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      From Harry Styles to BTS, Pop’s Biggest Stars Are Looking to Residencies

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      Extended runs in one venue, once associated with legacy acts, have become popular with stars including Harry Styles and BTS, lowering bills and building hype as touring costs rise.On Saturday, Harry Styles will take the stage at Madison Square Garden as part of the tour for his chart-topping new album, “Harry’s House.”Then, next Sunday, he will play the Garden again. Next Monday, too. And another 12 times through Sept. 21. At the Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif., Styles will perform another 15 times in October and November. The entire North American leg of the singer’s latest tour, which opened in Toronto this week, consists of 42 shows in just five cities.Styles’s tour is the most prominent example of a bubbling trend of concert residencies: extended runs by artists in a limited number of cities and venues. In a rebounding touring market, with concert-starved audiences buying tickets in record numbers — and at higher prices than ever — these bookings are deliberate choices by prominent artists to reduce their time on the road and set up shop in far fewer places than they could on a traditional tour.Besides Styles’s, high-profile residencies have been completed recently by the K-pop phenom BTS and the Mexican rock band Maná, which has booked 12 dates since March at the Forum, the group’s only performances in the United States all year. In Las Vegas, the place that arguably birthed the residency format, Adele will begin a 32-date weekend engagement at Caesars Palace in November, and Katy Perry and Miranda Lambert also have dates lined up for the fall.“We thought doing a whole tour would be really challenging, maybe impossible, given all the variables,” said Fher Olvera, the lead singer of Maná.Frederick M. Brown/Getty ImagesAccording to talent agents and industry observers, the reasons include clever branding, the protection of artists and crews in the pandemic and a cold calculation of financial efficiencies. More concerts in fewer cities means fewer trucks on the road and lower bills all around.Those financial advantages are key at a time when gas prices are high and the concert world must deal with the same supply-chain shortages that have hit other businesses, said Ray Waddell, who covered the touring business for decades for Billboard magazine and now runs the media and conferences division of the Oak View Group, which operates sports and entertainment venues around the world.“The math is challenging right now,” Waddell said. “It costs way more to tour, more to produce the shows for everybody, more for labor. At the same time, inflation is going to impact discretionary income and force fans to make choices. That’s bad calculus.”For artists like Adele, Harry Styles and BTS, whose vast fan bases seem to have unquenchable demand, asking fans to come to them — and perhaps incur travel expenses of their own — may not be a great risk. But this model does not translate well below the superstar level, agents say.Of course, extended bookings are nothing new. Bruce Springsteen played Giants Stadium 10 times in the summer of in 2003. Prince played 21 shows around Los Angeles in 2011, most at the Forum. But the pandemic may have led to a critical mass.For artists and venues, touring has had a much-needed return to full capacity this year. According to Pollstar, a trade publication that follows the concert industry, gross ticket sales for the top 100 tours in North America reached $1.7 billion for the first six months of 2022, up 9 percent from the same period in 2019. Live Nation, the global concert giant that owns Ticketmaster, recently reported that the company had already sold 100 million tickets for the full year, more than in 2019. Still, the tightening of the wider economy has many in the industry worried about the rest of the year.On the road, and in venues packed with unmasked fans, the threat of Covid-19 still lingers, leading to occasional postponements and cancellations. A residency plan can limit the risk of exposure, and also give an artist a temporary break from the rigors of the road. In one recent Instagram post from a tour stop in Germany, Styles showed himself collapsed in an ice bath. (Styles and his representatives declined to comment for this article.)Adele will begin a 32-date weekend engagement at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in November.Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for AdeleThe complications of touring in the age of Covid-19 were behind Maná’s decision to limit its U.S. shows to the Forum. Last year, as the group began making its plans for 2022, the rise of the Omicron variant, and the tangle of local health regulations across the country, made a nationwide tour seem daunting.So they decided to stick to one spot in the Los Angeles area, the group’s biggest worldwide market. The band has already played eight sold-out shows at the Forum, drawing 110,000 fans, and has four more announced through October.“We just wanted to get out and play, to be with our fans,” said Fher Olvera, Maná’s lead singer. “We thought doing a whole tour would be really challenging, maybe impossible, given all the variables.”“After everything that’s happened over the last few years,” Olvera added, “the residency is more than a series of concerts for us — it’s a celebration of life.”The origins of the contemporary concert residency go back to Celine Dion’s decision to set up in Las Vegas in 2003, a time when that city was still seen as a pasture for fading acts.