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      Adam Wade, Network Game Show Pioneer, Is Dead at 87

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      As a singer, he had three Top 10 hits in 1961. As an actor, he had a long career in film and on television. As an M.C., he broke a racial barrier.Adam Wade, a versatile, velvet-voiced crooner who scored three consecutive Billboard Top 10 hits in a single year, appeared in scores of films, plays and TV productions, and in 1975 became the first Black host of a network television game show, died on Thursday at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 87.His wife, Jeree Wade, a singer, actress and producer, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.In May 1975, CBS announced that it would break a network television racial barrier by naming Mr. Wade the master of ceremonies of a weekly afternoon game show, “Musical Chairs.”Staged at the Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan and co-produced by the music impresario Don Kirshner, the program featured guest musical performances, with four contestants competing to complete the lyrics of songs and respond to questions about music. (Among the guest performers were groups like the Spinners and singers like Irene Cara.)The novelty of a Black M.C. was not universally embraced: A CBS affiliate in Alabama refused to carry the show, and hate mail poured in — including, Mr. Wade told Connecticut Public Radio in 2014, a letter from a man “saying he didn’t want his wife sitting at home watching the Black guy hand out the money and the smarts.”The show was canceled after less than five months. Still, Mr. Wade said, “It probably added 30 years to my career.”That career began while he was working as a laboratory technician for Dr. Jonas E. Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine, and a songwriter friend invited him to New York to audition for a music publisher. He first recorded for Coed Records in 1958 and two years later moved to Manhattan, where he performed with the singer Freddy Cole, the brother of his idol Nat King Cole, and, rapidly ascending the show business ladder, opened for Tony Bennett and for the comedian Joe E. Lewis at the fashionable Copacabana nightclub.“Two years ago, he was Patrick Henry Wade, a $65-a-week aide on virus research experiments in the laboratory of Dr. Jonas E. Salk at the University of Pittsburgh,” The New York Times wrote in 1961. “Today he is Adam Wade, one of the country’s rising young singers in nightclubs and on records.”That same year, he recorded three songs that soared to the upper echelons of the Billboard Hot 100 chart: “Take Good Care of Her” (which reached No. 7), “The Writing on the Wall” (No. 5) and “As if I Didn’t Know” (No. 10).Patrick Henry Wade was born on March 17, 1935, in Pittsburgh to Pauline Simpson and Henry Oliver Wade Jr. He was raised by his grandparents, Henry Wade, a janitor at the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research (now part of Carnegie Mellon University), and Helen Wade.He attended Virginia State University on a basketball scholarship, but, although he had dreamed of playing for the Harlem Globetrotters, dropped out after three years and went to work at Dr. Salk’s laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh. Undecided about whether to accept the recording contract that Coed offered, Mr. Wade consulted Dr. Salk.“He told me he had this opportunity,” Dr. Salk told The Times at the time. “I told him he must search his own soul to find out what is in him that wants to come out.”He changed his first name — because his agent said there were too many Pats in show business — and had his first hit with the song “Ruby” early in 1960. His smooth vocal style was often compared to that of Johnny Mathis, but Mr. Wade said he was primarily influenced by an earlier boyhood idol, Nat King Cole.“So I guess that tells you how good my imitating skills were,” he said.He appeared on TV on soap operas including “The Guiding Light” and “Search for Tomorrow” and sitcoms including “The Jeffersons” and “Sanford & Son.” He was also seen in “Shaft” (1971), “Come Back Charleston Blue” (1972) and other films, and onstage in a 2008 touring company of “The Color Purple.”He and his wife ran Songbird, a company that produced African American historical revues, including the musical “Shades of Harlem,” which was staged Off Broadway at the Village Gate in 1983.The couple last performed at an anniversary party this year.In addition to Ms. Wade, whom he married in 1989, he is survived by their son, Jamel, a documentary filmmaker; three children, Sheldon Wade, Patrice Johnson Wade and Michael Wade, from his marriage to Kay Wade, which ended in 1973; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.For all his success in show business, Mr. Wade said he was particularly proud that 40 years after dropping out of college he earned a bachelor’s degree from Lehman College and a master’s in theater history and criticism from Brooklyn College, both constituents of the City University of New York. He taught speech and theater at Long Island University and at Bloomfield College in New Jersey.“I was the first one in my family to go to college,” he told Connecticut Public Radio. “I promised my grandmother back then that I would finish college someday. Many years later, I kept that promise.” More

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      A Global Hit, ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ Finally Lands in New York

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      The splashy show, an example par excellence of what makes modern French musicals distinctive, begins a run at Lincoln Center.When Americans are asked to name French musicals, their go-to is “Les Misérables,” which opened in Paris in 1980 before an extensively retooled English version went on to conquer the world a few years later.That, or some of the films that Jacques Demy directed in the 1960s, like “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “The Young Girls of Rochefort.”Usually not mentioned on our shores are the wildly popular homegrown stage musicals that appeared in France in the late 1990s. But now the most famous of them, “Notre Dame de Paris,” is having its New York premiere at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center on Wednesday, and will run there through July 24.One of its creators has issues with the terminology used to describe his work, though.