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      Stray Kids, a K-Pop Octet, Debuts on the Chart at No. 1

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      The eight-member group sold more than 100,000 copies of its new mini-album, “Oddinary,” on CD, which came in an array of collectible versions.Stray Kids, a K-pop group formed through a reality-TV show, has made its first appearance on the Billboard 200 chart a big one, opening at No. 1.“Oddinary,” a seven-track EP with lyrics mostly in Korean, had the equivalent of 110,000 sales in the United States in its first week out. The vast majority of those sales were for CDs, as the eight-man group’s “Oddinary” came out in a variety of collectible versions including stickers, posters, trading cards and other goodies. The mini-album also had 10 million streams, according to Luminate, the tracking service formerly known as MRC Data (and, before that, Nielsen Music).Lil Durk’s “7220,” last week’s chart-topper, falls to No. 2 with the equivalent of 81,000 sales, mostly from streaming, a 33 percent drop. Disney’s “Encanto” soundtrack is No. 3, and Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4.“Fighting Demons,” the second posthumous album by Juice WRLD, the singer and rapper who died at age 21 in late 2019, jumped 30 spots to No. 5 after it was rereleased in a deluxe version and also came out on physical formats like CD and vinyl LP. “Fighting Demons” had opened at No. 2 in December.The Weeknd’s compilation “The Highlights” is in sixth place, and the British pop singer and songwriter Charli XCX opens at No. 7 with “Crash,” a career high.On the singles chart, Glass Animals’ “Heat Waves,” a nearly two-year-old song that has become newly hot at pop radio after it became a meme on TikTok, holds at No. 1 for a fourth straight week. More

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      Wet Leg, the Indie-Rock Duo, Blew Up Fast. They Know It’s Weird.

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      The group’s droll single “Chaise Longue” racked up playlist spots and star endorsements. Its debut album has more springy bass lines, jabbing guitars and sharp, observational lyrics.“Hi, we’re Wet Leg. I guess you guys know that, because you bought tickets,” Rhian Teasdale said to the sold-out crowd at Mercury Lounge, a small club on the lip of New York’s Lower East Side, one evening in December. Teasdale, who mostly sings lead vocals and plays rhythm guitar, looked over her right shoulder at Hester Chambers, who mostly sings backup and plays lead guitar. The two chuckled as they shared their latest moment of astonishment. “It’s so weird,” Teasdale said to the audience.In the last year, lots of things have been weird for Wet Leg, a band from Isle of Wight, England, that has ascended as quickly and unexpectedly as any in recent pop history. It was weird when a well-known London manager signed them in May 2020, even though they hadn’t released any music, and it was weird when Domino Records, home to alternative rock stars including Cat Power and Arctic Monkeys, made a deal with them six months later, despite having heard only four songs on a private SoundCloud.The duo’s droll and instantly catchy first song, “Chaise Longue,” arrived in June 2021, and weird things happened: Streaming services added it to prominent playlists, Elton John played it on his Apple Music radio show and Dave Grohl raved about it in an interview, saying, “There are nights when we just play that song on repeat.”“Chaise Longue” has the feel of an epochal one-off, something unrepeatable, like “Louie Louie” or “Because I Got High.” But on their self-titled album due April 8, Teasdale, 29, and Chambers, 28, deliver more smart, frisky neo-new wave songs about the challenges of being a middle-class woman in her late 20s. The lyrics are full of modern references, including wokeness, Instagram, dating apps, sexting and late-night scrolling. Work is boring, boyfriends are fickle and deserve to be mocked, as they are in “Wet Dream” and “Loving You.” Though the lyrics sometimes linger over a feeling of being adrift (“I’m almost 28, still getting off my stupid face,” Teasdale sings in “I Don’t Wanna Go Out”), the Wet Leg album is a thrashing good time.“We didn’t aspire to get signed. We thought it would not be in the cards,” Chambers said a few days after their New York debut, sitting in the lobby of the band’s Brooklyn hotel. “We just wanted to play some silly songs.”Their pessimism about success was understandable. First of all, they lived on the Isle of Wight, which can be reached most easily by boat, and, with a population of about 141,000, is hardly known as a launching pad of global talent. The bucolic island is distinguished by its chalky white cliffs and Victorian cottages, and being there is “like going back in time,” said Martin Hall, Wet Leg’s manager. “It’s very English.”In addition, Teasdale and Chambers, who met as music students at the Isle of Wight College, had been performing separately for years, with little traction. Teasdale recorded under the name Rhain from 2016 to 2018, and sang askew, fanciful songs that call to mind Björk or Perfume Genius. Chambers fronted Hester and Red Squirrel, specializing in soft-focus songs about star-crossed lovers, like Nick Drake but with lots of water imagery. “I’ve played to literally no one before. That was fun,” Chambers said dryly of her history onstage.At one show, Teasdale had a near meltdown. She’d driven four hours for a solo gig, and everyone in the festival tent where she played was eating. After two songs, “I started crying hysterically,” she said. “I’d been playing music for five years, just because it becomes so intertwined in your identity.” She decided to ask Chambers to back her up onstage, so she’d feel less lonely.Chambers, similarly, was crying and having panic attacks before her shows, and had begun apprenticing in her parents’ jewelry business. “I felt like, OK, maybe making music isn’t in my stars,” she said. “And I was pretty gutted.”Once Teasdale and Chambers discovered they had similar stories, they resolved to start a new band that felt fun, with no goal beyond maybe, if they were lucky, playing at a local festival or two. They chose the name Wet Leg, Teasdale has explained, because it’s “such a dumb name,” and serves as a reminder not to take themselves seriously.