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      The Young Women Who Make TikTok Weep

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherWhen the Scottish singer-songwriter Katie Gregson-MacLeod recorded a verse of an unfinished song called “Complex” and posted it to TikTok in August, she was tapping into the app’s penchant for confessional storytelling, and demonstrating its ease of distribution and repurposing.Overnight, the snippet propelled her into viral success, leading to a recording contract and placing her in a lineage of young women who have found success on the app via emotional catharsis — sad, mad or both. That includes Olivia Rodrigo, whose “Drivers License” first gained traction there, and also Lauren Spencer-Smith, Sadie Jean, Gracie Abrams, Lizzy McAlpine, Gayle and many more.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the evolution of TikTok’s musical ambitions and the expansion of its emotional range, how the music business has tried to capitalize on the app’s intimacy, and the speed with which a bedroom-recording confessional can become a universal story line.Guest:Rachel Brodsky, who writes about pop music for StereogumConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      ‘Almost Famous’ Heads to Broadway, Purple Aura Intact

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      SAN DIEGO — In the 2000 film “Almost Famous,” William Miller, all of 15 and eager to conduct an interview for Creem magazine, can’t manage to slide past the brusque security guard at the arena where Black Sabbath is playing, despite his assurances that he is indeed a journalist. Not on the list, the guard says, then tells him to go to the top of the ramp “with the other girls.”One morning in August, Cameron Crowe — who made the coming-of-age movie, a gentle fictionalization of his days writing for Rolling Stone in the early 1970s — was back at that ramp. “This is where I’d be sent,” he said with a laugh, pointing to the spot where William, his cinematic alter ego, meets Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) and the other Band-Aids, the not-groupies who would help him navigate the backstage world of rock ’n’ roll.“The fact that they befriended me and started showing me the ropes was the beginning of everything,” Crowe, 65, said. “There are so many times where, if one thing didn’t happen, there’s no ‘Almost Famous.’”The film earned him an Academy Award for best original screenplay and went on to become a beloved story about the transformative power of music. So it was perhaps only a matter of time that it would transform yet again into, yes, a musical.Solea Pfeiffer, left, as Penny Lane, and Casey Likes as William Miller in the musical “Almost Famous.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Almost Famous” opens on Broadway next month, three years after its world premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe. Scores of Hollywood films have been made into musicals over the years, but few of the original filmmakers have had their hands in the remaking (Garry Marshall’s “Pretty Woman” and Patricia Resnick’s “9 to 5” are notable exceptions), as Crowe is doing here, writing the book and co-writing the lyrics.Crowe, who has written and directed such movies as “Say Anything,” “Jerry Maguire” and “Vanilla Sky,” initially was unsure about making a musical out of his critically acclaimed film. “I was really nervous about whether it would translate,” he said. “Because the show’s not a jukebox thing. It’s meant to capture the same thing as the movie, a personal story with music that you love.”Despite his concerns, the musical received rave reviews (the Los Angeles Times called it “as shimmering as a stadium of lighters during a Led Zeppelin encore”). But a planned Broadway debut in 2020 was forced into cold storage by the pandemic. The ensemble stayed in touch over the intervening years via a group chat, however, and nearly all of the original cast is returning for the show’s Broadway run, including Casey Likes as William Miller and Solea Pfeiffer as Penny Lane.“One of the silver linings of this horrible moment that we all went through was that the work just deepened,” Pfeiffer said. “And Cameron’s rewriting stuff all the time. It’s like a living, breathing thing.”Both the show and the original film boast such hits as Joni Mitchell’s “River” and Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” The film’s Grammy-winning soundtrack album, already a double LP set, contains only a third of the 50-some songs in the film.According to Lia Vollack, one of the show’s producers and a former president of worldwide music for Sony Pictures Entertainment, none of the bands whose music they sought for the Broadway outing turned them down.Crowe based “Almost Famous” on his days as a young music writer for Creem, Rolling Stone and other rock magazines.Magdalena Wosinska for The New York Times“Cameron and I both used our personal relationships to make things happen,” she said.Back at the arena, Crowe wandered the cavernous backstage area. In one nondescript room, now used to host visiting teams, he remembered interviewing rock royalty, including the members of Black Sabbath, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Traffic. “The last time I saw Ronnie Van Zant was in this dressing room,” he said.Despite a youth that many rock fans could only dream of, when Crowe began writing the “Almost Famous” screenplay, he didn’t make it about himself. “I initially wrote a script for David Bowie about a publicist who’s working with this Peter Frampton-type character named Ricky Fedora,” he said. “Penny Lane was there, but I was just a tiny character.”Inspired by semi-autobiographical