“I don’t think of ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ as musical theater,” the composer Richard Cocciante said by video from Rome, where he was preparing for a concert tour in Italy. “For me it’s a people’s opera. That’s because it’s entirely sung-through. We don’t call the numbers arias, though: ‘Belle’ or ‘Le temps des cathédrales’ stand alone as songs,” he added, mentioning two of the show’s many sweeping ballads and its biggest hits.The show, a spectacle with a cast of 30, made its debut in Paris in 1998.Alessandro DobiciBased, like “Les Misérables,” on an epic 19th-century novel by Victor Hugo (which also inspired the Disney animated film “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” to name just one of many adaptations), “Notre Dame de Paris” successfully exploited a distinctively French approach to modern stage musicals.The lyricist Luc Plamondon already had a successful career writing for artists both in his native Quebec (a certain belter released an album of his songs, “Dion chante Plamondon,” in 1992) and in France, where he wrote the lyrics for the musical “Starmania” in the late 1970s. (That perennial favorite is returning to the Paris stage in November.)Looking for another long-form project two decades later, Plamondon thought that “Notre Dame de Paris” would be a fitting source and called up Cocciante, who happened to have a tape of odds-and-ends melodies laying around.“The first song began with him singing ‘Time … da-da-da,’” Plamondon, 80, hummed on the phone. He had been thinking of the scene in the 1956 film adaptation in which Anthony Quinn, as the hunchback, Quasimodo, begs Gina Lollobrigida’s Esmeralda, the object of all the men’s attentions, for water. “He’s chained to the wheel and he goes ‘Belle … belle …’” Plamondon continued, quoting the French word for beautiful. “That gave me the idea to replace ‘time’ with ‘belle’ in the song.”And they were off. “From then on it gushed out of both us,” Cocciante, 76, said. “We wrote ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ in a kind of trance.”Hélène Ségara as Esmeralda in the original 1998 production of “Notre Dame de Paris.”Stephane Cardinale/Sygma, via Getty ImagesIn the French answer to a backers’ audition, he played the score on the piano and sang all the parts for the producer Charles Talar, who signed on and booked a run at the Palais des Congrès in Paris for the fall of 1998.It was fitting for Talar to get that venue, which is not a traditional theater but a cavernous concert hall, because he came from the music industry: He wanted to release an album first, then build on it to sell the stage show. It’s an approach Andrew Lloyd Webber successfully used for “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Evita,” but overall it’s not common in the United States and Britain, where a show precedes its recording.“He assumed he could activate the networks he had built and use some of the same strategies he used to sell records,” Nicolas Talar said on Zoom, recalling his father’s game plan. (Charles Talar died in 2020.) “The idea was to familiarize audiences with the music before the show started. The specificity of French musicals is that we promote them the way we would promote a pop record. If one or two songs become popular, you’re the star of the moment, you get on television and people want to see you,” he added. “The only way to hear ‘Belle’ live was to see the musical.”That song, a trio for the three men in love with Esmeralda, was released in the spring of 1998, months before the show’s opening, and went on to become the biggest-selling single of the year in France.“There was this miracle — I don’t know how else to describe it — of ‘Belle,’” said Daniel Lavoie, 73, who played the archdeacon Frollo in the original production and is back in the cassock for the New York run. “It was almost 5 minutes, which was inconceivable on the radio at the time because they didn’t play anything longer than 3 minutes. I remember that at our first TV appearance we were asked to do the song again. We knew then we were onto something.”Another number, “Le temps des cathédrales,” was almost as popular — many Americans might have discovered it on the 2015 Josh Groban album “Stages” — cementing the status of “Notre Dame” as the It show that year. And unlike in the United States, where stage personalities don’t tend to make a dent on the Billboard Hot 100, it turned the cast members Garou, Patrick Fiori and Hélène Ségara into pop stars. (Lavoie already had an established career as a singer by then.)“Notre Dame” was so huge that other producers followed in Talar’s footsteps, most prominently Dove Attia, who was behind the popular “Les Dix Commandements” (2000), “Le Roi Soleil” (2005) and “Mozart, l’opéra rock” (2009). That last was among the few to actually, er, rock, which may partly help explain why those shows have not had much of an impact in English-speaking countries, where the tolerance for a high ratio of power ballads seems to be lower than in France, Russia or South Korea.A decisive move by the “Notre Dame” team was to have the cast sing live to recorded tracks, which are still used in productions worldwide, though the New York engagement will supplement them with a full orchestra. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Lavoie said in English, before reverting back to French. “‘Notre Dame de Paris’ was conceived as a show outside of time.”“Notre Dame” has been translated into eight languages and performed in 23 countries, though its producers now prefer presenting it in the original French, which is how its cast of 30 will perform it in New York (with English supertitles). Still, this and similar musicals have faced an uphill battle to win over reviewers at home.“Musical theater doesn’t get much critical support in France,” said Laurent Valière, the producer and host of the weekly program “42e Rue” on French public radio as well as the author of a book about musicals. “The press pans it — sometimes with good reason and sometimes not.” (Full disclosure: I have been a guest commentator on the show.)The French hit factory seems to have hit a snag in recent years as it strains to find successors to the blockbusters of the 2000s. There are oddities like the biomusical “Bernadette de Lourdes,” which is based on the true story of a young girl who claimed to see the Virgin Mary and plays in Lourdes, the town where it all happened. In a different vein is “Résiste,” a jukebox musical based on France Gall’s pop songbook that benefited from a live band playing the original arrangements and contributions from the rising choreographer Marion Motin.Still, “Notre Dame de Paris” endures. “Another distinctive trait is that no matter where it’s playing, it’s staged the same way,” said Nicolas Talar, who is now producing the show and copresenting it in New York. (He also has producing credits on Broadway’s “Funny Girl” and “Moulin Rouge! The Musical.”)“Sometimes we wonder if the show has become outdated, but the themes are evergreen and the music was intentionally arranged to sound timeless, so we keep postponing making changes,” he added. “So far audiences haven’t complained and the show is doing well, so we’re staying the course.” More