“That’s why it’s so weird,” Teasdale added, “because the moment we stopped trying to make anyone else happy and did a band for the joy of playing and hanging out, that’s when …” Her voice trailed off, but the point was clear.“It’s rare to find a band that, from the off, sounds unique, individual and identifiable,” Lauren Mayberry of Chvrches, the Scottish band that chose Wet Leg as an opening act on some December dates, wrote in an email. “Lyrically, they can be wry, but their music feels very honest and joyful. I also think it’s rare for women to be allowed to have a sense of humor in their music, which is just another thing to love about them.”On record, the two musicians boldly sing about sex (Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP” was an inspiration). But in conversation, they are so soft-spoken that when a woman walked by talking loudly on her cellphone, I could barely hear their voices. They said they were still as unconfident as when they started, but as a duo, they gathered strength from one another, and from a motto that keeps them going: “Feel the fear, but do it anyway.”“We didn’t aspire to get signed,” Chambers said. “We just wanted to play some silly songs.”Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesLast August, they booked a set at the Green Man festival in Wales, and were startled to see dozens of fans waiting for them to play. Surely, they thought, all those people had come to see them by mistake. “Once we’d soundchecked our instruments,” Teasdale said, “we had a few minutes to …”“Have a nervous wee,” Chambers interjected.“The whole tent was full of expectant people who’d heard only one song at that point,” Teasdale continued. “It’s been really weird, playing to big audiences.”The effect of “Chaise Longue” was that immediate. By the time they started writing the song, Teasdale had moved to London and was working as a stylist on commercials. She came back to Isle of Wight to stay with Chambers and her partner Joshua Mobaraki, who tours with Wet Leg as a synth player and guitarist. Teasdale’s makeshift bed was a lumpy chaise longue that had belonged to Chambers’s grandparents, which inspired the three of them to write the song while taking part of the lyrics (“Is your muffin buttered?”) from a scene in “Mean Girls.”Michael Champion of the band Champs, who played bass on the song, liked it enough to contact Hall, who asked to meet them, much to their disbelief. “It’s kind of my sweet spot — the new wave indie guitar music I grew up loving,” Hall said. “They are quiet and shy people, and somewhat bemused by the success,” he added, “but there’s also a quiet ambition about them.”The video Wet Leg made themselves for “Chaise Longue” also helped fuel the phenomenon, thanks to Teasdale’s deadpan demeanor, and attire (straw sun hats, floor-length white frocks) that makes them look like 1890s frontierswomen. They’ve since made self-directed videos for “Wet Dream” and “Oh No.” “I trust their instincts,” Hall said. “They’ve got it right so far.”Older listeners might hear echoes of bands from an earlier generation, like Delta 5, Elastica or Art Brut. But Teasdale and Chambers aren’t familiar with any of those groups. Their closest compatriots are Dry Cleaning, Yard Act and Sports Team, young British bands who, despite having been born after new wave’s popularity crested, emulate the music’s springy bass lines, resolute drums and jabbing guitars as they limn the ruins of consumer culture, talk-singing in unmistakably British cadences. These bands share an ability to muster ecstatic objections out of their disgust.The camaraderie between Teasdale and Chambers feels like a pact, almost at the level of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It becomes evident when I ask them to describe one another.Chambers: “Rhian is funny and ethereal. This sounds cheesy, but when we met at uni, I knew you were going to do something really wild. You’re just a star. And you’re pretty.”Teasdale: “I’m blushing. Hester is kind and generous. You’re very quiet, and you have the smallest handwriting I’ve ever seen.”Chambers: “Thank you. That means a lot.”Teasdale: “You’re very strong, even though you think you’re not. Now I’m getting very emotional.”Chambers: “Thanks, mom.”Underneath their talk about feeling overwhelmed and overcoming fear, there’s also a resolve about how to present themselves. “A lot of the internet is saturated with images that make you feel like you’re not enough, or you don’t have enough,” Teasdale said. “I don’t want to be in a band that makes people, young girls in particular, feel like [expletive] about themselves.”True to their island background, the two offered a nautical simile that sums up the voyage so far. “We’re like two little seals surfing the wave,” Chambers said. “Two seal pups surfing along,” Teasdale responded, and the two friends laughed. More

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      Taylor Hawkins, Foo Fighters’ Drummer, Dies at 50