“It was a very big risk at the time — everybody thought we were fools,” said John Meglen of Concerts West, Dion’s promoter, which is part of the AEG Live empire. “At the time, Vegas was like the end of your career. It was like, ‘Come die with us.’”But Dion’s two residencies sold about $660 million in tickets to more than 1,100 shows, according to Pollstar. Dion’s engagements, as well as two by Elton John, recalibrated the industry’s approach to Las Vegas, and were followed by residencies there with Garth Brooks, Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga, Drake and many others.The crucial artist for expanding the residency outside of Las Vegas, however, was Billy Joel. After being named the Garden’s first “music franchise” in late 2013, Joel began playing there monthly in 2014, and, aside from a hiatus during the pandemic, never stopped; his 86th concert in the series was recently announced for Dec. 19.Through his June show, the Garden residency has sold about $180 million in tickets. If the rest of his concerts there this year sell out — a fair bet, since every other night of the residency has — the cumulative gross will be around $200 million.“It’s basically the Super Bowl of music events,” said Dennis Arfa, Joel’s longtime booking agent. Joel has said he would continue the engagement “as long as the demand continues,” and there is no sign of that letting up.For Arfa, the scale of engagements like Joel’s and Dion’s raises a question of nomenclature. Do 15 shows over a few weeks count as a “residency” compared to 86, or to 1,100? If not, then what is it?“The word residency is kind of undefinable,” Arfa said. “Now everything is a residency. People do four nights and they can call it a residency. It’s a matter of verbiage and perception. I think the accomplishment is more important than the title.”Whatever these are, they are likely to continue. Omar Al-joulani, Live Nation’s president of touring, said he expected around 30 residency-type engagements in 2023. “That’s including a big Vegas year.”But talent agents and music executives say that these kinds of events cannot replace full-scale touring as a way to satisfy demand and cultivate audiences. When Styles announced his tour dates, Nathan Hubbard, a longtime ticketing executive who is the former chief executive of Ticketmaster, on Twitter declared the strategy “the future of live.” But in a recent interview, he took a more nuanced view.“This is not the new touring model,” Hubbard said. “This doesn’t mean nobody’s going to Louisville — indeed, most artists are still going to have to go market to market to hustle it.”And when a major venue announces its next block booking, what do we call it? Is it a residency, or something else? Arfa, Joel’s agent, pointed to Styles’s dates at the Garden.“It’s a run,” he said. “It’s a great run.” More

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      If It’s All Going to Hell, Rina Sawayama Can’t Wait to See You There

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      On a sticky June afternoon at the Balloon Saloon, a party store in Tribeca, a casual shopper would have found an array of stick-on piercings, a host of glow-in-the-dark finger puppets, a shocking selection of fake excrement and one pop star giggling about it all.Rina Sawayama wandered through the aisles squeaking with equal parts delight and mild horror, posing for pictures with mannequins before settling on two flags: a rainbow one, in honor of Pride Month, and, seeing as it was one of the British-Japanese artist’s last days in the United States for a while, a Stars and Stripes.It was the final week of a pandemic-delayed tour supporting her 2020 debut, “Sawayama,” and she was feeling emotional. “I’m going to miss stories with the fans and just sharing that incredible energy in the space,” she said a few hours earlier, over lunch. “It’s almost like a relationship.”Her shows at Brooklyn Steel in May showed off the depth of that bond, as well as the breadth of Sawayama’s musical palate: part rock concert, part pop spectacular, part group therapy session for a mostly young, mostly queer crowd. As the bass throbbed and heads bobbed, Sawayama commanded the stage, singing, swearing and offering words of affirmation and appreciation: “Thank you for making me feel seen, and thank you for making me feel heard,” she announced; later, she instructed audience members to tell each other they’re hot.Sawayama, 32, has muscled her way to pop stardom as a devoted student of it, building an aesthetic out of the parts she likes — Lizzo’s empowerment, Charli XCX’s fun-and-freakiness, Lady Gaga’s genre-clashing vastness — and tossing aside the rest. (Her studiousness isn’t limited to music: She graduated from the University of Cambridge with a degree in politics, psychology and sociology.)“Sawayama,” an unexpected mix of head-thrashing rock and early aughts bubble-gum pop, arrived after seven years of making (and largely funding) her own music. Its April 2020 release date was not fortuitous. Now the singer and songwriter is trying to regain the momentum lost when the pandemic swallowed her debut and turn it up to 10 for her second album, “Hold the Girl,” due Sept. 16.“A lot of times, artists feel the pressure to do sessions and just bash out songs, but I am just not like that,” Sawayama said earlier this year during the first of two long interviews. “I don’t like working hard, I like working intentionally.”Sawayama knew she needed to pivot. So much had changed, in big and small ways, since her first album: The world was tense and dangerous; she’d turned 30 and entered a new era of personal evolution, starting an intensive form of therapy and folding its revelations into the DNA of “Hold the Girl.” She won’t reveal those realizations just yet, in part out of fear that she’ll influence her fans’ responses to the songs.