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      Rage Against the Machine Returns for Fresh Battles

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      The rap-rock group’s first tour in more than a decade arrives at a moment of political tension, and opens with the like-minded hip-hop duo Run the Jewels.CHICAGO — Four songs into Rage Against the Machine’s set Monday night at the United Center, the frontman Zack de la Rocha pulled up with a limp, hobbling across the stage while the rest of the band closed out “Bullet in the Head,” a jaggedly groovy anti-propaganda anthem from the band’s 1992 self-titled debut album. Early in the song, he’d been jumping, bounding toward the arena ceiling. At its end, he was carried offstage by crew members.His bandmates followed him, but after just a few moments, they were all back, with de la Rocha planted on a monitor on the right of the stage, his left leg stuck at an obtuse angle.“If I have to crawl across this stage, we’re going to play for y’all tonight,” he said. “We came too far,” salting the exhortation with an expletive.“Far” could have meant the decade-plus since the band last performed live, or the two-decades-plus since it released its last album. It might have meant the intense preparations to return to the road for these shows, the Public Service Announcement Tour, which was originally scheduled to begin in March 2020, but was derailed by the coronavirus pandemic.Tom Morello with de la Rocha, who appeared to sustain an injury early in the show and performed the remainder sitting down.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesOr perhaps it meant “far” in a more spiritual, conceptual sense — Rage is a band indelibly linked with the 1990s, when its anticapitalist rap-rock filled amphitheaters and festival grounds. It was the defining political act of that decade, its success a reminder that radical ideas could be conveyed through crisp-edged rock, reaching the ideologically aligned and, almost certainly, many who were not. For a band with a comparatively slim discography — four studio albums, one of which is a set of covers — it had outsized impact.Think of the two and a half years since Rage was originally meant to return to the road: the efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the assault on the Capitol, the ongoing scourge of police violence against Black people, the striking down of Roe v. Wade. Maybe “too far” means too far to give up ground now.Rage greeted this current social and political moment with a blistering torrent of controlled chaos in a concert that was part fist-pumping chant-along, part corporeal surrender. For 90 minutes — most of which de la Rocha, 52, conducted from his perch at the side of the stage — Rage was vital and ferocious. “Sleep Now in the Fire” was rowdy and tart, and “Guerrilla Radio” used groove to drive home agitated lyrics. “Killing in the Name,” which closed the show, brought the room to a rousing call and response about police injustice.After “Wake Up,” de la Rocha engaged in a quick sermon. “The ruling class in this country has proved itself unworthy of ruling anybody,” he said, urging the crowd to help “to fight back this fascist tide.”At times the group emphasized its points with text and video. During “Freedom,” the screen behind the band flashed with information about forced birth’s relationship to maternal mortality, lack of parental leave and lack of universal health care, concluding with the exhortation “Abort the Supreme Court.” Videos depicted a police van engulfed in flames, a snarling police dog chasing after a suspect, a helicopter hovering over a boat full of migrants. (This will almost certainly be the only major tour this year at which local activists hand out leaflets outside the venue reading “Who is the Chicago billionaire family who get richer every time a bomb drops? And what can be done about it? #CancelCrown.”)Footage projected behind the band showed a burning police van.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesTim Commerford, on bass, and the drummer Brad Wilk provided a dense, rolicking foundation for the band’s music.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesUnderneath the maelstrom was a certain smoothness, underscoring the ways in which the band, still in its original lineup — de la Rocha, Tom Morello on guitar, Tim Commerford on bass and sometime backup vocals and Brad Wilk on the drums — has matured in the three decades since its debut album. In its early days, it could at times be blunt and inelegantly dogmatic. But there is a polished fervor to them now. Morello occasionally displays flash on the guitar, like the D.J.-esque filigree on “Bulls on Parade,” and the combined rhythm section of Commerford and Wilk build a dense, rollicking foundation.Even sitting down, as he did for the majority of the show, de la Rocha remained magnetic. His rapping was more liquid than it was at the outset of his career, finding cleaner pockets and also utilizing the spaces between syllables as effectively as the syllables themselves. His only ostentation was a fuschia-ish T-shirt. (Fear not, though — it was advertising the stridently independent punk label Dischord.)When de la Rocha released his first solo single in 2016, “Digging for Windows,” it was produced by El-P, who had been a stalwart of New York’s independent rap scene in the mid- to late 1990s and also produced scabrous, industrial hip-hop for others, including the Atlanta sage Killer Mike.Killer Mike and El-P — the duo Run the Jewels — opened the show with their own brand of political rap music.