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      Hard-hitting and charismatic, he was direct about his hopes for the group’s future, even after two decades. “I want to be the biggest band in the world,” he said.Taylor Hawkins, the hard-hitting, charismatic drummer for Foo Fighters, the enduring Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band that has won 12 Grammys and released seven platinum albums, has died at 50.A statement posted to the band’s social media late Friday and sent by its representative confirmed the death. According to the attorney general’s office of Colombia, Mr. Hawkins had been staying in a hotel in northern Bogotá, where the band had been scheduled to play a show Friday night. The office said that preliminary tests showed Mr. Hawkins had several substances in his system, including opioids, marijuana and benzodiazepines; the cause of death was still under investigation.pic.twitter.com/ffPHhUKRT4— Foo Fighters (@foofighters) March 26, 2022
      Recognizable for his flailing limbs, surfer’s good looks and wide, childlike grin, Mr. Hawkins became a member of the band led by Dave Grohl for its third album, “There Is Nothing Left to Lose,” released in 1999, and played on the group’s subsequent seven albums. He drew on two distinct styles: the fundamentals of Roger Taylor from Queen and the intricacy of Stewart Copeland from the Police. He added the muscle of punk and metal, the precision of drum machines and a gift for explosive momentum.Foo Fighters’ most recent album, “Medicine at Midnight,” arrived last year as the group was celebrating its 25th anniversary, and in an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Hawkins was direct about his hopes for its future. “I want to be the biggest band in the world,” he said.Mr. Hawkins was born in Fort Worth on Feb. 17, 1972, and raised in Southern California. He started to play drums at age 10, and said that his mother gave him the confidence to dream big: “When I first got drums, she was the one who would watch me play. She was a big supporter and told me I’d make it,” he said in an interview last year.Attending a Queen show in 1982 confirmed that music was his passion. “After that concert, I don’t think I slept for three days,” he said in a 2021 interview with the metal magazine Kerrang. “It changed everything, and I was never the same because of it. It was the beginning of my obsession with rock ’n’ roll, and I knew that I wanted to be in a huge rock band.”After Mr. Hawkins played in a local California band called Sylvia and backing the Canadian rock vocalist Sass Jordan, his first mainstream break came in 1995, when he joined Alanis Morissette’s band as she toured behind her blockbuster album “Jagged Little Pill.” (He appeared in the video for her breakout hit “You Oughta Know,” flipping his blond mane behind the drum kit.)Foo Fighters in performance in New York last year.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesMr. Grohl, then still primarily known for his role as the drummer for Nirvana, recalled meeting Mr. Hawkins backstage at a radio station concert in the 1990s and feeling an immediate kinship.“I was like, ‘Wow, you’re either my twin or my spirit animal or my best friend,’” Mr. Grohl said in an interview last year. “When it was time to look for a drummer, I kind of wished that he would do it, but I didn’t imagine he would leave Alanis Morissette, because at the time she was the biggest artist in the world.”But when Mr. Grohl called him later looking for a drummer, he recalled, Mr. Hawkins said, “I’m your guy.”“I think it had more to do with our personal relationship than anything musical,” he added. “To be honest, it still does. Our musical relationship — the foundation of that is our friendship, and that’s why when we jump up onstage and play, we’re so connected, because we’re like best friends.”Mr. Grohl, Foo Fighters’ lead singer and one of its songwriters and guitarists, had played drums on the band’s first album in 1995, and he took over again for its second, “The Colour and the Shape,” when a replacement failed to stick. In joining the band, Mr. Hawkins was charged with assuming the seat of one of contemporary rock’s most distinct, powerful and beloved drummers. His colorful flair and good humor helped him carve out his own place in the band, and he adapted to Mr. Grohl’s creative process: “He writes in rhythms, not only in melodies but in rhythms, so I have to meet him there,” Mr. Hawkins said.Recorded in a Virginia basement, far from the prying eyes of a record label, “There Is Nothing Left to Lose” went on to win the band’s first Grammy, for best rock album.Foo Fighters were scheduled to perform at this year’s Grammys, to be held on April 3. “Medicine at Midnight” is nominated for three awards, including best rock performance (for the song “Making a Fire”), best rock song (“Waiting on a War”) and best rock album.Foo Fighters were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last year, recognized for their “rock authenticity with infectious hooks, in-your-face guitar riffs, monster drums and boundless energy.” At the induction ceremony, Mr. Hawkins told Mr. Grohl, “Thank you for letting me be in your band.”Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters spoke when the group was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland in October. Paul McCartney, who gave the induction speech, was behind Mr. Grohl, and Mr. Hawklns was next to Mr. McCartney.David Richard/Associated PressOn songs like “Times Like These,” the 2003 hit that has become an anthem of perseverance and renewal, Mr. Hawkins is a hard-driving force, punctuating the verses with rat-a-tat fills. On “Best of You,” another fist-pumping, heartstring-tugging signature song, his snare pounds provide the chorus’s steadily building drama. And on “Rope,” a single from the band’s 2011 album, “Wasting Light,” Mr. Hawkins’s precisely syncopated work on the verses gives way to eruptions of fills.In addition to his drumming, Mr. Hawkins went on to contribute as a songwriter to Foo Fighters albums, even singing lead vocals on occasion. Beginning in 2006, he released three albums with a side project, the