“I think the temptation, as an artist these days, is to look online and see what the fans want,” she said. “But I’m going to write something that’s meaningful and worth people’s time.”The result is an expansive album that stuffs in even more of her musical inspirations, with nods to everyone from Shania Twain and Abba (on “This Hell,” a cheeky, country-flecked song that sounds like when a church group facilitator accidentally makes purgatory sound really fun) to Gwen Stefani (she wanted the floaty “Catch Me in the Air” to resemble the Corrs writing a song for the frontwoman turned pop star) to Madonna (the sparse, echoey introduction to the single “Hold the Girl” feels related to “Like a Prayer”).Combining nostalgic sounds with the latest technology allows Sawayama to experience the best of both sonic worlds. “What I think about the New Jack Swing era, and production from the ’90s in general, it’s like …” she groaned. “The sound was so ambitious, but I think just the tech of that time didn’t capture the full breadth of it.”Clarence Clarity, the primary producer on both of Sawayama’s albums, described his process of making music with Sawayama as throwing a bunch of disparate eras and aesthetics together and seeing what works. “It doesn’t really matter what genre it is from song to song — it’s how can we evoke these different feelings,” he said in an interview.“That’s the nice thing about working with Rina,” he added. “She doesn’t think in traditional terms.”WHEN WE MET up in February in the back of a verdant hotel lobby, our worlds finally thawing from the double-punch of a pandemic winter, Sawayama wore her long black hair straight down to her shoulders, her brutally cut asymmetrical side bangs emphasizing her angular face. Though onstage she favors dramatic, sculptural costumes, that day she resembled a ballerina out on a bodega run in a black hoodie and sweatpants. Looking at her hands felt like peering into a silverware drawer: a silver or green ring on nearly every finger, her nails painted chrome and covered in baubles and pearls in the same shade, like gilded sweat. She had only gotten them recently, and they were a lot to get used to.“I don’t know how Rosalía does it,” she said.I asked Sawayama about the last really good party she’d been to. Her answer sounded like a civilian’s fever dream, various celebrities brought together by nothing but vibes, or the sort of party you imagine happens once you make it. She ended up doing karaoke with Harry Styles, Karamo Brown and Bobby Berk of “Queer Eye” fame, the model Kiko Mizuhara and a stylist friend.That night was four years ago. “Have I been to a party since?” she wondered aloud. It’s unlikely. Even in her early 30s, Sawayama is a retired socialite, having gotten it all out of her system when she was in her teens. She was born in Niigata, Japan, and temporarily moved to London as a young child with her parents. They soon divorced, which changed not only her home base — she ended up staying in London — but also her family’s class status. The singer shared a bedroom with her mother until she was about 15; the combination of that claustrophobic proximity, adolescence and the language barrier — neither spoke much English — all weighed on her, coalescing into a new identity that Sawayama could form for herself: a pop music fanatic.She used the genre to connect with her classmates, forming close friendships that took her out of her home and into a much wider world. As an early teen, she’d listen to albums at the Virgin Megastore for hours — the Killers, Bloc Party — then shadow those bands from gig to gig. Once, she followed a group she liked to Paris on her own, bunking with a fellow fan she’d met at a show. At 16, she started uploading her own music to the internet — covers of her favorite songs.“I was very angry as a teenager, and me going out was a reaction to that,” she said. (When I asked what “going out” looked like, Sawayama said that people were basically pretending they were on “Skins,” a British TV show akin to “Euphoria” that was airing around this time.) “I really think I had to find my creative voice later on in life because I didn’t have that time on my own,” she said. “I didn’t have any space. I didn’t have any privacy. I was worried about even writing my diary.”Starting her career in music a bit later in life, “I’m able to come to the table with a bit more stories, say and life experience and things to write about,” Sawayama said.Olivia Lifungula for The New York TimesAt the ripe age of 15, Sawayama walked into her kitchen one morning and announced she was done having puberty. (Her mother was not easily convinced.) But she had gotten all of her partying out of her system, and just in time, too: She recommitted to her grades and ended up enrolling at Cambridge. The culture shock hit hard: Sawayama spent most of her program depressed, and her relationship with her mother continued to sour until she got kicked out of the house.Sawayama worked various jobs — as a model, at an Apple Store (until she got fired for modeling in a Samsung advertisement), in an ice cream truck, as a nail tech. On the side, she developed her music, uploading new recordings to SoundCloud in between shifts. Eventually, she started getting recognized while doing pedicures, so she gave that gig up.Her manager introduced her to Clarity, the producer, and they collaborated on “Rina,” an EP released in 2017 about digital and cultural anxieties. Sawayama played small tours at home and the United States, but needed to keep working various jobs to support herself in between shows.“I signed my first record deal when I was 29,” she said during our second interview in May, over French fries at the Odeon in Tribeca. “Which is just so late for a pop artist, and I love that I’m able to change that in a positive way. I’m able to come to the table with a bit more stories, say, and life experience and things to write about.”Maturity has other benefits, too: In between Sawayama’s albums, some of the artists she’d admired became collaborators. She remade her own song “Chosen Family” with Elton John, teamed with Charli XCX on the pop star’s single “Beg for You” and provided vocals on a remix of Lady Gaga’s “Chromatica” track “Free Woman.”Her reach still shocks her. “All those people I grew up listening to” — she said she’d also heard her fans include Katy Perry and the producer Jack Antonoff — “I can’t believe they know I exist,” she said.But Clarity, who noted that Sawayama’s new album is far more personal than her debut, isn’t surprised: “She was meant to be a pop star,” he said. “She was born to do this.”FOR YEARS, SAWAYAMA has kept a list of interesting quotes or phrases in a Notes app on her iPhone as potential sources for inspiration, lines from books or from conversations with friends. The title of one of her new singles, “This Hell,” sprung from that list: Though she had originally clacked out “this heaven is better with you,” the phrase had morphed by the time she got into the studio, where she realized hell could encompass more of her reality.For one, parts of the pandemic were certainly hellish. For another, restrictive religious beliefs are being codified into law across the world. Like Lil Nas X, another artist who responds with queer insouciance toward Judeo-Christian homophobia, the song’s lines — “God hates us? All right then!