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesRun the Jewels — the duo of El-P and Killer Mike — is the opening act on this tour, making for a bill that pairs different generations and philosophies of agit-rap. Its set was chaotic fun, jittery and rambunctious. Their words poured out in fusillades that were sometimes hard to parse in the cavernous space, but protest manifests in myriad ways — the production that’s both nervy and nervous, the light sense of mayhem and mischief that coats all of their songs.Both outfits have aligned politics. “It’s always us against them, us against the oligarchs,” Killer Mike warned. The duo dedicated “Walking in the Snow” to people who have lost their lives “at the hands of people that were paid to protect them.”But there is a wryness to Run the Jewels, even at their most impassioned. For them, American dystopia is tragicomedy; for Rage, it’s a call to arms.That said, Rage is not wholly without a sense of humor. At the show’s end, the house lights went up, and the group members hugged for a long stretch, then faced the crowd and gazed upon them like long-lost family members they’d just reconnected with. As they left the stage, the speakers in the arena began pumping Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” — a bit of irony, a bit of nihilism, a bit of revolutionary optimism. More

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      Beach Bunny Is Building an Indie-Rock Career in a Time of TikTok

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      The singer-songwriter Lili Trifilio has had two songs connect — and get slightly misconstrued — on the app. With more ears on her band’s second album, what message will she deliver?One morning last August, Lili Trifilio was feeling emotional.“I’m honestly so nervous,” the singer-songwriter, then 24, admitted, her voice rising as she shook her head. It was the day before her indie-rock band Beach Bunny would headline a sold-out show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Beach Bunny’s recent success had seemed abstract to Trifilio, since most of it had happened during lockdown, on the internet, but the group’s biggest New York show to date would make it tangible.“Over the pandemic, Beach Bunny has grown like 200 percent,” Trifilio continued, between sips of an iced Nutella mocha latte at a cafe not far from the venue, “and I don’t know what to expect.”Trifilio has a wide, toothy smile and a choppy bobbed haircut that she likes to dye different colors — magenta, lilac, rust — though that day it was a naturalistic blonde. Onstage, she’s known for her bubbly, earnest positivity; at a recent Beach Bunny show, she gave an enthused recommendation for a local vegan restaurant, urged the audience to get their Covid-19 booster shots and led the entire crowd in singing “Happy Birthday” to a fan. On albums she’s known for the emotional lucidity of her songwriting, which seems to trap fleeting feelings in shimmery amber.Much of the recent growth in Beach Bunny’s popularity came via “Cloud 9,” a bouncy, guitar-driven love song from the Chicago band’s February 2020 debut album, “Honeymoon,” which in March 2021 became a viral hit on TikTok. Over 360,000 videos have now used Trifilio’s lilting valentine (“But when he loves me, I feel like I’m floating/When he calls me pretty, I feel like somebody”) to soundtrack photo reels of their lovers, crushes and besties; it has racked up more than 240 million streams on Spotify.Several fans have asked Trifilio to record an acoustic version of “Cloud 9,” so they can use it as their wedding song. Trifilio finds it all a little ironic, given that she wrote it in the final days of a failing relationship.“The lyrics are so smart,” Tegan Quin of the indie-pop duo Tegan and Sara said in a phone interview, “and melodically I find all their songs to be really creative.” She and her twin sister Sara were fans before “Cloud 9” took off, but the song’s popularity provided an opportunity for them to collaborate with Beach Bunny on a new version — as requested by fans — that also features “she” and “they” pronouns.Beach Bunny’s music has plenty of admirers outside of the TikTok demographic, too. The actor Bob Odenkirk discovered the band several years ago while flipping through The Chicago Tribune, and he “immediately dug them,” he wrote in an email, because he found their sound to be “connected to the indie rock that I loved from the days of yore,” like Pixies, Sebadoh and the Cavedogs. He’s since become a vocal fan and even made a cameo in Beach Bunny’s recent “Star Wars”-spoofing video for the song “Entropy.”“I’m an older white guy, and her lyrics are about longing and written from a female perspective,” Odenkirk added. “But I still feel very connected to the pain and estrangement of my 14-year-old self, and I always will.”While the breakout of “Cloud 9” (and a prior TikTok success, “Prom Queen”) brought the band opportunities, Trifilio feared being pigeonholed or not taken seriously. “I was such a crab about it,” she said, twisting her straw. “Like I’m going to fall into this genre of internet bands. I was like, ‘No, I want to play big stages and play with bands I like, and not be thought of as cringey. I had all these weird ego dilemmas.”Perhaps to combat those fears, during the pandemic, Trifilio taught herself about music production. She watched YouTube tutorials and countless interviews with producers who inspired her, like the electro-pop star Grimes. When the band started recording its second album, “Emotional Creature,” at Chicago’s Shirk Studios last spring, she felt more empowered to experiment.“I think it’s cool that she’s an all-in-one show and does everything hands on,” Trifilio said of Grimes, citing her aggressively upbeat 2015 single “Kill V. Maim” as one of her favorite songs. “So after listening to her talk about production, going in I was like, ‘OK, I don’t really know how to do this, but can we make the beginning have this vibe? Before, I never knew to bring in those references.”That increased ambition is apparent across “Emotional Creature,” out July 22, from the bright, explosively catchy leadoff track “Entropy” to the thrilling, nearly six-minute finale, “Love Song,” which in its satisfying final moments weaves together a medley of several other songs from the album.