cheekily named Taylor Hawkins and the Coattail Riders. He also played in a cover band called Chevy Metal and a prog-rock band called the Birds of Satan. Last year he teamed with the guitarist Dave Navarro and the bassist Chris Chaney to form a band called NHC; the group’s debut EP, “Intakes & Outtakes,” was released in February.On recent Foo Fighters tours, Mr. Hawkins would swap places with Mr. Grohl to sing a cover of Queen’s 1981 hit with David Bowie, “Under Pressure,” or Queen’s “Somebody to Love,” emerging from behind the kit in his signature shorts to pay homage to the act that set him on his path. He’d also take the spotlight for drum solos that stretched several minutes, smiling as he became a whirl of limbs atop his riser, smashing his cymbals and bashing a timpani.Although he has been referred to as “a sideman with a frontman’s flair,” Mr. Hawkins admitted over the years to feeling some self-doubt about filling Mr. Grohl’s seat behind the drum kit. “A lot of my insecurities — which led to a lot of my drug use — had to do with me not feeling like I was good enough to be in this band, to play drums with Dave,” he told Spin in 2002.In 2001, he overdosed in London and was briefly comatose. “Everyone has their own path, and I took it too far,” Mr. Hawkins told Kerrang, adding that he once believed the “myth of live hard and fast, die young.”He added, “I’m not here to preach about not doing drugs, because I loved doing drugs, but I just got out of control for a while and it almost got me.”In a 2018 conversation with the online radio station Beats 1, Mr. Hawkins said, “There’s no happy ending with hard drugs.” But he declined to explain how he stayed sober: “I don’t really discuss how I live my life in that regard. I have my system that works for me.”Mr. Hawkins is survived by his wife, Alison, whom he married in 2005, and their three children, Oliver, Annabelle and Everleigh.Jon Pareles More

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      Soccer Mommy Stretches Her Sound, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Phife Dawg, Omar Apollo, Zola Jesus 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.Soccer Mommy, ‘Shotgun’Sophie Allison, who records as Soccer Mommy, continues to stretch beyond the sparse indie-rock of her early songs. “Shotgun” previews an album due in June — “Sometimes, Forever” — that is produced by Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin), an auteur of big, blurry implications. “Shotgun” is a promise of devotion to someone who might be troubled. It places Allison’s breathy, dazed vocals above a hefty beat and a low, twangy riff; as the chorus vows “Whenever you want me I’ll be around,” new layers of echoey guitars and sudden drum blasts loom, suggesting that her path isn’t entirely clear. JON PARELESMaren Morris, ‘Humble Quest’“Humble Quest,” the title track of the new album by Maren Morris, carefully balances humility and a growing determination: “I was so nice till I woke up/I was polite till I spoke up,” she sings. The verses are dogged and subdued, with steady drums and descending piano chords; the chorus leaps upward, insisting, “Damn I do my best/Not gonna hold my breath.” But the song tapers off at the end, returning to the piano chords; the quest continues. PARELESKurt Vile, ‘Mount Airy Hill (Way Gone)’As usual, Philadelphia’s Kurt Vile is an ambling, amiable presence on “Mount Airy Hill (Way Gone),” a gently psychedelic ditty in no particular hurry to get to where it’s going. “Standing on top of Mount Airy Hill … thinkin’ ’bout … flying,” he begins, sounding like a cross between Bill Callahan and John Prine, the kindred spirit he collaborated with on the 2020 EP “Speed, Sound, Lonely KV.” Beginning with that release, Vile has begun to embrace more directly the country inflections of his music and vocal delivery, and here they add to the song’s eccentric charm. “I’ve been around, but now I’m gone,” he vamps, letting that last word fly loose in an airy falsetto before adding a winking line that doubles as the title of his forthcoming album: “Watch my moves.” LINDSAY ZOLADZFlock of Dimes, ‘It Just Goes On’Under her solo moniker Flock of Dimes, Jenn Wasner tends to make knotty, intricate indie-rock, enlivened by unexpected chord changes and unusual time signatures. She’s described the hypnotic “It Just Goes On,” though, as “perhaps one of the most simple and direct songs I’ve ever made,” and the understated arrangement allows her dreamy vocals to shine. The first track on a B-side companion piece to her excellent 2021 album “Head of Roses,” “It Just Goes On” is a slow-motion reverie centered around a murky guitar riff that hangs, like Wasner’s evocative lyrics, in a state of suspended possibility: “If it never started, it doesn’t have to end, it just goes on.” ZOLADZJane Weaver, ‘Oblique Fantasy’The English songwriter, singer and guitarist Jane Weaver reaches back to the clockwork Minimalism of 1970s kraut-rock in “Oblique Fantasy,” a patiently evolving assemblage of guitar and synthesizer lines — picked, strummed, fluttering, blipping, peaking into feedback — over an unswerving, motoric beat, as she lives up to her promise: “I will get under your skin.” PARELESKilo Kish featuring Miguel, ‘Death Fantasy’The avant-pop singer Kilo Kish has a pipe dream: the demise and undoing of all frameworks, definitions and limits that might constrain her. On “Death Fantasy,” from her new album “American Gurl,” Kish raps in a breathless staccato about her ambition: “I have a death fantasy/Death of my aesthetics, this falsing fiction carved in my way,” she chants. On Instagram, Kish referred to the song as a “manifesto” and a “declaration of freedom.” But with lurching drums, neon-drenched synths, Miguel’s sky-high, looping vocalizations and a jarring flatline, “Death Fantasy” is less anthemic — it’s more a