films by some of his cinematic heroes, including Neil Simon, Barry Levinson and François Truffaut, Crowe let his younger self take center stage. In the Broadway version, Crowe pulls even more from his own life, in particular, the relationship between his mother and sister.He recalled advice from Tom Kitt, the show’s composer, who told him, “The movie is your story, so let’s not adapt the movie when we have all this source material that came before that.”Anika Larsen, who plays William’s mother, Elaine, worried about playing the character brought to life in the movie by Frances McDormand. “The first week was terrifying and awful,” Larsen said. “She’s my favorite actor of all time. I was like, why would I do or say anything different than Frances McDormand?”Kate Hudson played Penny Lane in the 2000 film “Almost Famous,” earning an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.Neal Preston/DreamWorks PicturesUnderstanding the musical theater aspect of her role — where there are no camera close-ups at an actor’s disposal — helped her make peace with it. “Our tasks are so different,” she said. “Frances is telling you volumes with just the slightest look on her face. And I’m singing all of those things in songs.”In the film and the musical, Elaine Miller frets about the potential ill effects the rock world might have on William (“Don’t take drugs,” she famously and embarrassingly yells after dropping him off at the Black Sabbath concert). But Alice Crowe, the director’s mother, who died in 2019 before the musical opened, could not have been prouder of what became of her music-obsessed son. When the show was in rehearsals at the Old Globe, Crowe would call her every night, sometimes expressing doubts about how things were going.“She’d say, It’s going to be great,” he recalled. “Your negative thoughts are actions! You’ll create it! Never give up! You never give up! You love theater! This is the legacy of your family! Tell the story! Tell the story!”In addition to bringing a bit more of Alice Crowe into Elaine Miller, Crowe and his team took a second look at Penny Lane, with an eye to the #MeToo movement. “We wanted to give her more agency,” Crowe said.Much more than just an object of two men’s desires, Penny finds her voice in the show, literally, and sings just as much as the boys in the band. “In the film, it’s so much from William’s point of view,” Pfeiffer said. “In our version, Penny’s more humanized. We see her feet touch the ground.”The show’s producers have also dropped a scene in the film where she may or may not confess to being underage and omitted moments played for comedy when she overdoses.“I don’t think it’s about bringing Penny Lane and the Band-Aids up-to-date,” said Jeremy Herrin, the show’s director. “I think it would be appalling to give characters a vocabulary and a thought process they wouldn’t have had in those days. But we try to be very responsible about how we present it.”Crowe outside the San Diego arena where a key scene from his movie takes place. “There are so many times,” he said, “where, if one thing didn’t happen, there’s no ‘Almost Famous.’”Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesThe creators are also shifting the perspective to more of the characters, largely through song. Kitt recalled writing a song a day for Crowe in the early stages of the show’s creation. “Cameron is a poet,” he said. “These characters want to have new thoughts in the voice of Cameron Crowe. So there are many places where you’ll hear something in the lyrics that came directly out of the film.”The show marks Crowe’s first Broadway musical, and the first time on Broadway for 15 members of the cast, including Likes, who debuted the part of William when he was 17. “I basically grew up on the show,” he said. “I do feel like the kid on this production. And when I don’t, I’m definitely reminded by my cast members.”After his visit to the arena, Crowe stopped by the San Diego apartment he lived in during high school, the place where his sister gave him the stash of LPs — “Pet Sounds” by The Beach Boys, “Cheap Thrills” by Big Brother and the Holding Company — that would later shape his musical tastes and, as his sister promised, set him free.While there, Crowe talked about what he had learned about writing musicals. “Be succinct,” he said. “It’s a great lesson for me, because I write really long scripts.” He also discovered the camaraderie and closeness that comes with working on a show for months and even years, as one does in the theater, as opposed to the short days and weeks one spends on a movie shoot.“I love, love, love that you live with the actors,” he said.Crowe is taking full advantage of the opportunity. “Cameron is there every minute of every rehearsal every day,” said Drew Gehling, who plays Jeff Bebe, the driven lead singer of Stillwater, the band William is profiling.As for William, Crowe’s eternally young alter ego, “I’m still that guy,” Crowe said. “I still love doing interviews. I love William and his relationship with his sister, just trying to make it all work in the family.”Not that it’s ever easy seeing his life play out in front of the masses, whether in a movie theater or on a Broadway stage. “It’s emotional,” he said. “When people would come up after the movie and go, ‘It’s too long. I don’t like him in Ohio,’” I’d be like, ‘Is my life too long?’ It’s hard not to take it personally.” More

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      Anita Kerr, an Architect of the Nashville Sound, Dies at 94