“It still sounds like Beach Bunny,” Trifilio said, “but it just sounds a little more grown up. Which I’m happy with, because I’m growing up.”Trifilio onstage at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in August 2021. Before the show, the singer-songwriter admitted, “I’m honestly so nervous.”OK McCausland for The New York TimesTRIFILIO WAS RAISED in Chicago, and she started taking guitar lessons with a friend in fifth grade. “We did not have the attention spans for it,” she said with a laugh in a recent video interview from her childhood bedroom, where the purple walls matched her tie-dye butterfly shirt. (She moved into her own place during the pandemic, but still visits her parents frequently.) “But it was fun. That’s where I learned my basic skills. We were just like obnoxious kids, and so after a couple of years I quit because I had other things to do as a 13-year-old.”Later in her teen years, Trifilio started participating in neighborhood jam sessions and teaching herself cover songs. She has noted on Twitter, amid the occasional Hannah Montana quotation, that while journalists compare her sound to “cool” ’90s bands, her most direct influence is the pop group Aly & AJ’s 2007 album, “Insomniatic.” (I hear traces of the alt-rock mainstays Letters to Cleo and the cheery indie-pop group Velocity Girl.) When she was 18, she thought, “Well, I’ve learned a lot of covers. Let’s see if I can use this combined knowledge to write something.”The result was “6 Weeks,” a wailing, melancholic recollection of heartbreak (“Let’s begin at the end, when you tore me apart”) that she recorded on her computer with just an acoustic guitar. She presented it to her guitar-lesson friend as casually as possible: “I was like, I made this song, and I’m so embarrassed. Can you listen? I think I’m going to delete it.”Trifilio’s pal gave her a much needed confidence boost — and an ultimatum. “She was like, ‘I’m going to stop being your friend if you don’t put this out,’” Trifilio recalled. “I was like, whoa, OK. Stakes are high.”For the next few years, while she was studying journalism at DePaul University, Trifilio continued writing sharp, hooky power-pop songs and uploading them to a modest but growing online fan base. In 2017, she also started playing shows with a local group of guys — the drummer Jon Alvarado, the guitarist Matt Henkels and the bassist Aidan Cada, who was later replaced by Anthony Vaccaro — and her solo project became a proper band.Trifilio’s candid, plain-spoken lyrics often sound like internal monologues; sometimes they’re pep talks, other times they give voice to her demons. The title track from the 2018 EP “Prom Queen” straddles the line between the two. “Shut up, count your calories,” it begins over a jangly chord progression. “I never looked good in Mom jeans.” The song became one of the most downcast tracks to inspire an internet dance craze. As her anxiety builds, the song becomes a critique of aesthetic perfectionism and diet culture that Trifilio, who has admitted that she has “struggled with [her] own body image,” knows all too well.Many listeners related to Trifilio’s unabashed presentation of her insecurities. But “Prom Queen” found success on a platform that often rewards young people for adhering to the very conventions Trifilio was critiquing. Some noted the irony when the popular TikTok creator Addison Rae — the app’s honorary prom queen — posted a video of herself dancing and grinningly lip-syncing to a song that goes, “I was never cut out for Prom Queen.”TikTok can make a song incredibly popular overnight; it can also very often divorce a song, or even fragments of a song, from its larger context. Trifilio, who was not yet familiar with the app when “Prom Queen” blew up in 2019, was concerned that listeners who only heard a line or two of the song might misconstrue it as an endorsement of behavior like calorie counting. So she pinned a lengthy statement to the song’s YouTube video, clearly stating her authorial intentions.“I wrote this song for every person out there that has felt insecure, unloved, or unhappy in their own skin,” she wrote. “Please don’t harm your health or well being to live up to these invented expectations, it is not worth risking your life over.”Three years and another round of app-fueled success later, Trifilio said she’s learned to relinquish control of how her songs might be received. “You know, I use music in the same way,” she said. “I’m sure artists had different intentions than how I interpret things.” “Prom Queen,” she added, is “kind of the public’s song now.”AT A JULY 2019 show in New Mexico, Trifilio was surprised to notice a familiar face at the merch table: Odenkirk. He mentioned an upcoming audition he was preparing for, and as they parted Trifilio wished him good luck. “He spun around, gave me the finger guns, and he was like, ‘I don’t need it,’” she recalled with a laugh. “And I was like, ‘That’s right, you don’t need it!’ I need that level of confidence!’”The bold and self-assured sound of “Emotional Creature” shows how far she’s come. Sean O’Keefe, who produced the album, called her “one of the best songwriters I’ve ever gotten to work with, and I’ve been fortunate enough to work with a lot of really great songwriters.” (His credits include Fall Out Boy and Plain White T’s.)“There is definitely a young girl audience, mostly coming from TikTok, with very little experience of even attending shows,” Trifilio said of the band’s evolving crowd.Lyndon French for The New York TimesOn the new album, piercing pop-punk tunes like “Gone” and “Deadweight” challenge emotionally ambivalent partners to wear their hearts on their sleeves. “You’re a diamond/Wish you could see you the way I see,” Trifilio sings on the mid-tempo rocker “Weeds,” during a chorus that offers loving advice to a heartbroken friend — or perhaps the singer herself. Writing the album, she said, helped her to confront her history of “shame around feeling big emotions.”“That was, like, a therapy moment,” she said. “‘Wow, you have a lot of shame around being an emotional person, even though every human has feelings.”’Trifilio has since come around on TikTok, too. “There is definitely a young girl audience, mostly coming from TikTok, with very little experience of even attending shows,” she said. “They tell me, ‘This is one of my first shows,’ and I’m like, ‘That’s amazing. I hope you go to so many more.’”Such experiences seem indicative, to artists of a previous generation like Tegan and Sara, of a palpable change. “Streaming has devastated the music industry for artists, but it’s also made it really easy to be popular in corners of the industry that just didn’t exist when we were coming up,” Quin said. “Beach Bunny is an example of that. There’s just this vibrant, incredible scene flourishing around them because people can find them.”At the Brooklyn cafe, Trifilio had noted, “When I was 16, there would be some band I’d see and I’d think, ‘It would be so cool to be in a band.’” Preparing to greet some of her new fans in the flesh the following night, she added, “It’s amazing to think that someone might come to a show and maybe that inspires them to learn a Beach Bunny song on guitar. And then they learn other songs on guitar. That’s wild.” More