trance-like spell, conjured to convince you of the promise of starting anew. ISABELIA HERRERAPhife Dawg, ‘Forever’Well-earned 1990s nostalgia and grown-up regrets fill Phife Dawg’s “Forever,” the title track from a new album, released six years after his death, that blends his last raps with tribute verses from guests. Phife Dawg had reunited with A Tribe Called Quest, but he died before their final album together was released in 2016. In “Forever,” he rhymes through the group’s history as “four brothers with a mic and a dream.” A plush soul string section, a lurching beat and old-school turntable scratching accompany him as he recalls the group’s ascent. Suddenly he silences the track and, a cappella, he admits, “Lack of communication killed my tribe/Bad vibes.” But bygones are bygones, he declares: “Despite trials, tribe-ulations, no doubt we were built to survive.” PARELESOmar Apollo, ‘Tamagotchi’The 24-year-old singer Omar Apollo has a knack for jagged, irreverent pop songs. On “Tamagotchi,” he conscripts the Neptunes to mastermind his latest vision: there’s Pharrell’s signature four-count start, a muted Spanish guitar loop coiling under bilingual bars about Apollo’s ascendant celebrity. But the best part of “Tamagotchi” is that Apollo doesn’t take himself too seriously: “I’m making bread (Bread)/Sound like Pavarotti,” he snickers at one point. By the honey-soaked R&B bridge, you’ll be drenched in his charisma. HERRERAFrya, ‘Changes’Frya, from Zimbabwe, has clearly listened to Adele: where she applies vibrato, her approach to syncopation and sustain, and where she makes her voice build and break. But she has a songwriter’s gift: how to turn words and sounds into an emotional connection. “Say my name please in that tone again,” she begs in “Changes,” as it climbs from piano ballad to orchestral plea, perfectly strategized and emotionally telling. PARELESSon Lux and Moses Sumney, ‘Fence’The magnificently eerie “Fences,” from the soundtrack to the metaverse movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” deals in falsetto reassurances and gaping abysses. Over sustained electronic tones, tolling bass notes and orchestral swells, Moses Sumney sings an apologetic, waltzing refrain — “Only meant to give you my all/never meant to build you a wall” — that multiplies its vocal harmonies but sounds ever more bereft. PARELESZola Jesus, ‘Lost’“Everyone I know is lost,” Nika Roza Danilova, who records as Zola Jesus, wails on the doomy, kinetic new single from her forthcoming album, “Arkhon.” The track begins with a decidedly post-apocalyptic vibe: earthy, guttural rumbles, synthesizers that toll like air-raid sirens, and a percussive series of sharp breaths, spliced together to create the song’s beat. But Danilova’s powerful vocal soon provides a stirring counterpoint and a defiant sign of life, like a signal flare shot up through an icy landscape. ZOLADZMarvin Sewell, ‘A Hero’s Journey’The guitarist Marvin Sewell, who’s usually heard injecting soul and scruff into other people’s bands, takes a moment to ruminate alone on “A Hero’s Journey.” He plays the acoustic guitar with a shivering slide, returning frequently to a mournful motif on the higher strings. Though understated, the track is a standout on “Black Lives,” a two-disc compilation of new music performed by a wide stylistic range of contemporary jazz artists. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOMark Turner, ‘Waste Land’At first, the occasional clatter from Jonathan Pinson’s drums seems like the main source of agitation on an otherwise low-key track: The interplay between Mark Turner’s tenor saxophone and Jason Palmer’s trumpet — both of them doused in reverb, played with crystal clarity and zero hurry — is almost placid. But there is a worried tension in the space between their horns, one that doesn’t get totally exposed until near the end. Finally, we’re left without resolution, as the band rises toward a landing that never fully comes. RUSSONELLO More

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      Aldous Harding’s Gloriously Peculiar World of Songs

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      On her fourth album, “Warm Chris,” the New Zealand singer and songwriter delivers unpredictable but enchanting vocals and enigmatic lyrics that revel in simplicity.If you are unfamiliar with the weird and wonderful world of the New Zealand folk musician Aldous Harding, the mesmerizing music video for her 2019 single “The Barrel” is probably the place to start.The song is breezy and light — gently strummed acoustic guitar chords, a buoyant piano riff — but as the video proceeds, a disarming sense of the uncanny creeps in. Something is ever so slightly off. Harding wears a billowing blouse with a pilgrim collar and a stovepipe-shaped straw hat, stiffly shimmying her shoulders and making a series of awkwardly expressive faces. It’s not quite obvious at first, but you could swear that with each cut her hat seems to be getting … taller? Then it’s definitely taller, comically so — but right when it becomes bizarre enough to laugh out loud, there’s a sudden cut to Harding wearing a spooky demon mask that takes your breath away. At any point, you might be tempted to ask, why? But that would be the wrong question. In Aldous Harding’s droll, dreamlike work, there’s not a lot of because, just a lot of glorious, deadpan is.Harding is generally reluctant to explain what her songs are “about” and gravitates toward prismatic and evocative lyrics that welcome multiple interpretations. Still, in the middle of her enchanting fourth album, “Warm Chris,” out Friday, she stumbles upon a refrain that sounds, in some sense, like a mantra for her whole joyfully immersive oeuvre: “Passion must play, or passion won’t stay,” she sings on the jaunty, piano-driven “Passion Babe,” in a high, staccato