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      She and her background vocalists were heard “oohing” and “aahing” on thousands of country and pop hits recorded in the 1950s and ’60s.Anita Kerr, the prolific session singer and arranger who was an architect of the sumptuous Nashville Sound and later had a multifaceted career in pop music, died on Monday in Geneva. She was 94. Her death, at a nursing home in the city’s Carouge district, was confirmed by her daughter Kelley Kerr.Working with producers like Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley, Ms. Kerr and her quartet of background vocalists, the Anita Kerr Singers, were heard “oohing” and “aahing” on thousands of recordings made in Nashville in the 1950s and ’60s. In the process, they contributed to the birth of the lush orchestral Nashville Sound, refining the rough-hewed provincial music for which the city was known into something that appealed to a wider audience.Just as important, Ms. Kerr and her ensemble helped preserve country music’s viability in the face of the commercial threat presented by the emergence of rock ’n’ roll.Ms. Kerr sang soprano and wrote and conducted arrangements for the group, which included the alto Dottie Dillard, the tenor Gil Wright and the bass Louis Nunley. Together they performed on hits by future members of the Country Music Hall of Fame like Red Foley, Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow, as well as on major pop singles, including Bobby Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock” (1957), Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” (1960) and Burl Ives’s “A Little Bitty Tear” (1961).Ms. Kerr and her singers also crooned the indelible “dum-dum-dum, dooby-doo-wah” on “Only the Lonely,” a No. 2 pop hit for Roy Orbison in 1960.With the possible exception of the Jordanaires, the Southern gospel quartet featured on landmark recordings by Elvis Presley and Patsy Cline, no vocal ensemble was in greater demand for session work in Nashville in the 1950s and ’60s than the Anita Kerr Singers.“At the beginning we recorded two sessions per week,” Ms. Kerr wrote on her website, describing the postwar boom in Nashville’s music industry. “Then, by 1955, we were recording eight sessions per week, plus a five-day-a-week national program at WSM with Jim Reeves.”“Gradually,” she went on, “we grew to 12 to 18 sessions per week, and I was writing as many arrangements for these sessions as was physically possible. Loving every minute of it, mind you. Tired at times, but happy.”Beginning in 1956, the group began working in New York City as well, winning a contest on the popular CBS television and radio variety show “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.” They soon began making regular trips to appear on the program.In 1960, another quartet led by Ms. Kerr, the short-lived Little Dippers, had a Top 10 pop hit with the dreamy ballad “Forever.”Ms. Kerr, center, with the 1970 version of the Anita Kerr Singers in Amsterdam. She, her husband and her daughters moved to Switzerland that year.Fotocollectie AnefoThe Anita Kerr Singers signed a contract with RCA Victor Records in 1961 and went on to release a series of albums of easy-listening music, some of them credited to the Anita Kerr Quartet. One, “We Dig Mancini,” which featured renditions of TV and movie themes written by Henry Mancini, won a Grammy Award for best performance by a vocal group in 1966, besting the Beatles’ “Help!” for the honor.The Kerr group won the same award the next year for their cover of “A Man and a Woman,” the theme song from the 1966 French film of the same name.During the early ’60s, the group, augmented by four additional vocalists, released several albums of contemporary pop material as part of RCA’s Living Voices series.Ms. Kerr and her ensemble also lent their voices to a number of significant R&B hits of the day, including Carla Thomas’s “Gee Whiz” (1960), Esther Phillips’s “Release Me” (1962) and Bobby Bland’s “Share Your Love With Me” (1963).In addition, Ms. Kerr wrote and recorded jingles for some of the era’s popular AM radio stations, including WMCA in New York City and WLS in Chicago.Anita Jean Grilli was born on Oct. 13, 1927, in Memphis to William and Sofia (Polonara) Grilli, Italian immigrants who settled in Mississippi with their families as teenagers and became farm workers. Moving with his wife to Memphis, her father opened a grocery store there. Her mother, a contralto, had the opportunity to study classical music in New York but instead became a homemaker.Anita and her two older brothers studied piano at their mother’s insistence, but only Anita, who began taking lessons at the age of 4, stayed with it. By the time she was in the fourth grade at St. Thomas Catholic School, she was playing organ for the school’s Masses.At 15, she was hired as a staff musician for an after-school radio program in Memphis. She also played with local dance bands, for which she composed arrangements.She married Al Kerr in 1947 and moved to Nashville after he accepted a job as a disc jockey at the local radio station WKDA. Ms. Kerr again worked with dance bands, and she also assembled a vocal quintet that was eventually hired by WSM, the station that broadcast “The Grand Ole Opry,” to perform on its show “Sunday Down South.”A year later, Ms. Kerr and members of her group were hired as background singers for Decca Records. They changed their name, at the label’s urging, from the Sunday Down South Choir to the Anita Kerr Singers.In 1965, after almost two decades in Nashville — and after she had divorced Mr. Kerr and married Alex Grob, a Swiss businessman who became her manager — Ms. Kerr moved to Los Angeles, where she wrote orchestral scores and worked in pop, jazz, Latin and other idioms besides country music.She assembled a new edition of the Anita Kerr Singers and released