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      Taylor Swift and Tyler, the Creator Excavate Old Love

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      Mitski moved to Nashville. She’s not quite sure why, because she didn’t really know anyone there, but she liked how specifically weird it was — a town with stories. A local businessman had recently died and left his substantial estate to his Border collie. Bachelorette parties were a surreal and ever-present cottage industry: “There’s always a woman crying on the street and five other women in matching T-shirts comforting her,” as Mitski put it to me. “It feels like such a good place to observe the human condition.” More

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      Remembering Avicii by Stepping Into His Bewildering World

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      The Avicii Experience offers a taste of the pressures that led up to the D.J.’s death. It’s the latest immersive exhibition trying to find the line between emotional engagement and entertainment.STOCKHOLM — Visitors filed one by one into a dark, 6 foot by 12 foot room at the Space exhibition center here last Friday, where they were greeted by a mix of ringing and muddled noises: camera clicks, audience cheers, plane engine roars. Strobe lights bounced off a ceiling-high screen showing the interiors of cars, paparazzi flashes and the reaching arms of a festival crowd in quick succession. Jagged mirrors in the ceiling reflected the chaos below.The effect was meant to reproduce the bewildering experience of being the wildly successful, globe-trotting D.J. Avicii. For some visitors, it made a big impact. “I think I would go crazy if I had to live like that,” said Magdalena Grundström, a 51-year-old classical musician.Had entrants turned right, they would have encountered a very different space. Through a beaded curtain, pan pipe music was playing in the neighboring room. On one of its sea-green walls, a text on hanging fabric explained how Buddhism can help with anxiety.These contrasting rooms are part of the Avicii Experience, a new immersive exhibition dedicated to the life of the Swedish electronic dance music producer that opened in Stockholm in late February. The temporary museum is designed to give visitors an insight into both the musical talents that brought him global fame as an in-demand D.J., and the pressures that led up to his suicide.It also grapples with how to memorialize a short life shaped by extraordinary public interest in a way that feels both entertaining and thoughtful.The museum, which was opened in late February, was curated with the support of Avicii’s family.Felix Odell for The New York TimesAvicii, born Tim Bergling, died while on vacation in Muscat, Oman, in April 2018. Two years earlier, he had retired from touring, citing the overwhelming schedule of an internationally famous D.J. He also struggled with alcohol and prescription painkillers.Avicii was only 22 years old when “Levels,” a hooky dance track featuring an Etta James sample, propelled him to stardom. Over the subsequent six years, his music took electronic dance music, or E.D.M., in new directions, blending beats with folk vocals on tracks like “Wake Me Up” from his 2013 debut, “True.” He was nominated for two Grammys, and his songs have been streamed more than a billion times on Spotify.After Avicii’s death, his family visited Abba the Museum, an interactive, immersive space dedicated to the Swedish pop group, also in Stockholm. They thought something similar could work as a tribute to Avicii, Lisa Halling-Aadland, the content producer of the Avicii Experience, said in a video interview.“It’s obviously two very different emotions tied to each of these,” Halling-Aadland said, “but we said yes, we can do something. Not the same, but something.”Halling-Aadland and her mother, Ingmarie Halling, the exhibition’s creative director, sought approval from the Bergling family throughout the planning process. “We just had to consistently turn to them. We had an idea that’s good for us, and then we said, does this seem right to you guys?” Halling-Aadland said.The Avicii Experience, which will run for several years, is designed to emphasize the contrast between Tim Bergling, an introverted person whose passion was composing music, and Avicii, a global E.D.M. brand.