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      The 1975’s Chamber-Pop Confessions, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear new tracks from Alvvays, Tyshawn Sorey, Killer Mike and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.The 1975, ‘Part of the Band’Matty Healy, the proudly enigmatic singer-songwriter of the 1975, leads his group into chamber-pop with “Part of the Band,” the first song from an album due in October, “Being Funny in a Foreign Language.” He sings about “cringes and heroin binges,” about a “vaccinista tote-bag chic barista” and about literary-minded gay liaisons — “I was Rimbaud and he was Paul Verlaine.” He also queries, “Am I ironically woke?” The production wanders from chugging string ensemble to fingerpicked folk-rock to saxophone choir, with all of them mingling near the end. It’s pandemic confusion, self-questioning and ennui, with melodies to spare. JON PARELESAlvvays, ‘Pharmacist’A plain-spoken, everyday admission — “I know you’re back, I saw your sister at the pharmacy” — kick-starts the latest single from the Canadian dream-pop band Alvvays; as soon as the vocalist Molly Rankin sings that line, the song suddenly transforms into a fantasia of melancholic melody and squalling guitars. Hints of My Bloody Valentine and Japanese Breakfast hang in the hazy atmosphere, but Rankin’s bittersweet delivery gives “Pharmacist,” the opening track from the upcoming album “Blue Rev,” a distinct emotional undertow, like a stirring dream that ends a little too soon. LINDSAY ZOLADZJulien Baker, ‘Guthrie’“Guthrie” is a quietly harrowing postscript to Julien Baker’s 2021 album “Little Oblivions” from a collection, “B-Sides,” being released later this month. Like “Little Oblivions,” the song confronts what it’s like to be an addict: “Whatever I get, I always need a little more,” she sings. But while Baker overdubbed herself into a rock band on “Little Oblivions,” in “Guthrie” she’s solo, picking a soothing waltz on her guitar as she tears into her own failings. The song is a crisis of conscience and of faith, with a voice humbled by self-knowledge. “Wanted so bad to be good,” she offers, “but there’s no such thing.” PARELESKing Princess, ‘Change the Locks’“A year without no separation just might have broke us, baby,” King Princess sings in “Change the Locks,” a song about how pandemic proximity — and friction — could destroy a relationship. It’s three-chord folk-rock that explodes into hard rock when King Princess (the Brooklyn songwriter Mikaela Strauss) realizes how bad things have gotten. She wants to hold on; she knows she can’t. PARELESFlo, ‘Immature’English R&B lags American innovations by years or sometimes decades. The vocal trio Flo is catching up with what American acts like Destiny’s Child accomplished in the 1990s: calling out male assumptions while mastering recording techniques and harnessing voices, instruments and machines to sharpen their message of self-determination. The way Flo juggles individual voices and two or three-part harmonies, flirtation and fury, harks back to Destiny’s Child, but unerringly: “Why you gotta be so immature,” they sing, adding “Tell me how can I relate/If you don’t communicate?” Even before a crying-baby sample slips into the mix, it’s easy to know who’s in the wrong. PARELESGhetto Kumbé, ‘Pila Pila (Trooko Remix)’Ghetto Kumbé is a group from Bogotá that fortifies Afro-Colombian drumming and socially conscious lyrics with electronics; it released a potent self-titled debut album in 2020 and has opened for Radiohead. The group handed over tracks from its album to various producers for “Ghetto Kumbé Clubbing Remixes,” an album due in November. “Pila Pila,” a brawny tribute to the power of drums, got reworked by the Grammy-winning Honduran producer Trooko (who worked on “Residente” and “The Hamilton Mixtape”). He revved it up even further, switching the meter from 6/4 to 4/4, moving its incantatory lead vocal to the start of the song and bringing in a hopping salsa bass line, electronic hoots, jazzy piano and twitchy drum machines, constantly hurtling ahead. PARELESKiller Mike featuring Young Thug, ‘Run’A verse from a still-jailed Young Thug only adds to the urgency of “Run,” Killer Mike’s first new track as a solo artist since his vital 2012 album “R.A.P. Music.” Across four fruitful albums with Run the Jewels, it’s become commonplace to hear Mike rapping over El-P’s kinetic, collagelike beats, but it’s refreshing here to hear him link up once again with the veteran No I.D., whose understated production allows Killer Mike to tap into a smoother flow. “The race to freedom ain’t won,” he raps on the chorus, providing some welcome counterprogramming to your standard Independence Day jingoism. ZOLADZDomi & JD Beck (featuring Anderson .Paak), ‘Take a Chance’Jazz might be one of the only spaces left where the term “internet star” still means anything. Domi & JD Beck are Exhibit A, a duo of virtuosic post-jazz Zoomers who seem to have leaped out of a cartoon, and whose wow factor is suited to the small screen: A blond keyboardist rips solos while a diminutive drummer taps out hyper-contained, hyperactive beats. References to jazz history are funneled into the aesthetics of a sped-up TV jingle. Domi and Beck have found a champion in Anderson .Paak, and their debut album, “Not Tight,” is being jointly released by his new label and Blue Note Records. Redolent of lounge, ’70s fusion, trip-hop and breakbeat, this LP offers the nonstop dopamine drip of a doom-scroll, and it’s heavy on star features: Thundercat, Snoop Dogg and Mac DeMarco all pull up. “Take a Chance” is their moment with Paak, and if his earnest, rapped pledges of devotion don’t exactly square with the song’s feel-good vibes and the geometrically sound pop hook that Domi and Beck sing, you’re hard-pressed to hold it against them. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOTyshawn Sorey Trio, ‘Enchantment’A multi-instrumentalist, composer, University of Pennsylvania professor and MacArthur “genius” grantee, Tyshawn Sorey is likely to be found writing suite-length experimental works, or serving as composer in residence with an opera company, or conjuring up new systems for group improvisation. It’s been a long time since anyone really thought of him as “just” a jazz drummer. So, for Sorey, recording an album of standards with a piano trio qualifies as a curve ball. Of course, he has a big fondness for throwing curves. Sorey recently joined up with the pianist Aaron Diehl, one of jazz’s standard-bearing traditionalists, and the versatile bassist Matt Brewer to record “Mesmerism,” an album of jazz classics and lesser-known pieces from the canon. Horace Silver’s “Enchantment” is usually played as a tautly rhythmic samba, but the trio retrofits it, with Diehl putting the lush precision of his harmonies to work over a loose-limbed, shuffling beat from Sorey. RUSSONELLO More