/Buckle up, at dawn we’re riding” — imply that there’ll be plenty of good company on the road to perdition.“I was just like, ‘If there is a belief that we’re wrong for wanting to have autonomy in our bodies or identities, then [expletive] it, we’re all going to go to hell, and let’s have a party,’” Sawayama said, laughing and adding a few additional expletives. She identifies as pansexual; the music video for the song features the singer in a three-way marriage with a man and a woman. “Hell is going to be the place to be, evidently.”Onstage in Brooklyn in May, Sawayama brought her fans into her version of it — devil chic — vamping about the stage in a blood-red, strong-shouldered unitard. Lithe but powerful, she twisted and snaked her upper body with aplomb, adding extra flicks of rhythm when she felt the call to. At one point, her guitarist came forward to join her at the front of the stage, shredding powerfully, losing herself as if in a trance. But Sawayama only had eyes for the instrument itself, her eyes locked onto its strings, dancing in response to its sounds, almost like she had been possessed. More

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      Bad Bunny Beats YoungBoy Never Broke Again in a Tight Race for No. 1

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      Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” falls to No. 3 as the Puerto Rican superstar and the Louisiana rapper battle for the top spot on the Billboard album chart.Bad Bunny reclaims No. 1 on the Billboard album chart by the thinnest of margins this week, as the Puerto Rican superstar’s three-month-old album “Un Verano Sin Ti” logged its eighth time at the top, beating out the latest release by the prolific Louisiana rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again by just 400 copies.“Un Verano Sin Ti,” a steady streaming hit since its release 14 weeks ago, is credited with the equivalent of 108,800 sales in the United States, while YoungBoy’s “The Last Slimeto” had 108,400, according to the tracking service Luminate.Looking under the hood shows slight differences in how the two albums performed over the last week. “Un Verano” had 143 million streams, which Luminate and Billboard credit with the equivalent of just over 102,000 sales. “The Last Slimeto,” on the other hand, took many more streams — 163 million — to earn barely 1,000 more equivalent sales.Billboard gives greater weight to the streams from paying subscribers than nonpaying ones. The data tea leaves suggest that YoungBoy may have performed especially well on services with free tiers like Spotify and YouTube, where YoungBoy has been a huge attraction for years.Even so, the deciding factor in winning No. 1 was the number of copies sold as a complete package. Last week, the CD version of “Un Verano” became widely available, so the album sold 6,000 copies, while “The Last Slimeto” moved just 4,600.Beyoncé’s “Renaissance,” last week’s top seller, falls two spots to No. 3 in its second week out, with the equivalent of 89,000 sales, a drop of 73 percent. Beyoncé’s single “Break My Soul” holds at No. 1 on the Hot 100 chart, thanks to a “Queens Remix” that incorporates Madonna’s 1990 hit “Vogue” and features Beyoncé tweaking the shout-outs from her predecessor’s song to include Black female musicians including Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Aaliyah and Lizzo.Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4 and Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” holds at No. 5. More

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      From Madonna to Beyoncé, Pop Material Girls Draw From Rich Influence

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      Questions about borrowing, authorship and inspiration — from the underground to the mainstream and vice versa — connect new releases from Beyoncé, Madonna and Saucy Santana.Much of the early fallout surrounding the release of Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” — in the sense that there can be any true fallout from a militarily precise rollout that moves in stealth and is staffed by armies of writers, producers, marketers, lawyers and social media savants — came down to matters of acknowledgment and credit.These are concerns that are, in essence, legal, but really more philosophical and moral. Acknowledging a source of inspiration, direct or indirect, is correct business practice but also, in the era of internet-centric hyperaccountability, something akin to playing offense as defense.This is perhaps unusually true in regards to “Renaissance,” a meticulous album that’s a rich and thoughtful exploration and interpretation of the past few decades in American dance music, particularly its Black, queer roots, touching on disco, house, ballroom and more. The credits and the list of collaborators are scrupulous — Beyoncé worked with producers and writers from those worlds and sampled foundational tracks from those scenes.But there were still quarrels, or quirks, as the album arrived. First came the ping-ponging songwriting credits on its first single, “Break My Soul,” which initially included the writers of the Robin S. club classic “Show Me Love,” then removed them, then reinstated them. (The credits don’t, however, acknowledge