“The normal impression was perhaps, a very successful, rich guy: Why did he end his life the way he did?” Klas Bergling, the musician’s father, said in a phone interview. “I don’t mean that we have an answer. Not at all. But you get another perspective.”In a replica of Avicii’s childhood bedroom, the computer screen shows a scene from World of Warcraft.Felix Odell for The New York TimesAnother space recreates the studio in Avicii’s home on Blue Jay Way in Los Angeles.Felix Odell for The New York TimesThe exhibition includes a replica of Avicii’s childhood bedroom, complete with a discarded pizza box and a computer screen showing his World of Warcraft character. Nearby visitors can don a virtual reality headset, enter a replica of his recording studio and sing the vocals on one of his tracks.The last 10 years have seen a boom in immersive experiences. Globally there are currently at least five immersive Van Gogh exhibitions — Instagram-friendly shows that have attracted visitors beyond the usual audience for art galleries. In London, there have recently been immersive shows dedicated to the work of David Bowie, Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones, and the theater company Punchdrunk has been exploring immersive, interactive productions for the last decade.It’s not surprising that as immersive experiences become more widespread, the subjects they try to tackle will broaden too, said Sarah Elger, the C.E.O. of an immersive experiences company called Pseudonym Productions.But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to get it right. “Designing an immersive experience in and of itself is an art form,” she said in a recent video interview. For immersive memorial spaces, Elger stressed the importance of a curator having a “personal connection” with the subject. “Challenges will arise if this becomes a mainstay of how we want to memorialize people,” she added.A virtual reality headset takes visitors into a a music studio where they can meet Sandro Cavazza, Aloe Blacc and Carl Falk, Avicii’s co-producers and musicians.Felix Odell for The New York TimesIn 2020, plans for an interactive, immersive Holocaust memorial experience in Kyiv, Ukraine, ignited a firestorm of criticism, including a rebuke from a curator who said it would be “Holocaust Disney.”The Avicii Experience is billed as a “tribute” to the musician, and includes spaces that feel funereal. The final room in the show is small and churchlike, with white stone-effect walls and flickering electric candles in alcoves. A slide show of Avicii photographs is projected on one wall, while a solemn orchestral version of his hit “The Nights” plays. In a section called “Unanswered Questions,” a text explains that nobody close to Avicii saw his suicide coming: “How could a human being be in the middle of such a creative flow and suddenly be gone?”Priya Khanchandani, the curator of an exhibition about Amy Winehouse at London’s Design Museum that includes immersive experiences, said that the line between emotional engagement and entertainment is a tricky one.“It’s about sensitivity, and the immersive elements have to be part of the storytelling rather than being a kind of gimmicky vehicle for sensory experience in themselves,” she said. “The danger, of course, with these kinds of experiences is they become too consumer focused. The museum becomes a theme park, or akin to a sort of retail experience.”In one area, visitors can make their own audio mixes.Felix Odell for The New York TimesThe room depicting the pressures of fame gives visitors a fully immersive experience.Felix Odell for The New York TimesOutside the Avicii Experience, a shop sold Avicii branded caps for 449 Swedish kronor, around $45. Part of the profits from the Experience go to the Tim Bergling Foundation, a mental health charity set up by Bergling’s family.For Avicii fans, visiting the exhibition means moving between the roles of consumer and mourner. Ayesha Simmons, 20, traveled from London to see the show. “That room with the jagged mirrors felt so important to me, because it gave us even the tiniest idea of what it must have felt like for him,” she said in a Facebook message.The immersive elements did not impact everyone, though. “I just thought I was in an amusement park,” Daniel Täng, 20, said after walking around the exhibition. “I didn’t really think about it.” More

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      Carlos Barbosa-Lima, 77, Dies; Expanded Classical Guitar’s Reach