voice that makes her sound like a wise child.Even Harding’s more gloomy-sounding early records, like the sparse and gothic “Party” from 2017, were enlivened by moments of absurdist humor, like incongruous backing vocals that emerged out of nowhere on song titles like “What If Birds Aren’t Singing They’re Screaming.” Since her breakout 2019 album “Designer,” though, Harding’s music has been drifting ever closer to weightlessness. “Warm Chris,” a collection of fractured, airy pop songs and her third album produced by the PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish, continues this progression. It is her nimblest album yet, though it has not sacrificed her signature, surrealist undertow.Harding’s voice is chameleonic, and the way it changes in tone and timbre from song to song is one of her music’s disorienting pleasures. “People say to me, ‘Why don’t you use your real voice?’” she said in a recent Pitchfork interview. “But what people don’t understand is that I don’t know what my normal voice is anymore.” On paper, Harding could be classified as just another “female folk singer/songwriter,” but her music and videos have a spaciousness that makes that descriptor seem unbearably limiting. In her writing process, which she has described as a kind of channeling of various characters’ monologues, she added, “taking identity too seriously is really detrimental to my music.”And so her vocal delivery throughout “Warm Chris” is anything but predictable: On one song, the plangent, plinking “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,” Harding sings with the reedy keen of “After the Gold Rush” era Neil Young, while on the very next, “Staring at the Henry Moore,” she’s a lilting chanteuse in the style of Vashti Bunyan. The typical Harding song is not a legible narrative so much as a tableau vivant, with strange, unknowable characters posed in the middle of a scene that is fully realized if never entirely explained.Much of this effect comes from Harding’s lyrics, which are succinct, enigmatic and potent. That wasn’t always the case: On her 2014 self-titled debut album, she used often archaic words and knotty diction, as if she were straining to sound serious and poetic. But her writing has greatly improved as she’s come to understand the power of simple, modern words arranged in unexpected ways. “Oh, the dirty of it,” she intones in a gruff voice at the beginning of the “Warm Chris” highlight “Tick Tock” — a line that is somehow both inscrutable and precisely vivid.The excellent single “Fever,” a spiky, stutter-stepping mid-tempo number, contains some of her most stirring lyricism yet. Though too vague and imagistic to be reduced to a linear narrative, the song still loosely, and poignantly, suggests how difficult it can be to make a long-term partnership work: “I still stare at you in the dark,” Harding sings in a low croon, “looking for that thrill in the nothing.”It’s quite a tightrope act to make music this legitimately odd without falling into excessive whimsy, and, every so often, Harding’s legs wobble. (“Of all the ways to eat a cake,” she sings on “Passion Babe,” “this one surely takes the knife.”) But at its core, like David Byrne in his big suit or David Bowie playing harlequin, Harding’s is a grounded eccentricity, rooted in the traditions of avant-garde theater and folk music while still retaining a welcoming sense of play. As with all of Harding’s best work, “Warm Chris” is an offbeat, infectious and ultimately liberating invitation to stop making sense.Aldous Harding“Warm Chris”(4AD) More

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      ‘Olivia Rodrigo: Driving Home 2 U’ Review: Songs on Overdrive

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      The singer-songwriter is in a reflective state in the director Stacey Lee’s film, which documents a trip from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles.Olivia Rodrigo, the pop sensation whose global megahit “Driver’s License” put her career in the fast lane in 2021, is, naturally, driving a car in the first film about her life.She makes the same trip — Salt Lake City to Los Angeles — in the director Stacey Lee’s film on Disney+ as she did to record her wildly popular debut album, “Sour.” It’s a trek that puts Rodrigo in a reflective state, and Lee’s mood-infused film is tailored to appeal to the vintage taste of a Gen Z crowd that loves the grainiest of photo filters. Her subject’s ruminations feel overstated when paired with a retro-chic visual palette, so there are looks of intense longing that would make “Folklore”-era Taylor Swift proud.But the more Lee shows Rodrigo gazing into the distance, whether alone in a hotel room or atop a hill, the more it feels like a director’s cue rather than an organic moment that the camera just happened to catch. In the scenes where Rodrigo is openly sharing parts of her life that led to creating “Sour,” authenticity seems to come more easily.As a performance piece, “Driving Home 2 U” is an exhilarating and intimate showcase for Rodrigo, as commentary about her album’s tracks spills seamlessly, in musical-theater fashion, into “Sour” tunes. Songs are newly arranged and presented in some breathtakingly scenic spots. It’s a film that at least succeeds in making you feel that it really is about the journey, not the destination.Olivia Rodrigo: Driving Home 2 U (a Sour Film)Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      The Many Worlds of Rosalía