StoneBridge, the remixer who popularized the original song.)A few days before the album’s release, its full credits were circulated online, suggesting that the song “Energy” had interpolated a Kelis song that was produced by the Neptunes (Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo). Kelis, the early 2000s alt-soul innovator, posted a series of Instagram videos expressing frustration that she was not advised of the borrowing, even though she is not the publishing rights holder. (Kelis wasn’t a credited writer or producer on most of the early albums she made with the Neptunes, owing to an agreement she signed with the duo when she “was too young and too stupid to double-check it,” she told The Guardian.) That opened up conversations about legal versus spiritual obligations, and the potential two-facedness of Williams. Without comment, Beyoncé updated the song, seemingly removing part of the interpolation of Kelis’s “Milkshake.”When these sorts of dissatisfactions spill over into the public eye (or in the worst cases, the courts), often the text is about money but the subtext is about power. And it has been notable that even Beyoncé, ordinarily beyond reproach, couldn’t safely traipse across the modern internet totally without incident.Conversations about who has the right to borrow from whom — and whether it is acceptable — are heightened when the person doing the borrowing is among the most powerful figures in pop music. But on “Renaissance,” Beyoncé largely deploys her loans savvily — working with the long-running house music D.J. and producer Honey Dijon, sampling the hugely influential drag queen and musician Kevin Aviance — providing a huge platform for artists who are often relegated to the margins.Days after “Renaissance” officially arrived, Beyoncé released a series of remixes of its single, most notably “Break My Soul (The Queens Remix),” which blended her track with Madonna’s “Vogue.” That 1990 song, of course, represented an early mainstreaming of New York’s queer club culture. But Beyoncé brought new cultural politics to this version, turning Madonna’s roll call of white silver-screen idols into a catalog of crucial Black women musicians: Aaliyah, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Santigold, Bessie Smith, Nina Simone and more. (The idea for the remix seemingly originated with a D.J. named frooty treblez on TikTok, who received a miscellaneous production credit.)The remix is electric, both philosophically and musically — it displays a clear continuum of the ways in which pop stars are themselves voracious consumers, and have been granted certain latitude when their borrowings are perceived as respectful. (Naturally, both Beyoncé and Madonna have received some criticism from queer critics who find their work appropriative.)Three decades on from “Vogue,” however, Madonna is still demonstrating her ongoing, deep engagement with queer culture. She recently released “Material Gworrllllllll!” a collaboration with the rapper Saucy Santana remixing his own song, “Material Girl” (named, naturally, for her 1984 hit). It’s a bit of a messy collision — Madonna’s vocals sound as if they’ve been run through sort of a hyperpop vocal filter, and her segments of the song feel more aspirated than his. It’s peppy but lacks flair.The rapper Saucy Santana collaborated with Madonna on a remix of his own “Material Girl,” and nodded to Beyoncé on another single, “Booty.”Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesSaucy Santana, a gay rapper who first found fame on reality television after working as a makeup artist for the hip-hop duo City Girls, began achieving TikTok virality a couple of years ago. Of his song snippets that gained traction online, “Material Girl” was the most vivid, an ode to transactional luxury just as raw as Madonna’s original.But the wink of the title was his most effective gambit, a way of linking his insouciance to Madonna’s. This strategy spilled over into “Booty,” his most recent single, which is based on the same ecstatic horn sample as Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love.” Even in a year in which countless pop stars have plundered the past for obvious samples, this was a particularly audacious maneuver. Especially given that the borrowing is not, in fact, from “Crazy in Love,” but rather from the song that “Crazy in Love” samples, “Are You My Woman? (Tell Me So)” by the Chi-Lites.Here, again, the linkage to the past is a sleight of hand. To the uninitiated, “Booty” sounds like an official cosign from Beyoncé herself. To the slightly more savvy, it might appear that Beyoncé’s approval was implicit, the result of a behind-the-scenes understanding. Or perhaps Saucy Santana simply audaciously outflanked her.Whichever the case, these borrowings mark Saucy Santana as a pop star who understands that fame is pastiche. He’s building a persona from parts that are there for the taking, risking asking forgiveness rather than worrying about permission. Or more succinctly put, doing exactly what the divas before him did. More

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      M.I.A. Takes Aim at Fame, and 7 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Nicki Minaj, Gayle, Yeah Yeah Yeahs 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.M.I.A., ‘Popular’It’s a little hard to tell if M.I.A. is skewering the self-involvement of social media culture on “Popular” or if she’s vying for a TikTok hit herself — but hey, who says you can’t have it both ways? “Love me like I love me, love me,” she intones, as the skittish but thoroughly hypnotic beat (from the producers Boaz van de Beats and Diplo) lulls the listener into nodding along. The accompanying video is a wild, creepy trip into the uncanny valley, as M.I.A. confronts and ultimately destroys her A.I. alter ego, the appropriately named “M.A.I.” LINDSAY ZOLADZGayle, ‘Indieedgycool’A concept song about the resurgence of anti-pop posturing rendered with the dryness of 1990s alt-rock delivered by a singer whose breakout came via a record