a series of musically omnivorous records, including three mariachi albums credited to the Mexicali Singers. She made several records devoted to the catalogs of songwriters like Burt Bacharach and Hal David and composed, arranged and conducted the music for “The Sea,” an album featuring the poetry of Rod McKuen. And she served as the choral director for the first season of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1967.In 1970, Ms. Kerr and her husband, along with her two daughters from her first marriage, moved to Switzerland. Ms. Kerr formed yet another edition of her singing group there and continued to write, record and conduct. Two of the gospel albums she made during this period were nominated for Grammys.In 1975, she and her husband established Mountain Studios in Montreux. They later sold it to the English rock band Queen, which eventually turned it into “Queen: The Studio Experience,” a museum and exhibition benefiting the Mercury Phoenix Trust.Ms. Kerr remained active into the 1980s and beyond, writing scores for films including the 1972 drama “Limbo” and conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and other ensembles.Ms. Kerr, who wasn’t always credited for her work as an arranger and group leader in Nashville — and is still is not a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame — received a special award from the music licensing organization ASCAP in 1975, recognizing her “contributions to the birth and development of the Nashville Sound.” In 1992 she was honored by the Recording Academy with a Governors Award for her “outstanding contribution to American Music.”“Anita Kerr: America’s First Lady of Music,” a biography written by Barry Pugh with a foreword by Mr. Bacharach, was published this year.In addition to her daughter Kelley, Ms. Kerr is survived by her husband; another daughter, Suzanne Trebert; five grandchildren; and two great-granddaughters.From early childhood on, Ms. Kerr said, she knew she would spend her life making music.“I did everything regarding music, I couldn’t get enough,” she wrote on her website. “I never had the problem of wondering what I was going to do when I grew up. I always knew that it would be music.” More

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      Anton Fier, Drummer Who Left Stamp on a Downtown Scene, Dies at 66

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      He worked with everyone from the Feelies to Herbie Hancock to Laurie Anderson, as well as leading the indie-rock supergroup the Golden Palominos. But there was a troubled side.Even at his musical peak in the 1980s, Anton Fier, a drummer, producer and bandleader who brought power and precision to his work with acts as diverse as the Feelies, Herbie Hancock, Laurie Anderson and his own star-studded ensemble, the Golden Palominos, seemed to glimpse a dark end for himself.The film and music critic Glenn Kenny, in an email, remembered running into Mr. Fier in the mid-1980s at the Hoboken, N.J., nightclub Maxwell’s, then a cauldron of indie rock, and querying him about alarming details on the sleeve of the Palominos’ album “Visions of Excess.”The rear cover featured a photograph of Mr. Fier, visibly drunk, quaffing a cocktail at a rock club. With it was an acknowledgment that read, “For Jim Gordon and Bonzo,” a reference to the Derek and the Dominos drummer who murdered his own mother during a psychotic episode, and to John Bonham, the Led Zeppelin drummer who died at 32 after consuming some 40 shots of vodka.Mr. Fier seemed to be hinting at his own grisly demise. “I don’t care,” Mr. Kenny recalled him saying. “I’m not going to live to be 35.”With anyone else, the episode might fit a familiar narrative — the self-destructive rocker in a death spiral. But throughout his life, friends said, Mr. Fier always resisted easy categorization.He was a punk-rock provocateur who could extemporize, seemingly for hours, about free-jazz pioneers and Ghanaian percussion luminaries; an artist with big ambitions and a web of platinum connections, but also a loner who shunned interviews and self-promotion; a prickly contrarian who seemed to revel in confrontation, but who was also known among friends for a kind, generous spirit.“Anton was kind of like a Tootsie Pop, with a hard exterior and a soft core,” the singer-songwriter Lianne Smith, a close friend who worked with him, said in a phone interview.Little wonder, then, that his death on Sept. 14 at 66 — confirmed by a cremation notice from a service in Basel, Switzerland — left as many questions as answers. The cause was rumored to be voluntary assisted dying, the location said to be in Switzerland, and suicide itself did not seem out of the question. Plagued by money troubles and waning career prospects, he had openly discussed the topic among friends in recent years. But where? When? How?He had certainly fallen on hard times. Dogged by money woes, lacking musical inspiration and, after injuring his wrists, hindered in playing drums to his own high standards, he had lost his only outlet. “He had a lot of pressures and a lot of anxieties,” Ms. Smith said. “But when he played music, he was a complete human being.”Mr. Fier in 1987. “Anton was kind of like a Tootsie Pop,” a friend and fellow musician said, “with a hard exterior and a soft core.”Rick McGinnisAnton John Fier III was born on June 20, 1956, in Cleveland, to Anton J. Fier Jr., an electrician and former Marine, and Ruthe Marie Fier. His parents split up when he was young, and Mr. Fier, who was known as Tony in his school days, endured a difficult relationship with his stepfather, a polka musician, he later told friends.Turning to music, he worked in a record store as a