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      A virtuoso since his teenage years, he performed concerts that ranged from classical repertory to Brazilian music to the Beatles and Broadway.Carlos Barbosa-Lima, who was a virtuoso on classical guitar while still a teenager in Brazil and then spent a lifetime expanding the instrument’s possibilities, bringing classical techniques and sensibilities to his arrangements of Gershwin, the Beatles and especially the music of his fellow Brazilian Antônio Carlos Jobim, died on Feb. 23 at a hospital in São Paulo. He was 77.The guitarist Larry Del Casale, who had performed with him for years, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Barbosa-Lima recorded some 50 albums and performed all over the world, at small recitals and on prestigious stages, including those of Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. A Barbosa-Lima concert might include a sonata by the Baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti, “Manha de Carnaval” by the Brazilian composer Luiz Bonfá, “I Got Rhythm” and an encore of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” from the musical “Evita.”Mr. Barbosa-Lima was known for his delicate, intricate playing, which Mr. Del Casale said was made possible in part by the unusual strength and flexibility of the fingers of his left hand.“He had a very, very, very long left-hand stretch,” Mr. Del Casale said in a phone interview. “If you try to play some of his arrangements, you can’t do it, because people can’t make those kinds of reaches.”“He was able to bring out and give voice to the bass, the soprano and alto lines and the melody, and give them each a different volume, a different rhythm,” Mr. Del Casale added. “When you’re listening to it, you think it’s two guitars.”At one of Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s earliest New York performances, a 1973 recital at Town Hall in Manhattan, those skills impressed Allen Hughes, who, in his review for The New York Times, wrote that Mr. Barbosa-Lima had “made his points modestly and quietly, but with such authority that each work he played became an absorbing musical experience.”Some 24 years later, Punch Shaw, reviewing a performance in Texas for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, was especially impressed with Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s handling of two Scarlatti sonatas.“The delicate lacework of those pieces is difficult enough to create on the keyboard instrument for which it was composed,” he wrote. “Taking it so successfully to the guitar as Barbosa-Lima did, as both arranger and performer, was breathtaking.”Mr. Barbosa-Lima applied his arranging skills to contemporary composers as well, including Mr. Jobim, with whom he began working in the early 1980s when both were living in New York. Mr. Jobim, who died in 1994, was known for his contribution to the score of the 1959 movie “Black Orpheus” and for fueling the bossa nova craze of the 1960s with songs like “The Girl From Ipanema,” when Mr. Barbosa-Lima first proposed adapting some of his songs.“I thought, ‘Why not treat Jobim’s music as if the guitar were a little chamber orchestra?’” he told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1995.The result, in 1982, was the album “Carlos Barbosa-Lima Plays the Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim and George Gershwin,” which included Jobim works like “Desafinado” as well as “Summertime” and other Gershwin compositions. The record raised Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s profile in the United States considerably.“Day in, day out, we discussed rhythm, harmony, counterpoint and intention,” Mr. Jobim wrote in the liner notes, describing the making of the album. “I watched him with awe as he strove for perfection.”Another composer who experienced Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s skills as an arranger firsthand was Mason Williams, best known for the 1968 crossover hit “Classical Gas.” In 2016 Mr. Barbosa-Lima released “Carlos Barbosa-Lima Plays Mason Williams,” an album that included his two-guitar version of Mr. Williams’s hit, with Mr. Del Casale playing the second guitar part.“He knew where the essence of the composition lay and stayed true to all of that,” Mr. Williams said of the Barbosa-Lima “Classical Gas” on a 2016 episode of the YouTube series “Musicians’ Round Table,” “but he knew exactly where he could expound on aspects of it for his arrangement.”Though Mr. Barbosa-Lima often performed solo, he also arranged a number of works for two guitars, and since 2003 Mr. Del Casale had often been his onstage playing partner. The pieces they played could be challenging, but Mr. Del Casale said the maestro always had his back if he started going astray.“If you’re doing a duo with him, he’ll catch you and bring you back in,” he said. “He was that kind of player.”Antonio Carlos Ribeiro Barbosa-Lima was born on Dec. 17, 1944, in São Paulo to Manuel Carlos and Eclair Soares Ribeiro Barbosa-Lima.He started playing as a boy, by happenstance.“My father was trying to learn the guitar but couldn’t,” he told The Orlando Sentinel in 2006. “Instead, his teacher began giving me lessons.”The boy proved to be a prodigy. In 1957 he gave his first concert, and the next year he began releasing albums on the Chantecler label. (They were rereleased a few years ago by Zoho Music as “The Chantecler Sessions.”) Mr. Del Casales said Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s first record had a reputation among players because he did things on it that most adult professionals couldn’t.