label-initiated TikTok. It’s a catchy eye roll that’s an ouroboros of TikTok-addled hype-cycle collapse, meshing microtrend and backlash all together into one. JON CARAMANICAWillow, ‘Hover Like a Goddess’“Hover Like a Goddess,” from the upcoming album “,” is further proof that Willow has finally found her lane in the space where bouncy pop-punk and anguished emo-rock converge. “I’ll never be fine if you won’t be mine,” she sings with pent-up intensity amid a number of other lusty confessions (“Just meet me under the covers/Baby, I wish”), before the song suddenly transforms into a dreamy reverie. That bliss is fleeting, though, and by the next verse Willow is just as quickly jarred back into her endearingly anxious reality. ZOLADZYeah Yeah Yeahs, ‘Burning’Yeah Yeah Yeahs unexpectedly interpolate Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ 1967 version of “Beggin’” for their fiery new single “Burning,” from their upcoming album “Cool It Down,” expanding the original’s feeling of romantic desperation into a more vast and ominous conflagration. Nick Zinner’s guitar riff snakes through the song like a lit fuse as Karen O croons devilish come-ons like, “Lay your red hand on me as I go.” The whole thing’s a little bit retro, and a little bit neo-apocalyptic. ZOLADZNicki Minaj, ‘Super Freaky Girl’As the title would suggest, this is simply a series of intense, gum-snapping Nicki Minaj raps over Rick James’s “Super Freak,” a combination so obvious and winningly bubbly that it’s shocking it didn’t already exist. CARAMANICAIce Spice, “Munch (Feelin’ U)”Few things have better mouth feel than a fresh piece of slang. The way the lips, teeth and tongue contort to form a word as the neural pathways connect that word to a new concept — it’s invigorating. So it goes with “Munch (Feelin’ U)” by the Bronx drill rapper Ice Spice, who in the past week received a boost following an embrace by Drake. In a frenzied genre, she’s a calm rapper, which is part of what makes this song so frosty — the beat is skittish and portentous, but Ice Spice sounds at peace. She’s rhyming quickly, but also calmly and slightly dismissively, probably because of the subject matter. That would be a man who might be useful in some ways, but is easily dismissed — someone who’s on call, but barely needed. He’s good at one thing, and when that’s done, not much else — he’s a munch. Get used to saying it. CARAMANICARex Orange County, ‘Threat’A tender take on self-doubt by the goofily warm British singer Rex Orange County. “I don’t wanna keep you in a boring life/I can pick up when you’re calling/Keep it real with you always,” he sings, wondering if he’s worthy of the object of his affection. It’s all delivered over a guitar figure that suggests the early Vampire Weekend revival is just around the corner. CARAMANICAAri Lennox, ‘Hoodie’Hoodies have never sounded sexier than they do on Ari Lennox’s slinky new homage to loungewear and whatever’s going on “underneath your North Face.” The track from the R&B singer’s forthcoming album “Age/Sex/Location,” which comes out on Sept. 9, has a few playful lines (“spread it like some queso”) but Lennox’s powerhouse vocal performance imbues the whole thing with a mature, pulsing sensuality. ZOLADZ More

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      Bill Pitman, Revered Studio Guitarist, Is Dead at 102

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      As a versatile member of the loose association of musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, he was heard on many of the biggest pop and rock hits of the 1960s and ’70s.Bill Pitman, a guitarist who accompanied Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand and others from the late 1950s to the ’70s, and who for decades was heard on the soundtracks of countless Hollywood films and television shows, died on Thursday night at his home in La Quinta, Calif. He was 102.His wife, Janet Pitman, said he died after four weeks at a rehabilitation center in Palm Springs, where he was treated for a fractured spine suffered in a fall, and the past week at home under hospice care.Virtually anonymous outside the music world but revered within it, Mr. Pitman was a member of what came to be called the Wrecking Crew — a loosely organized corps of peerless Los Angeles freelancers who were in constant demand by record producers to back up headline performers. As an ensemble, they turned routine recording sessions and live performances into extraordinary musical moments.Examples abound: Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” (1966). Presley’s “Blue Hawaii” (1961). Streisand’s “The Way We Were” (1973). The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” (1963). The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” (1966). On “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” from the Paul Newman-Robert Redford hit movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), Mr. Pitman played ukulele.In a career of nearly 40 years, Mr. Pitman played countless gigs for studios and record labels that dominated the pop charts but rarely credited the performers behind the stars. The Wrecking Crew did almost everything — television and film scores; pop, rock and jazz arrangements; even cartoon soundtracks. Whether recorded in a studio or on location, everything was performed with precision and pizazz.“These were crack session players who moved effortlessly through many different styles: pop, jazz, rockabilly, but primarily the two-minute-thirty-second world of hit records that America listened to all through the sixties and seventies,” Allegro magazine reminisced in 2011. “If it was a hit and recorded in L.A., the Wrecking Crew cut the tracks.”Jumping from studio to studio — often playing four or five sessions a day — members of the crew accompanied the Beach Boys, Sonny and Cher, the Monkees, the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, Ricky Nelson, Jan and Dean, Johnny Rivers, the Byrds, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, the Everly Brothers, Peggy Lee and scads more — nearly every prominent performer of the era.The pace was relentless, Mr. Pitman recalled in Denny Tedesco’s 2008 documentary, “The Wrecking Crew.”