teenager and eventually drummed his way into the Cleveland proto-punk scene, recording with a version of the Styrenes and playing on the seminal 1978 EP “Datapanik in the Year Zero” by Pere Ubu, the conceptual band that calls its genre “avant garage.”Soon after, Mr. Fier followed his musical dreams to New York, where he brokered his encyclopedic knowledge of music into a job at the SoHo Music Gallery, a record store catering to the downtown music cognoscenti. There, he seemed more interested in chatting about records than selling them.Mr. Kenny recalled, “I remember walking in one day and these two cats” — Mr. Fier and the experimental saxophonist John Zorn, a fellow clerk — “were sitting up front talking about Charlie Parker, treating browsers like they were minor inconveniences.”Mr. Fier did more than talk about music. A gifted and ferocious drummer, he got his big break in 1978 when he answered an ad in The Village Voice placed by the Feelies, a cerebral indie group from New Jersey that The Voice had recently called the best underground band in New York. The group was looking for a drummer.“We asked the people who called what they thought of Moe Tucker,” Glenn Mercer, the band’s guitarist and vocalist, said, referring to the Velvet Underground’s drummer. “We were thinking in terms of very simple, primitive drumming. I think he was the only one that even knew who she was.”With a bookish air and a subversive sensibility, Mr. Fier fit the ethos of the band. His explosive drumming helped fuel the group’s first album, “Crazy Rhythms,” which the critic Robert Christgau later described as “exciting in a disturbingly abstract way, or maybe disturbing in an excitingly abstract way.”But Mr. Fier’s personality proved explosive as well, making his tenure with the band a short one. As the Feelies pulled up to a gig at one club, where the line was around the block, he gushed about how thrilled he was to be in the band. After a raucous set that had the packed house cheering, his mood inexplicably turned.“When the show was over, he was like, ‘You guys are so controlling, I can’t believe it,” Mr. Mercer recalled Mr. Fier saying. “Just like that, a 180.”Mr. Fier with the Golden Palominos in 2012.Christopher Gregory for The New York TimesEven so, Mr. Fier’s career continued to flourish. He joined the Lounge Lizards, John Lurie’s avant-jazz combo, for their first album, released in 1981, before Mr. Lurie rose to fame as an archetype of New York cool with his roles in Jim Jarmusch’s indie films “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Down by Law.”His career rose to new heights in the mid-1980s: He toured with the jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock following Mr. Hancock’s 1984 pop-funk crossover hit “Rockit,” and played on Laurie Anderson’s acclaimed 1984 album, “Mister Heartbreak.”By that point his musical ambitions could not be contained behind the drum kit, so Mr. Fier formed the Golden Palominos, an ever-evolving indie-rock supergroup that attracted a parade of guest stars, including Michael Stipe, John Lydon and Richard Thompson, through the rest of the 1980s and into the ’90s.“The band revolved around anyone Anton liked at the time,” Syd Straw, the iconoclastic singer-songwriter who got her start with the group, said by phone. “He had pretty bizarre social skills, but he was a magnet for brainy musicians. I think that he was, at heart, an amazing casting director.”In whatever musical role, Mr. Fier was exacting. “He never ‘settled,’’’ Chris Stamey, a founder of the indie band the dB’s who performed with the Palominos, recalled in an email. “And this could be unsettling at times. But we all wanted to see that blissful smile when something finally met his high standards.”Through the 2000s and early 2010s, Mr. Fier began to focus more on producing, working on albums by Ms. Smith, Julia Brown and the guitarist Jim Campilongo, although he did continue to perform with a highly regarded combo headed by the singer, guitarist and bassist Tony Scherr, a former Lounge Lizard.He also quit alcohol, a habit that had grown prodigious, particularly since the hard-partying Hancock tour, Mr. Stamey said.Hounded by creditors, however, Mr. Fier drifted further and further off the grid, avoiding even banks. He seemed to conclude, in eerily analytical fashion, that life was no longer worth living. Ms. Smith said he told her that he wanted to “fly to Thailand, have a wonderful vacation, take a lot of drugs and walk into the ocean.”The pandemic seemed only to deepen his despair. Without work or family (his only marriage, in 1976, lasted less than a year), he began researching his options. Last fall, Mr. Stamey recalled, Mr. Fier told him that he had been burned when he paid $900 over the internet for a veterinary tranquilizer, which he had decided “was the most peaceful way to go.”A few months ago, Mr. Fier texted his friend J.P. Olsen, a filmmaker and musician who had recently moved to Indiana, asking him for his new address. Mr. Fier had some boxes he wanted to send him. On Sept. 21, word began circulating that he was dead, apparently from an assisted suicide in Switzerland. Four days later, Mr. Olsen received the boxes, which were filled with piles of Mr. Fier’s clothes.And on Oct. 1, Nicky Skopelitis, a Palominos guitarist and the executor of Mr. Fier’s estate, received the cremation notice, dated Sept. 14, along with Mr. Fier’s remains.Questions about his last days linger. But in a way, friends said, that seems fitting for a man who was only too comfortable with loose ends.Two years ago, Mr. Stamey urged Mr. Fier to write a memoir, to pull him out of his funk. Mr. Fier’s response, Mr. Stamey recalled, was curt: “He said that he wanted to be the only one who didn’t write a book.” More

