae, the TikTok sensation turned pop songwriter, to sing about craving attention, achieving the “glamorous life” and dealing with all the parasocial fallout? “I live for the appeal,” she sings, adding, “It never was enough / I always wanted more.” Yet she also realizes, “I’m your dream girl, but you’re not my type.” The production cycles through its three chords with an insistent pulse that hints at the pressure to keep generating more content.Sudan Archives, ‘Dead’Sudan Archives — the songwriter, violinist and producer Brittney Parks — powers through an identity crisis with the shape-shifting, maximalist, ultimately unstoppable track “Dead.” She asks “Where my old self at?” and “Where my new self at?” and teases “Did you miss me?” and “Do you miss me?” In four minutes, the song morphs among quasi-orchestral string arrangements, spacey electronics and walloping dance beats, then merges them all in a triumphant closing stomp.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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      Everything Millennial Is Cool Again

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      JNCO Jeans, big hair, “Sex and the City” and recession pop: Peak Millennial is back and the era’s trends are taking on a new life.They trolled us for being old when we hit our 30s, old-fashioned for remembering a time before email and for being “cringe” as we kept wearing our skinny jeans and ankle socks.Oh, how the tables have turned.Gen Z and younger generations are picking up where we, their (slightly) older counterparts, left off in the 2000s.The Gen Z girlies are watching “Sex and the City” and living their best Carrie Bradshaw lifestyles. Those Facebook albums of blurry photos of a night out? They’re back, repackaged as an Instagram “photo dump.” Ditto for big hair and wired headphones.“I do like seeing how a younger generation interprets an older trend when it comes back around,” said Erin Miller, 35, a TikTok creator and self-proclaimed 1990s and 2000s historian. She wasn’t surprised that many trends loved by millennials were making a comeback. “Does it remind me of my age? Yes.”But that’s not to say everything is the same. Millennials (typically those born from the early 1980s to the late ’90s) had infomercials and mail-order. Gen Z and Alpha have TikTok makeup tutorials and fast fashion. Bradshaw’s cosmopolitan has been exchanged for an Aperol spritz.Members of generations Z and Alpha are putting their own mark on once-ubiquitous phenomena, and according to Ms. Miller, they’re the winners: “I think they are doing it better.”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