“You leave the house at 7 in the morning, and you’re at Universal at 9 till noon,” he said. “Now you’re at Capitol Records at 1. You just got time to get there, then you got a jingle at 4, then we’re on a date with somebody at 8, then the Beach Boys at midnight, and you do that five days a week.”Mr. Pitman was heard on the soundtracks of some 200 films, including Robert Altman’s Korean War black comedy “M*A*S*H” (1970), Amy Heckerling’s comedy “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982), Emile Ardolino’s romantic musical drama “Dirty Dancing” (1987) and Martin Scorsese’s gangster fable “Goodfellas” (1990).On television, Mr. Pitman’s Danelectro bass guitar was heard for years on “The Wild Wild West.” He also worked on “I Love Lucy,” “Bonanza,” “The Deputy,” “Ironside,” “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour,” “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” and many other shows. He was credited with composing music for early episodes of the original “Star Trek” series.While generally indifferent toward rock, colleagues said, Mr. Pitman played it well, sometimes expressing surprise at the success of his work in that genre. He was far more enthusiastic about jazz, especially the work of composers and arrangers like Marty Paich, Dave Grusin and Johnny Mandel.Mr. Pitman, who grew up in New York City and had music tutors from the time he was 6 years old, came home from World War II and headed west determined to make a living in music. He attended the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, learned arranging and composing, and essentially taught himself the skills of a master guitarist.In 1951, at a club where Peggy Lee was singing, he met the guitar virtuoso Laurindo Almeida, who was quitting Ms. Lee’s band. After an audition, Mr. Pitman was hired to take Mr. Almeida’s place, and his career was launched.In 1954 he joined the singer Rusty Draper’s daily radio show. Three years later, he sat in for the guitarist Tony Rizzi at a recording date for Capitol Records. It was his big break.Word soon got around about the comer who could improvise with the best. Mr. Pitman got to know the session guitarists Howard Roberts, Jack Marshall, Al Hendrickson, Bob Bain and Bobby Gibbons, and he was soon one of them.Mr. Bill Pitman and a fellow studio musician, the bassist Carol Kaye, in a scene from the documentary “The Wrecking Crew” (2008).Magnolia PicturesHis fellow studio musicians included the drummer Hal Blaine, the guitarists Tommy Tedesco and Glen Campbell (before he had a hit-making singing career), the bassists Carol Kaye and Joe Osborn, and the keyboardists Don Randi and Leon Russell (who also went on to a successful solo singing career). They coalesced around Phil Spector, the producer known for his “wall of sound” approach, who regularly employed them.While not publicly recognized in its era, this ensemble is viewed with reverence today by music historians and insiders. Mr. Blaine, who died in 2019, claimed that he named the Wrecking Crew. But Ms. Kaye insisted that he did not start using the name until years after its musicians stopped working together in the ’70s. In any case, there was no disagreement about Mr. Pitman’s contributions.In his book “Conversations With Great Jazz and Studio Guitarists” (2009), Jim Carlton called Mr. Pitman a mainstay of the crew. “Perhaps no one personifies the unsung studio player like Bill Pitman does,” he wrote. “Few guitarists have logged more recording sessions, and fewer still have enjoyed being such a legitimate part of America’s soundtrack.”William Keith Pitman was born in Belleville, N.J., on Feb. 12, 1920, the only child of Keith and Irma (Kunze) Pitman. His father was a staff bassist for NBC Radio and a busy freelance player in New York; his mother was a Broadway dancer. The family moved to Manhattan when Bill was 6, and he attended the Professional Children’s School.Mr. Pitman in 2012. He performed in Las Vegas and on film soundtracks well until the 1980s, and continued to play guitar at home after that.Jan PittmanWhen he was 13, his parents split up. His mother joined a firm that made theater costumes. His father gave him guitar lessons, and young Bill played 50-cent gigs with musicians who would later become famous, like the trumpeter Shorty Rogers and the drummer Shelly Manne. But his schoolwork at Haaren High School in Manhattan suffered, and he dropped out. He joined the Army Air Corps in 1942, became a radio operator and flew many supply missions over the Himalayas from India to China during World War II.In 1947, he married Mildred Hurty. They had three children and were divorced in the late 1960s. In the ’70s he married and divorced Debbie Yajacovic twice. In 1985 he married Janet Valentine and adopted her daughter, Rosemary.Besides his wife, he is survived by his son, Dale; his daughters, Donna Simpson, Jean Langdon and Rosemary Pitman; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.Mr. Pitman quit session work in 1973 and went on the road, performing in concert with Burt Bacharach, Anthony Newley, Vikki Carr and others for several years. In the late ’70s he moved to Las Vegas, where he joined the music staff of the MGM Grand Hotel, playing for headliners well into the ’80s. He also continued to play on film soundtracks until he retired in 1989.Mr. Pitman performed professionally only once in retirement — at a memorial concert in 2001 in Pasadena, Calif., for an old friend, Julius Wechter, leader of the Baja Marimba Band. Mr. Wechter, who died in 1999, had Tourette’s syndrome and was a spokesman for people with the disorder.Mr. Pitman continued writing arrangements, and at 99 he was still playing music — and golf.“He plays the guitar at home just about every day,” his wife said in an interview for this obituary in 2019. “I am a bass player. We play only jazz. No rock ’n’ roll.” As for golf, she said, “He can still beat me.” More