“People say ‘Don’t listen to that album, you’ll burn your guitar,’” he said.Mr. Barbosa-Lima first played in the United States in 1967. Not long after that, in Madrid, he met the Spanish classical guitar master Andrés Segovia. He was playing classical repertory at the time, and, Mr. Del Casale said, it was Segovia who advised him not to be afraid to follow his own instincts and apply his classical techniques to Brazilian music, jazz, pop or whatever else he wanted. After that, Mr. Del Casale said, “He took off his tuxedo, he put on a nice Hawaiian dress shirt, and that was it.”Mr. Barbosa-Lima taught at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the 1970s and at the Manhattan School of Music in the ’80s. He lived in Puerto Rico for a time, but since about 2000, Mr. Del Casale said, he had had no permanent address; he had basically been on the road full time.He is survived by a sister, Maria Christina Barbosa-Lima. A brother, Luiz, died in 1973.Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s last record, “Delicado,” a homage to Brazilian music made with Mr. Del Casale and others, was released in 2019. “This music is romantic, joyful, and surprisingly accessible given the complexity of some of the arrangements,” Glide magazine wrote in a review.Mr. Del Casale remained in awe of his mentor even as he played alongside him.“The palette of colors he got out of the instrument — he could paint a picture with that guitar,” he said.Mr. Barbosa-Lima once described his technique in a video interview. “I like the guitar to be with me, you know?” he said. “Not me against the guitar.” More

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      Joni James, Heartfelt Chanteuse of the 1950s, Dies at 91

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      A top-selling artist known as the “Queen of Hearts,” she had a voice tinged with longing and melancholy and was an early influence on Barbra Streisand.Joni James, a best-selling chanteuse whose records climbed the Billboard charts in the 1950s and who was an early influence on Barbra Streisand, died on Feb. 20 in West Palm Beach, Fla. She was 91. Her family announced the death, in a hospital, in an online obituary. No cause was specified.Known to her fans as the “Queen of Hearts,” Ms. James had an intimate vocal style tinged with longing and melancholy. She recorded nearly 700 songs and sold more than 100 million records — 24 going platinum and 12 gold.“I always sang from the heart,” she told The Daily News of New York in 1996. “I always sang about life and how it affected me. I’m Italian. Italians are passionate people.”Her debut single, “Why Don’t You Believe Me,” reached No. 1 on the three Billboard charts in 1952 (in those days there were separate charts for sales, radio play and jukebox play) and made her an overnight sensation.Her next showstoppers included “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” a cover of the Hank Williams hit, which helped Ms. James establish herself as one of the first pop singers to bring country into the pop mainstream.In the mid-1950s, she had four Top 10 charted hits, including “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Have You Heard?,” which sold more than three million records, and “How Important Can It Be?,” which sold more than four million.In May 1959, she was among the first pop singers to perform a solo concert at Carnegie Hall, where she was backed by a 100-piece orchestra and 30 singers.It was Ms. James’s recording of “Have You Heard?” that drew Ms. Streisand to her. “My favorite singer while I was growing up was Johnny Mathis,” Ms. Streisand told The New York Times in 1985. “I also listened a lot to Joni James records and sang her hit ‘Have You Heard?’ at club auditions, but I didn’t really want to sound like her.”Whether she wanted to or not, some early Streisand recordings did recall those of Ms. James, at least to the ear of the Times critic Stephen Holden, who wrote in 1991, “Without having developed a rounded vibrato, she sounded a lot like her childhood idol, Joni James, a singer with only rudimentary technique who infused early-’50s pop ballads with a waiflike plaintiveness.”There was enough of a connection between the two singers that Ms. James was invited to be part of a star-studded cast for the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award tribute to Ms. Streisand in 2001. Onstage at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Ms. James performed one of Ms. Streisand’s signature