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherThe Spanish flamenco prodigy turned multigenre pop innovator Rosalía has just released her third album, “Motomami.” Crucially, it’s her first full-length since the breakthrough she experienced with her 2018 album “El Mal Querer,” which elevated her from local renown to global attention.In the years since, Rosalía has collaborated widely — Travis Scott, Ozuna, Billie Eilish, J Balvin — and leaned into the sounds of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Her success has, for some, underscored how much latitude is afforded white performers working with nonwhite styles and sounds. But also it has marked Rosalía as one of the most sonically ambitious and creative performers in contemporary pop.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Rosalía’s unlikely pop stardom, her avant-garde approach to style blending and the cultural politics of laying claim to a multitude of traditions.Guest:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterConnect 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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      How Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek and Christine and the Queens Navigate Pop

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      As she was preparing to release “Crash,” the glossiest album of her career as a solo pop artist, Charli XCX was in the doldrums. In December, the British singer and songwriter landed a high-stakes “Saturday Night Live” performance that would feature two of her friends and collaborators, Caroline Polachek and Christine and the Queens.After a labyrinth of planning, rehearsal and boomerang travel, the whole thing was scrapped hours before air because of the Omicron surge. Navigating this disruption and other big questions about what might come next, Charli XCX spun out. “I actually felt really, really low in January,” she said, “and really sad, and was crying a lot and questioning a lot of things.”Eventually, the fog lifted; her public bravado kicked in. “My album is so good,” she tweeted last week. “It’s just true, I can’t help it.” “Crash,” which arrived on Friday, is the fifth and final LP released under the major label contract that Charli XCX, 29, signed as a 16-year-old. After she broke through in 2014 with the single “Boom Clap,” and earned a reputation as a hooky, hit-making writer for other artists, she grew more experimental, veering into hyperpop with Sophie and A.G. Cook, like her 2017 mixtape “Pop 2.” But she never lost her taste for collaborating.“She’s the queen of features,” said Polachek, a longtime friend. She and Christine and the Queens, the French artist Hélöise Letissier, who goes by Chris, are, indeed, featured on “New Shapes,” a synthy single from “Crash,” in which each wrote a verse about relationships — a subject they have long discussed in DMs and on podcasts. “I think we all fall in love quite differently,” Charli said.The relationship songs on “Crash” could double as a narrative about Charli XCX’s up-and-down time in the music industry, she added. She wanted the album to be her last, most packaged push for pop stardom — just to see if she could do it. “For me, there’s always been this eternal question of, like, could I be the biggest artist in the world,” she said, “or am I not made for it? Am I too weird, too left, too opinionated, too unlikable, too different looking, whatever, whatever, whatever?”Charli XCX got a rescheduled shot on “S.N.L.” this month, albeit without her pals. Now she’s wondering what the next phase of her career could be. “Who will I become? What will I look like? What will I wear? What will it sound like?” she said.Transformation and evolution were recurring topics when Charli XCX, Polachek and Chris got together in December, to discuss recording and performing together across continents. They each approach music from different lanes, as Polachek, formerly of the Brooklyn indie band Chairlift, put it: Charli on the social media-fueled pop front (she started on Myspace); Chris, who has lately been holed up in Los Angeles at work on a new Christine and the Queens album, arriving with a headier theatrical and performance background. “I love making music on my own, but I really find I come alive more when I share a space with them,” Charli said.In joint interviews and separately, they spoke about their careers and friendships, and why they work well as collaborators. “We’re feelers, you know,” Polachek said. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.“I roll my eyes when people point to female pop vocalists as an example of change in music,” Polachek said.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesHow They MetPOLACHEK Charli and I met 12 years ago in Australia. I was playing double-decker synths, singing from behind the band — I wasn’t even really the lead singer of that band. And Charli was wearing platform sneakers that were like a foot high, with rainbow stripes, and she was just singing over an iPod and stomping onstage. The paradigms were so different. She was like, Caroline, I want you to produce music for me. At the time I’d never produced music for anyone, let alone myself.CHARLI XCX I remember watching Chairlift perform and Caroline’s vocals being incredible, and I think I was just really in awe of her. And I still am. I felt intimidated by her coolness, not that she was an intimidating person. She was really kind. I was maybe 18, and still traveling back and forth on trips from my parents’ house.POLACHEK I did a mega-story Instagram post when Chris put out the “Girlfriend” video, I was just blown away by it, and I think you responded to that story and said, “I’m a fan” and I was like, “I’m a fan.” We had a pen pal relationship for about a year and a half, and quite a deep one, before we actually met. Just on Instagram DM. We were talking about love and pain.CHRIS I can go deep with you in conversation, and I appreciate that in our friendship.“The truth is, I’m allowed to be whoever I want, because the reason I’m an interesting artist is because I evolve and change,” Charli XCX said.