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      Jazmine Sullivan’s Meditation on Courage, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Charlie Puth, Chloe Moriondo, Kali Uchis 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.Jazmine Sullivan, ‘Stand Up’“Stand Up,” from the soundtrack to the film “Till,” captures an awakening sense of courage and purpose with a melody that expands upward and rhythms that coalesce from a tentative waltz to an insistent 6/8. Jazmine Sullivan’s voice is grainy, improvisatory and increasingly determined; at the end, it becomes a choir of solidarity, declaring, “Someone’s counting on you.” JON PARELESJamila Woods, ‘Boundaries’With a syncopated acoustic guitar at its core, Jamila Woods’s “Boundaries” could have been an easygoing bossa nova. Instead, it’s laced with nervous undercurrents of percussion and bass, playing up the ambivalence of a song that’s pondering just how close to let a relationship get. “It’s safer on the outside/I’d hate to find a reason I should leave,” Woods argues. But she leaves the song unresolved, as if her decision might not be final. PARELESCharlie Puth, ‘Marks on My Neck’If the songs on “Charlie,” the new album by Charlie Puth, sound familiar, it’s because no pop star shows their drafts quite like Puth does, revealing both his personality and his process. “Marks on My Neck” began as a TikTok in November 2021 — Puth, his hair bouncing, told a lightly intimate story, and showed off the early stages of putting together a song about what had happened to him. The final product is chirpy in a way the sentiment isn’t, but it’s in keeping with Puth’s recent turn to the saccharine, his zest for process sometimes outstripping his appetite for pain. JON CARAMANICAChloe Moriondo, ‘Dress Up’The new Chloe Moriondo album, “Suckerpunch,” is jubilantly chaotic — the production leans much further into hyperpop muscle than her previous work, and her songwriting is rowdier and looser. Take “Dress Up,” a part-sung, part-rapped Disney evil-princess theme song that nods to Doja Cat, Kim Petras, maybe Kitty Pryde. It’s astute pop, and also an astute read on the state of contemporary pop. CARAMANICASpecial Interest, ‘Foul’Warehouse labor barks its discontents in “Foul” by the New Orleans post-punk band Special Interest. Over a crescendo of gnashing guitar noise and thumping, clattering drum-machine beats, Maria Elena (guitar) and Alli Logout (vocals) shout terse lines back and forth — “Short staffed/Overworked/Sleep deprived/It’s an art” — until they work themselves up to righteous, well-earned screams. PARELESKali Uchis, ‘La Unica’“Unica — you know I’m the only one,” Kali Uchis sings, in one of the few English lyrics to this skeletal, bilingual, rapped and sung track. It’s a computer construction of programmed beats, sampled flute lines and disembodied voices behind Uchis’s supremely blasé lead vocal. The song feels grounded in Afro-Colombian tradition, even as it flaunts every bit (and byte) of its processing. PARELESLil Yachty, ‘Poland’“Poland” is a wobbly sound experiment from Lil Yachty, one of hip-hop’s most flexible performers. Here he leans into a digitized warble, delivering a dreamlike incantation with an undercurrent of silliness. Is it a song? An idea? A demo? A joke? It no longer matters — those are yesterday’s distinctions. CARAMANICAArima Ederra, ‘Steel Wing’“My refugee blood/You can’t take my freedom,” Arima Ederra sings in “Steel Wing,” a song about leaving home to prove herself. Ederra is the daughter of Ethiopian refugees, born in Atlanta and now based in Los Angeles, where she has found fellow pop experimenters. “Steel Wing,” from her new album “An Orange-Colored Day,” opens with a loose-limbed beat and a low-fi, not-quite-in-tune guitar lick. The song blooms into full-fledged reggae, but doesn’t settle there; it dissolves into a hand-clapping beat and echoey piano chords, with a few words from Ederra’s mother at the end. Ederra may be away from home, but the family connection holds. PARELESCourtney Marie Andrews, ‘Thinkin’ on You’Pure fondness peals from “Thinkin’ on You,” a song with an unambiguous sentiment about a temporary separation. “While you’re away, I’ll be thinkin’ on you,” Courtney Marie Andrews sings in a grandly retro production that stacks folk-rock guitars, pedal steel curlicues and a string-section arrangement over a girl-group beat. She sings “Ooh, ooh,” with a cowgirl yip, fully confident of an impending reunion. PARELESJohanna Warren, ‘Tooth for a Tooth’“Tooth for a Tooth” is the outlier on Johanna Warren’s new album, “Lessons for Mutants,” which is mostly volatile, guitar-centered indie-rock. Instead, “Tooth for a Tooth” is a slow-swaying piano ballad — with upright bass and brushed drums — that tries to find solace after a breakup: “I’d rather be lonely and empowered/Than on a cross or devoured,” she croons. The piano closely follows her vocal line, kindly offering unspoken support. PARELESMidwife, ‘Sickworld’Stasis is an illusion in “Sickworld,” a wistful, lush meditation by Madeline Johnston, who records as Midwife. “Don’t tell me about the future/Don’t ask me about the past,” she whisper-sings, “I don’t want to stay here/But I can’t go back. The structure is elementary — two chords, arpeggiated for four bars each — but Johnston enfolds them in layers that waft by like fog banks: guitar, piano, voices, strings, all of them substantial and then ephemeral. PARELES More

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      The Sudden Rise of Zach Bryan