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      War Ruins Ivan Dorn’s Effort to Reconcile Russia and Ukraine

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      Ivan Dorn, who was born in Russia and grew up in Ukraine, promoted friendship between the countries for years. Now, he is focused on supporting Ukraine.Ivan Dorn, a Ukrainian musician, had mostly finished his first album in five years by February.“Dorndom” was recorded in a village in northern Ukraine, and is a more conceptual project than his trademark genre-crossing pop. On the LP, Dorn, 33, who was born in Russia, sings in Russian, as he does on most of the hits that have propelled him to stardom in both Ukraine and Russia.He settled on a release date at the end of May, and his team worked to put together a global tour that included dates across both countries. Then Russia invaded Ukraine.Against the backdrop of missiles raining down on Ukrainian cities, devastating hospitals, theaters and apartment buildings, releasing Russian-language music that did not reflect on these events felt wrong.“People are just too sensitive about language at the moment,” Dorn said in a recent interview after a sold-out concert in Tbilisi, Georgia.Instead of performing and promoting “Dorndom” — which Dorn still hopes to release one day; its name is a combination of his own and the Russian word for house — the musician is now playing older hits across Europe and the United States to raise money to help Ukrainians in peril.“I am trying to understand the extent to which this album would work today,” Dorn said.For Ukrainian artists like Dorn, whose country’s culture as well as its politics have long been intertwined with Russia’s, such concerns have become familiar: Is it right to perform in a country whose leader claims your nation as part of his own? Should artists switch to writing and singing in Ukrainian, which could mean potentially losing access to a much larger audience, and market, in Russia?After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, many Ukrainian artists, including Okean Elzy, the country’s most popular rock band, and Monatik, a widely celebrated pop singer, stopped performing in Russia.Dorn — who was born in Russia, but grew up in Ukraine — took a different approach: He continued touring in Russia in an effort to build “a cultural bridge” between the neighboring countries, he said.“My idea was this: I capture as many people as possible with my music so that they would never attack my own country,” he said. “I was confident that people who came to my concerts would not fight in a war against Ukraine.”At a 2016 concert in Moscow, Dorn said from stage, “There is nothing between us, nothing but friendship,” and asked the crowd to exclaim, “Hello, Kyiv!” People raised their hands and screamed ecstatically.Although he sings in Russian, Dorn says he has always tried to emphasize his Ukrainian identity. Over the years, his catchy tunes encompassing hip-hop, house and experimental music have earned him a reputation that is similar to Pharrell Williams; recently, Russian critics voted his debut album from 2012 the best record of the past three decades.But Dorn’s efforts to preach friendship between the two countries had provoked anger among some Ukrainians, including repeated criticism from nationalists, according to Ukrainian news reports.Dorn performed at a concert in Long Island City this month to raise money to help Ukrainians who are in peril.Sasha Maslov for The New York TimesToday — with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, saying last month that Russia occupied a fifth of his country, and was edging to capture more — Dorn said his mission of friendship might be seen as a failure. But he does not regret it.“The Russian propaganda machine was just too powerful,” he said. “I am sure that if we would spend a week in front of Russian television, we would ourselves start to believe that we are Nazis and fascists,” he said, referring to false charges that the Kremlin uses to justify the invasion.Dorn has now cut ties with Russia and is focusing on supporting Ukraine in the war, turning his label’s headquarters into a volunteer center and removing his music from Russian streaming services. He has also canceled contracts with Russian brands and artists.In the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, dozens of Ukrainian pop stars performed and appeared on television in Russia. Many of them relocated to Moscow permanently, creating a cultural scene blending influences from both countries.Svetlana Loboda, a popular Ukrainian singer, moved to Moscow in 2017, where she could find a much bigger and established pop industry than in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.In the early days of the war in Ukraine, Loboda said her hometown was largely turned to rubble. She posted a video to her 13 million followers on Instagram, most of them from Russia, saying in tears that the war had “been the worst thing that has happened in my life.” She then released a song in Ukrainian and announced that she had moved elsewhere in Europe.As war erupted between the two countries, Russian artists have faced a stark choice, too: stay in Russia and support President Vladimir V. Putin’s war, or protest, stop performing and flee.Even in Ukraine, the music industry has not been united in the face of Russia’s invasion.This month, Yuri Bardash — one of Ukraine’s most successful producers — called for Ukraine to capitulate and accused Ukrainian artists like Dorn of “advertising the war by touring in Europe” in order to “legitimize it.”However much Dorn may hope for peace between the two countries, when Russia invaded, his support for Ukraine was never in question. He was born in Chelyabinsk, Russia, but moved to Slavutych, Ukraine, two years later when his father, a physicist, was sent to work on the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

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      What if Juliet Lived? A Pop Hitmaker’s ‘& Juliet’ Heads to Broadway.