songs, “The Way We Were,” accompanied by Marvin Hamlisch on piano.Ms. James recorded nearly 700 songs in her career and sold more than 100 million records, but she largely left the music scene in 1964. Giovanna Carmella Babbo was born in Chicago on Sept. 22, 1930. Her father, Angelo Babbo, who sang operatic arias when he was a shepherd boy in Italy, had come to America at 18. He died at 36, when Giovanna was 5. That left her mother, Mary Chereso, struggling to raise six children by herself during the Depression.Giovanna babysat and worked in a bakery to help the family and to raise money to train as a ballerina. A petite woman — she stood 5 feet tall and wore a size 4 shoe — she dreamed of going to New York and dancing with the American Ballet Theater.That didn’t happen. After graduating from high school, she toured Canada with a local dance group, then took a job as a chorus girl at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago. By then she had changed her first name, after her high school newspaper kept misspelling it. Later, when she worked as a model, her managers told her to find a new surname; Ms. Babbo promptly turned to the phone book and picked “James” at random.While she was focused on dance, singing was second nature to her. She grew up singing in the school choir and said her influences were the blues and Gregorian chants. Later, when she sang in nightclubs and entered talent contests, audiences always reacted warmly to her, but she didn’t consider herself a real singer like her idols, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday and Doris Day.Ms. James was finally noticed by MGM Records, which signed her to a contract in 1952. Her first single had been written as “You Should Believe Me,” but she tweaked the lyrics and the title, making it “Why Don’t You Believe Me.” She paid for and organized the recording session, which included a 23-piece orchestra. The song was an instant hit and sold more than two million copies.She married Anthony Acquaviva, her manager, arranger and conductor, in 1956 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Mr. Acquaviva, known as Tony, oversaw sessions on which she was accompanied by strings, which helped define her lush sound.She appeared on all the major television variety shows, including those hosted by Ed Sullivan, Perry Como and Andy Williams. She was in demand around the world and became the first American to record at Abbey Road Studios in London, where she made five albums.But at the height of her fame, her husband developed diabetes, and she largely left the music scene in 1964 to care for him. She told The Los Angeles Times that this included washing one of his legs six times a day to prevent it from getting gangrene and being amputated. He died in 1986.Though she still performed occasionally while he was still living, she had stepped so far away from the limelight that the newspapers called her “The Garbo of Song.”She then met Bernard A. Schriever, a retired Air Force general who oversaw the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. They married in 1997, and with his encouragement she eased her way back onstage, performing memorable concerts in New York at Town Hall, Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall.“I was a bent-wing sparrow,” she told The Oakland Tribune, “and he pushed me to come back.”Ms. James is survived by her son, Michael Acquaviva; her daughter, Angela Kwoka; her brothers, Angelo Babbo and Jimmy Contino; her sisters, Clara Aerostegui and Rosalie Ferina; and two grandchildren. General Schriever died in 2005.Asked by The Daily News in 2000 why she sang so many sad songs, Ms. James had a simple answer: “Because I know what they mean.” More

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      The Buzzy Band Wet Leg Trips Out at a Party, and 13 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Bartees Strange, La Marimba, Sharon Van Etten 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.Wet Leg, ‘Angelica’The latest single from the buzzy post-punk revivalists Wet Leg tells a more linear story than their drolly absurdist breakout “Chaise Longue”: “Angelica” captures that all-too-relatable experience of feeling awkward at a bad party, observing with a pang of envy the people who actually seem to be having fun. “I don’t know what I’m even doing here,” Rhian Teasdale deadpans, “I was told that there would be free beer.” But she and bandmate Hester Chambers finally get to let loose on the chorus, as the song’s surf-rock-meets-French-disco groove explodes, however briefly, into a psychedelic freakout. LINDSAY ZOLADZBartees Strange, ‘Heavy Heart’With its jangly guitar riffs and a cutting post-hardcore edge, Bartees Strange’s “Heavy Heart” at first seems