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherOne of the year’s biggest pop breakouts is Zach Bryan, a Navy veteran who makes calm and detailed country-folk. His major label debut album, “American Heartbreak,” has steadily held in the Top 20 of the Billboard album chart since its release in May.Bryan is not a radio fixture, and mostly has found success on streaming, translating into live crowds of several thousand per night. He is also a reluctant star, offering very little to the public outside of his music and Twitter feed.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Bryan’s old-fashioned artistry and 1990s attitude, the shifts in mainstream country music that have in part set the table for his rise and how genre boundaries serve as guideposts, even for artists who assiduously try to skirt them.Guest:Grady Smith, who hosts a YouTube channel about country musicConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Alvvays, a Dreamy Indie-Rock Band, Cranks Up the Volume

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      Molly Rankin’s group is known for emotional and melodic sophistication. Talking about its latest LP, “Blue Rev,” she reflected on how her family’s deep musical history led her there.When Molly Rankin was a child, she discovered she had some special powers. As a scion of the Rankin Family, the award-winning ’90s Canadian musical group, she adopted as her instrument of choice the fiddle, which her father, John Morris Rankin, also played.“If you play the fiddle, you’re sort of like a Jedi — you have this aura around you,” she said in an interview from her Toronto apartment, a Devo poster and a wall of guitars visible behind her. “And I was, you know, exhibiting signs of the Force at a young age, and encouraged to not squander that.”In 2011, she founded Alvvays, an indie-rock band that wraps fuzzy layers of rock instrumentation around stories of hard lives and hurt feelings. It may not seem connected to her roots, but Rankin, 35, noted that the music of her forbears emerged from Celtic melodies passed down for centuries. “They stand the test of time,” she said, “and they bounce around in your head forever.”From the 2014 release of its self-titled debut LP, Alvvays demonstrated an emotional and melodic sophistication that helped it stand out from its peers. “Antisocialites,” from 2017, was shortlisted for the prestigious Polaris Music Prize and led to the band’s U.S. television debut. Their anticipated third album, “Blue Rev,” out on Friday, was partly delayed by the pandemic but ultimately enriched by additional time.“Sometimes I feel like every song I write is the last one,” Rankin said, with a small grin. “I wouldn’t call that a process; I would probably call that a personality.”The slower pace benefited the band’s thoughtfulness about its own work, and its tightly woven bonds. Rankin lives with her partner, Alec O’Hanley, who co-writes the band’s songs and plays a slew of instruments. When we spoke in late September, the band’s drummer, Sheridan Riley, and its bassist, Abbey Blackwell, were staying in an apartment upstairs; Rankin’s childhood friend Kerri MacLellan, who plays keyboards and sings, is just a short bike ride away. O’Hanley compared the home’s current vibe to “Animal House”: “We’re quite clannish in that regard, but it’s not deliberate — it just seems to shake out that way.”“Blue Rev” pushes the band’s sound toward dreamier and noisier frontiers, while deepening its narrative-driven songwriting. The album takes its name from a Canadian alcoholic beverage Rankin drank as a teenager, which is not enjoyed for its taste.“I like to offset something pretty with something challenging,” Rankin explained. “I love melodies that can be sweet, but I do love when there’s some grit — a little bit of emotional weight and pain, just to make it feel complete.” She added that she was “constantly trying to make the guitars louder,” and cited Alice Munro’s short stories as a recent inspiration. “I love that she has the ability to knock the wind out of you with a 12-page short story, and you’re just left reeling,” she said. “I would love to be able to do that with a song.”The producer Shawn Everett (the War on Drugs, the Killers) helped the band break out of some old habits and refine the loud-quiet-loud dynamics in its songs. “We’re always looking to broaden spectrums, whether they’re emotional or tonal — see how far we can push something before it breaks,” O’Hanley said, referencing records by Neil Young, the Psychedelic Furs, Abba, the Cure and the Magnetic Fields as sonic goal posts. He said the band members spent a lot of time gathering unconventional influences from across pop culture, as though they were “ascending Nerd Mountain.” (Though the band is known for sober subject matter, in conversation, its members displayed a sharp wit.)The single “Belinda Says” began with Rankin messing around with chords in the basement, and lyrics that describe leaving town for an uncertain future — “Moving to the country/Gonna have this baby/See how it goes/See how it grows” — took shape. O’Hanley came up with the line that gives the song its title, which references the 1987 Belinda Carlisle hit “Heaven Is a Place on Earth.” O’Hanley had heard “Belinda Says” as a country song, referencing work by Lucinda Williams and Deana Carter, but said that Rankin was “quite insistent on the need for some scuzz.” The resulting track encapsulates the band’s strengths: plaintive and distinct lyrics, keening melodies, waves and waves of sugar-flecked white noise that envelop without overwhelming, a triumphant guitar solo that hoists the song toward an ascendant climax.On “Blue Rev,” some of the personal pain powering the music is more explicit. John Morris Rankin died in a car accident in 2000, at the age of 