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      The jukebox musical, which is already running in London, features songs by the Swedish writer and producer Max Martin, including “Since U Been Gone” and “ … Baby One More Time.”Come on, Mr. Shakespeare. Did Juliet really have to die in that tragic play of yours?A new musical that envisions a not-quite-so-star-crossed scenario for one of drama’s most famous young lovers is coming to Broadway.“& Juliet” — the title a play on “Romeo and Juliet” — features pop songs by the Swedish hitmaker Max Martin, best known for his collaborations with Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and Katy Perry.The musical began its life in Manchester, England, in 2019, and then transferred to London, where reviews were mixed but audiences enthused, and it is still going strong. A North American production is now running in Toronto, and will transfer to Broadway, where it is scheduled to start previews Oct. 28 and open Nov. 17 at the Stephen Sondheim Theater.The score consists of pop songs, many of them quite famous, including “Since U Been Gone,” “Roar,” “ … Baby One More Time,” “Larger Than Life,” “That’s the Way It Is” and “Can’t Stop the Feeling!”The show’s comedic book, featuring a variety of romantic entanglements, is by David West Read (“Schitt’s Creek”); the director is Luke Sheppard. Martin, in addition to writing the songs, leads the producing team, which also includes Tim Headington, Theresa Steele Page, Jenny Petersson (Martin’s wife), Martin Dodd and Eva Price.The cast will feature Lorna Courtney as Juliet; Stark Sands (a two-time Tony nominee, for “Journey’s End” and “Kinky Boots”) will play Shakespeare; Betsy Wolfe will play his wife, Anne Hathaway; and Paulo Szot (a Tony winner for “South Pacific”) will play a character named Lance. More

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      Lesley Gore’s Archive Arrives at the New York Public Library

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      The collection, which includes family photos, scrapbook pages and annotated music, traces the singer’s arc from releasing bubble gum hits to creating a powerful feminist statement.As a teenage singer in the 1960s who fit the all-American girl mold, Lesley Gore may have seemed like an unlikely figure to carve out a lasting legacy of feminist resilience and independence. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has now made the musician’s archive available for anyone interested in her artistic evolution, giving fans a chance to browse through notated music sheets and an unfinished memoir.Lois Sasson, Gore’s partner for more than 30 years, began working with the library in February 2016, sifting through storage boxes and cataloging each object with help from the singer’s family and friends. Sasson emphasized that the collection should remain free to the public and housed in New York, where Gore lived, said Jessica Wood, the assistant curator of music and recorded sound at the Library for the Performing Arts. Gore died of lung cancer in 2015. Sasson, a fierce defender of women’s and gay rights, died of Covid-19 in 2020.The archive, which contains scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, fan club files, music theory books, a birthday invitation, family photographs and album covers, was first made available on May 31, and all printed and written works can be examined on request. The library is still working to digitize the audio and movie image recordings that document Gore’s rehearsals, performances and television appearances, as well as visual works like a 1968 Robert F. Kennedy ad campaign.“By studying her archive, it elevates all of the women performers who sang other people’s materials but really brought a lot of genius to the way they animated those songs,” Wood said.Gore, known for bubble gum classics like “It’s My Party,” the No. 1 hit from 1963 recorded by Quincy Jones, and “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” focused largely on love and heartbreak until the 1963 release of “You Don’t Own Me.” The song, written by John Madara and David White, became an early feminist anthem, rebuking the idea that the singer should bend to the whims of a man. “I’m free and I love to be free,” Gore sang, “to live my life the way I want/To say and do whatever I please.” All three songs were recorded before she turned 18.Brad Schreiber, an author who chronicles social change through music, said that while Gore lacked power as a young female recording artist, “You Don’t Own Me” echoed a strong statement about reclaiming respect and dignity.“She didn’t have to dedicate her entire career to do socially conscious music,” Schreiber said. “She did one very important song that has had a far-reaching effect.”The archive includes music scores of “You Don’t Own Me” that were used for performances to promote Gore’s 2005 “Ever Since” LP (her 11th and final studio album), along with musical arrangements of the release by Claus Ogerman, Joe Glandro and Mariano Longo.Susan Kahaner, Sasson’s sister, said Gore admired the activism of the pioneering feminist Betty Friedan and was particularly drawn to the civil rights advocate and politician Bella Abzug, who chanted, “This woman’s place is in the House, the House of Representatives!” as she ran and won a seat in the House in 1970.“Bella and that whole group of feminists opened up Lesley’s eyes to what is possible,” Kahaner said.Gore was devoted to her education, majoring in English and American literature at Sarah Lawrence College during the peak of her pop career. Kahaner said that as an avid reader of fiction and nonfiction as well as a lover of jazz and pop music, Gore would be proud to share her work with researchers and students at the library:“We couldn’t be happier that this is the home that will keep Lesley’s legacy alive.” More