like a simple slice of mid-00s nostalgia. But there is more longing for another time here. Strange, who grew up playing in hardcore bands in Washington, D.C., shatters genre tropes with ease: there is a rap-sung verse, a blossoming horn section, an aura of tender hope. “Heavy Heart,” which Strange wrote during a period of personal crisis in 2020, is about the guilt he experienced around the passing of his grandfather and the sacrifices his father made for his family. But it’s not a submission to that feeling; Strange sings, “Then I remember I rely too much upon/My heavy heart.” This is a relinquishing — a promise to embrace the possibility that lies beyond debilitating regret. ISABELIA HERRERAKevin Morby, ‘This Is a Photograph’“This Is a Photograph,” by the songwriter Kevin Morby (from the Woods and the Babies), starts out sparse and low-fi and keeps gathering instruments and implications. He juxtaposes momentary images with mortality: “This is what I’ll miss about being alive,” he repeats, between descriptions of mundane scenes. His vocals are largely spoken, more chanted than rapped, over a repeating modal guitar line that the arrangement keeps building on: with keyboards, drums, guitars, saxes and voices, a gathering of humanity to hold off the solitude of death. JON PARELESLabrinth and Zendaya, ‘I’m Tired’“Hey Lord, you know I’m tired of tears,” Labrinth sings in “I’m Tired,” a gospel-rooted song from the “Euphoria” soundtrack that retains the barest remnants of gospel’s underlying hope. It contemplates oblivion as much as redemption: “I’m sure this world is done with me,” Labrinth adds. Organ chords and choir harmonies swell, yet even when Zendaya comes in at the end, vowing to get through somehow, she wonders, “It’s all I got, is this enough?” PARELESRobyn, Neneh Cherry and Maipei, ‘Buffalo Stance’Neneh Cherry’s album “Raw Like Sushi,” released in 1989, was both of and ahead of its time: reveling in the ways pop, electronics, hip-hop and rock were merging and defining what an autonomous woman could do with them all. This week she released a remade version of the international hit “Buffalo Stance” featuring the dance-crying Swedish songwriter Robyn and the Swedish American rapper-singer Mapei. Cherry’s original, with vintage vinyl scratching for rhythm, was about fashion, poverty, exploitation and defiance: “No moneyman can win my love,” she taunted. The remake is slower and warier, with snaking minor-key guitar lines and even more skepticism about what men want. PARELESSharon Van Etten, ‘Used to It’Following her recent, upbeat single “Porta,” “Used to It” is a return to the more meditative side of Sharon Van Etten. Vividly imagistic lyrics and the smoky hush of Van Etten’s voice unfurl across the track with an unhurried confidence: “Where are you going, you rainstorm?” Van Etten sings. “Are you used to it, pouring out your life?” ZOLADZHaim, ‘Lost Track’“Lost Track” — a playfully punny title for a previously unreleased one-off single that is also about someone in an emotional free-fall — is as understated as a Haim song gets. Handclaps take the place of the group’s usually forceful percussion, Danielle Haim’s signature guitar is absent from the verses, a plinking toy piano gives the whole thing a dreamlike vibe. But the dynamism the Haim sisters are able to create from such simple means, and the way the song suddenly and satisfyingly builds to a crescendo during the chorus, is a testament to their deft and resourceful song craft. The music video, by the group’s longtime collaborator and Alana Haim’s “Licorice Pizza” director Paul Thomas Anderson, casts Danielle as a fidgety malcontent at a country club, her frustration bubbling over as she shouts the song’s most triumphant line, “You can sit down if you don’t mind me standing up!” ZOLADZOmah Lay and Justin Bieber, ‘Attention’Justin Bieber isn’t done with Nigerian Afrobeats; his restrained croon dovetails nicely with the equanimity of Afrobeats singers. Meanwhile, Western producers are learning Afrobeats techniques. Last year Bieber joined a remix of “Essence,” a worldwide hit by Wizkid. Now he’s collaborating with another Nigerian star, Omah Lay, on “Attention,” which melds Afrobeats and house music in a production by Avedon (Vincent van den Ende), from the Netherlands, and Harv (Bernard Harvey), from Kansas City. Separately and then together, Bieber and Lay state a longing that might be either for romance or clicks: “Show me a little attention.” PARELESNew Kids on the Block featuring Salt-N-Pepa, Rick Astley and En Vogue, ‘Bring Back the Time’At a moment when current hitmakers like the Weeknd and Dua Lipa revive glossy, pumped-up 1980s sounds — ballooning drums, arpeggiating synthesizers — the not-so-New Kids on the