40. A photograph of Rankin’s family appears on the album’s cover, which she suggested held a deeper meaning: “It’s the comfort of your parents, and they’re helping you climb onto a wharf, and then behind them is this big, ominous sky of adulthood and what the world is ready to show you.”Rankin said that when her father died, “It was a really chaotic time and obviously traumatic, but I also had brain fog for a long time,” noting she was too young to grasp all of the emotions and thoughts that accompany a parent’s death. Though she continued playing the fiddle, and even performed with the Rankin Family on a reunion tour, she eventually chose to forge her own path.Despite the sonic differences, Rankin said she channels her father’s drive. “I’m not afraid to say if I don’t like something or if something isn’t good enough,” she explained. “It’s really important to me, to not be a yes person. He certainly wasn’t one.”Everett, who was born in Canada but currently lives in Los Angeles, said he hears the Rankin Family’s legacy in Alvvays. “There’s a Northern Lights spirituality you feel growing up in Canada — the miracle of the snow, the weird difference in reality,” he said. “It’s a kind of ethereal question mark that Molly has the ability to weave.”Damian Abraham, the frontman for the Canadian hardcore band F____ Up, recalled bringing Alvvays on tour as a supporting act in 2014, and said its poise and maturity were already evident. “They had this naïve brilliance you want from a band making pop music with a punk approach,” he said. “They had real music chops in the background, but there was an edge to it that we all gravitated toward.”Alvvays moved on to headlining its own shows, and accumulating a small, though loyal, fan base. “I don’t know if Alvvays will ever be more than a cult favorite,” O’Hanley said. “We just want to continue on this pop-art beauty quest for as long as we can; if I can have a job playing music and good songs, then that’s great. I don’t have to work in a poutine bar in Toronto.”Rankin said she could be “pretty hard” on herself, and that it takes a long time to collect material that moves her, but it’s all worth it when the music feels right and resonates. “I’m not expecting a specific trajectory,” she added, with a small laugh. Even a Jedi can’t predict the future. More

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      Steve Lacy’s Streaming Smash ‘Bad Habit’ Climbs to No. 1

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      A left-field hit from a 24-year-old master of alternative R&B displaces Harry Styles’s “As It Was” as the top single, while Bad Bunny logs a 12th week atop the album chart.Steve Lacy, a 24-year-old guitarist and producer, started the year with a reputation as a gifted innovator on the fringes of alternative R&B, best known for a D.I.Y. approach in the studio. Now he has the No. 1 song in the country.“Bad Habit,” a spacey, pensive ballad driven by a slightly warped guitar, has been a monster streaming hit since its release three months ago. After gaining traction on pop radio it finally climbs to the top spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart this week, with 20 million streams and 40 million “airplay audience impressions,” a measurement of a song’s popularity on radio stations, according to the tracking service Luminate.The song, from Lacy’s second studio album, “Gemini Rights,” replaces Harry Styles’s “As It Was” at the top of the chart, after an on-and-off reign of 15 weeks since April.The ascent of “Bad Habit” has been one of the more surprising stories in the music business this year, but for those watching Lacy’s career it has not come out of nowhere. After emerging as a teenage member of the Internet, an offshoot from Odd Future — the boundary-pushing hip-hop ensemble that gave us Frank Ocean, Syd, Earl Sweatshirt and Tyler, the Creator — Lacy collaborated with Kendrick Lamar, Solange, Vampire Weekend and others, developing a track record as an artist who could comfortably bridge R&B, hip-hop and alternative rock.How long “Bad Habit” will hold, however, is an open question — “Unholy,” the latest from the British singer Sam Smith featuring Kim Petras, is hot on its heels.The Billboard 200 album chart is once again dominated by a familiar face: Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican superstar whose “Un Verano Sin Ti” is the year’s biggest album, with a gigantic stadium tour to match. This week, “Un Verano” is No. 1 for a 12th time.Bad Bunny’s album had the equivalent of 87,000 sales in the United States in its most recent week, including 120 million streams, according to Luminate. As far as No. 1 albums go, that total is modest. So far this year, the albums reaching the top each week have had an average equivalent sales number — a composite figure that incorporates streaming, individual track downloads and old-fashioned purchases of an album as a complete unit — of about 138,000. Even so, the numbers for “Verano” this week are still nearly twice as high as any of its competitors.The Australian pop-rock band 5 Seconds of Summer opens at No. 2 with the equivalent of 48,000 sales of its latest, “5SOS5,” which includes 36,000 copies sold as a complete package and just 16 million streams. (By comparison, in recent weeks Bad Bunny’s “Me Porto Bonito” and “Titi Me Pregunto” — just two of the 23 tracks on “Un Verano” — have each been drawing as many clicks.)Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” a chart mainstay for 21 months and counting, is No. 3. Last week’s top seller, Blackpink’s “Born Pink,” falls to No. 4 with the equivalent of 40,000 sales, a 60 percent drop. Styles’s “Harry’s House” is in fifth place. More