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      A Renaissance in American Hardcore Music

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherAmerican hardcore music is experiencing a creative burst at the moment, owing to bands including Gulch, Scowl, Drug Church, Drain, Mindforce and End It. The scene has its own network of YouTube channels, podcasts and websites that catalog it. And last month’s Sound and Fury Festival in Los Angeles was a powerful statement of purpose.There have been some recent precedents for this current moment — the ongoing crossover success and musical evolution of the Baltimore band Turnstile; the way the California act Trash Talk made inroads into hip-hop, skating and streetwear communities. But these have been moments in which outsiders took a gander at hardcore. Right now, the center itself is growing and thriving.On this week’s episode, a survey of contemporary hardcore bands, a look at the genre’s purposely porous boundaries, and a discussion of the hardcore scene as music, ethic and feeling.Guests:Tom Breihan, senior editor at StereogumChris Ryan, editorial director of The Ringer and co-host of The Watch podcastConnect 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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      Sylvan Esso’s New Album of Electro-pop Challenges All Expectations

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      The duo’s fourth LP, “No Rules Sandy,” revels in constantly shifting sounds that are “surreal but free.”The electronic vertigo revs up immediately and rarely lets up on “No Rules Sandy,” the fourth studio album by Sylvan Esso. “How can I be moved when everything is moving,” Amelia Meath calmly muses in the opening track, “Moving,” over a hissing, scurrying beat, octave-swooping blips and stereo-panning whooshes that keep things spinning. It’s a whirlwind start to an album that celebrates renewed, unconstrained motion: lighthearted on the surface, purposeful at its core.Sylvan Esso — the duo of Meath and her husband, Nick Sanborn — has created its own niche of electro-pop: transparent yet intricate, airy but serious, fond of pop structures yet eager to bend them. The duo skillfully deploys the hardware and software of electronic dance music, even as it eludes genres and warps standard patterns. The technology makes repetition all too easy, but Sylvan Esso has better ideas.“No Rules Sandy” is a pendulum-swing sequel to “Free Love,” the subdued, wistful album that arrived in September 2020, when pandemic stasis and isolation were sinking in. “Free Love” contemplated, from a distance, the shared pleasures that were once taken for granted, with songs that longed to be, as one put it, “Shaking out the numb.”In Sylvan Esso’s new songs, pleasure is back within reach. “Sunburn” celebrates overindulgence — too much sun, too many sweets — with a track punctuated by the happy sample of a bicycle bell. “Didn’t Care” revels in an unexpected romance with a euphoric blend of Afro-pop guitars, Balkan choral harmonies and bubbly synthesizers.Sylan Esso hasn’t stayed isolated during the pandemic. Back in March 2021, it gathered fellow musicians around its North Carolina home base and completely reworked the electronic tracks from “Free Love” for a hand-played, full-band livestream set, titled “With Love” — a reminder of concert camaraderie. In September, the duo returned to touring. Still, “No Rules Sandy” sounds like Sylvan Esso had ample time to fool around in the studio.There’s a spirit of try-anything, knob-twirling whimsy throughout the new album, a determination that any parameter can change at any time. The album’s watchwords are the refrain of “Your Reality,” a track that meshes syncopated, ambiguous synthesizer chords and a sighing string quartet: “Surreal but free — it’s your reality.”Typical electronic pop and dance music offer reassurance through predictability: an obvious and reliable beat on the bottom, crisp verse-chorus-verse delineations for songs, or measured four-bar buildups leading to anticipated payoffs in dance tracks. Sylvan Esso challenges all those expectations. Throughout “No Rules Sandy,” beats appear, fracture and suddenly vanish and return; vocals are intimate and naturalistic one moment, glitchy or multitracked or pitch-shifted the next.In “Echo Party,” Meath sings about “a lot of people dancing downtown,” with hi-hats and piano chords that hint at disco and house music. But the track craftily refuses to settle into a club groove. The sliding bass line slows down to trip things up (or out); later, the beat drops away completely, leaving Meath on a looped a cappella syllable: “by, by, by.”The tweaks keep coming. “Look at Me” takes on the attention economy — “All I want is to be seen,” Meath sings — with production suggesting a constantly pinging internet; the rhythm is defined almost entirely from above by pecking, tapping, booping, clicking offbeats. “Cloud Walker” flickers in and out of a sense of 4/4 and 3/4, subdivided by the fibrillating cymbals of breakbeats, while Meath’s voice is overdubbed into chords as she sings about fear and acceptance: “learning disaster/relax in style.” As that line suggests, “No Rules Sandy” is upbeat but not oblivious. “Everybody’s hearing along with me/the alarm the alarm the alarm,” Meath sings in “Alarm,” near the end of the album. For all the fun Sylvan Esso was clearly having in the studio, the music also reflects just how unstable the 2020s feel. All the whizzing, zinging, twinkling, morphing sounds promise there are ways to cope with what’s coming at us.The album’s final track switches up once more. “Coming Back to You” is a simple, folky ballad, strummed on acoustic guitar (though Sylvan Esso can’t resist adding some filtered vocal harmonies). It promises a homecoming, a connection, a refuge: “I am the root, I am the leaf/I am the big tree you grew beneath,” Meath sings. After all the motion, the song offers a place to rest.Sylvan Esso“No Rules Sandy”(Loma Vista) More