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesOn Gender in the Music IndustryCHARLI XCX Now, and for the past however many years, I’ve loved co-writing. I see it as a real skill to be able to hone multiple people’s ideas into one sensical thing. But what I did experience [from outsiders] was a sense of disbelief that I could possibly write a song. Maybe that’s a lack of education in the minutiae of the music industry and the different roles — the songwriter; the producer; the artist who sometimes doubles as both. I think there’s still a narrative of people being like, oh, did Olivia Rodrigo really write that song? Or did Taylor Swift?Like, it seems that there needs to be this question around women’s validity and whether they’re worth their space, whereas it just doesn’t really seem to be a question for men.POLACHEK I roll my eyes when people point to female pop vocalists as an example of change in music. No. Women’s faces and women’s voices have been prominent since the beginning of pop music. It’s who has their hand on the dial. That’s what’s changing.CHARLI XCX There are more ways to be an artist because there are more platforms — there’s TikTok, there’s SoundCloud. There’s being that girl in your bedroom, releasing songs and organically building a fan base via your own memes. Those things are all true, but unfortunately, and maybe call me a pessimist, I do feel like there are still boxes that women are supposed to fit in.And there are definitely moments that break that mold — Billie Eilish becoming the biggest artist in the world. A great artist creates an amazing world for people to access. I feel like people sometimes are not willing to accept that women artists evolve. Billie did a performance using Auto-Tune, and the world imploded. And it’s like, that’s an artistic choice.I’m the weird girl on the fringes who made “Pop 2” and people loved me for that, and I’m eternally grateful for that support. That helped me sustain a career that, post-2014 to 2015, wasn’t very commercially successful. I found a new lease on life playing closer to the underground, more avant-garde sounds. Maybe this is just the Twitter discourse, which I probably need to get my head out of, but sometimes it feels like I’m being told, no, you’re not allowed to be anyone other than that. And really, the truth is, I’m allowed to be whoever I want, because the reason I’m an interesting artist is because I evolve and change.CHRIS I’m off social, stopped in July. My mental health is better. My connection to the present is better. I think social sometimes — when it’s hyper-filtered and it needs to be punchy, catchy, immediately digestible — it’s encouraging something that I’m not always understanding myself, as an artist. Sometimes I want to take more time to express an idea.My journey with gender has always been tumultuous. It’s raging right now, as I’m just exploring what is beyond this. A way to express it could be switching between they and she. I kind of want to tear down that system that made us label genders in such a strict way. I remember talking about being pansexual in France in 2014 — it was a conversation that few opened up, and I was advised in, like, offices to maybe tone it down. I’m really trying to address it the right way now, and I’ve been sometimes pressured to give an answer. But I think the answer is to be flickery, fluid, escaping.I don’t want to rush that conversation, and I might never answer again. But in my work I’m finding ways to make that journey joyful. I believe the real gestures are artistic, because the real discussion on queerness is also a discussion about the society we live in, about capitalism, about social justice. It’s not just about me every morning wondering, am I masculine or feminine? It’s all-encompassing.“My journey with gender has always been tumultuous,” Chris said. “It’s raging right now, as I’m just exploring what is beyond this.”Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesOn What They Value in Each Other as ArtistsPOLACHEK Chris has a sense of velocity and total commitment. Most people when they’re in rehearsal mode, they do things at 50 percent energy because you don’t want to wear yourself out, you’re just doing it for your brain. Chris is at like 100 percent, 150 percent, every single time, and just raises the level of commitment and energy flow for everyone around.CHRIS I’ve been a fan of Caroline forever. I like how artistic everything is, how intentional everything is. There is an elegance, it’s demanding, but also super melodic.CHARLI XCX I think Caroline sees the potential for pop music to be anything that she can mold. She can create and make it sound or look or do anything that she wants, because she has all the skill set to do that.With Caroline and Chris sometimes, honestly, I’m just envious of their music. When I heard “Girlfriend,” I was like, God, I want to work with [Christine’s collaborator] Dâm-Funk. And I did and I was like, I don’t have this magical connection with this person, even though he’s amazing. Like, I wish Chris was here to figure this out for me.CHRIS Charli, I relate very deeply to you writing the song. I can tell that you’re making music with what you experienced and the feeling you go through. There is something very earnest about your writing.CHARLI XCX Well, you were sort of my therapist for a while. You give good advice.Especially over the past couple of years, I’ve been able to turn to both of them for a lot of personal things outside of music, and also, personal things that connect to music. Sometimes I think it’s hard, being an artist, to vocalize that you’re having a hard time, because obviously, we’re so lucky to be able sustain ourselves from the things that we create. But also, everyone has struggles. It’s nice to speak with others who are in the same kind of situation as you, to confide in them about things that they get. I’m really, really grateful for that. More