Block cannily position themselves as a nostalgia act for both music and video. Abetted by early-MTV contemporaries, they fondly parody 1980s videos from Devo, Talking Heads, A Flock of Seagulls, Robert Palmer, Twisted Sister, Michael Jackson and more. “We’re still the same kids we were back in ’89,” they proclaim, all evidence to the contrary. PARELESLa Marimba, ‘Suéltame’The Dominican singer-songwriter La Marimba may have a smoky voice, but don’t confuse it for hushed modesty. Her single “Suéltame,” or “Let Me Go,” is nothing less than a battle cry: this is punk perico ripiao, an electric take on the oldest style of merengue, with a liberatory spirit. (On Instagram, La Marimba said the song is a response to the everyday struggles of women and girls in the Caribbean.) Over razor-sharp synths and the raucous metal scrapes of the güira, La Marimba demands freedom through gritted teeth: “Let me go already/I am how I want to be.” HERRERAMelissa Aldana, ‘Emelia’The Chilean-born tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana was in the middle of a dream about motherhood one night when the melody to “Emelia” came to her. Pillowy and suspended, caught between longing and rest, this tune is the moment on “12 Stars” — Aldana’s latest release for Blue Note Records — when she and her hyper-literate quintet of rising jazz all-stars slow down and fully embrace the blur. The pianist Sullivan Fortner is the biggest smudge artist here, adding clouds of harmony on Rhodes, cluttering the airspace around Lage Lund’s guitar, and complementing the distant, even-toned longing of Aldana’s saxophone. At the end of the song, taking the melody home, she tongues the instrument’s reed, letting her notes crack; then the music cuts off and the voices of young children come in, bringing the track to a close. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOThe Weather Station, ‘To Talk About It’“I’m tired of working all night long, trying to fit this world into a song,” Tamara Lindeman sighs, although the striking achievement of her latest album as the Weather Station is how often she is able to do just that. “How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars,” out Friday, is at once spacious and granular: Lindeman’s precise lyricism zooms in on particular human experiences and scenes, but her airy, piano-driven compositions allow for all sorts of environmental ambience and collective anxieties to seep in. “To Talk About,” the album’s latest single, features vocals from the Toronto-based musician Ryan Driver, and seeks refuge from an emotionally fatiguing world in quiet, shared intimacy: “I am tired,” Lindeman repeats, this time adding, “I only want to lie beside my lover tonight.” ZOLADZCarmen Villain, ‘Subtle Bodies’The composer Carmen Villain blends nature recordings, instruments, samples and programming to create tracks that feel both enveloping and open. “Subtle Bodies,” from her new album “Only Love from Now On,” stacks up layers of quiet polyrhythm, swathes them in pink noise that could be wind or waves, nudges them forward with a muffled two-note bass loop and wafts in sustained tones and distant wordless voices; it’s ambient but clearly in motion. PARELESLila Tirando a Violeta & Nicola Cruz, ‘Cuerpo que Flota’“Cuerpo que Flota,” the first single from Uruguayan producer Lila Tirando a Violeta’s forthcoming album “Desire Path,” refuses to hew to tradition. Alongside the Ecuadorean producer Nicola Cruz, Lila stitches together murmurs; a muted, stuttering half-dembow riddim; and layers of static disturbance. The album samples pre-Hispanic flutes and ocarinas right alongside Lila’s electronic experimentation (you can even buy a 3-D printed ocarina along with the release), allowing her to forge her own dystopic, serrated universe where past meets present. HERRERA More

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      Nilüfer Yanya’s Music Is a Family Affair

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      The British musician has long collaborated on videos with her sister. Her new album, “Painless,” stems from exploring her lineage, and what exactly it means to “be from somewhere.”Sometime last year, while on vacation with her two sisters, the British musician Nilüfer Yanya was listening to the mastered recording of her second album, “Painless,” for the first time.“We were getting really excited,” her older sister, Molly Daniel, recalled on a recent video call, especially about “Stabilise,” an antic number built atop a guitar riff as intricate and tightly wound as a labyrinth. “I was like manically dancing around and directing the video,” Daniel said, “Like, then you run here, then you’re on a bike, then you do this, then you’re in a car.”Eventually, Daniel did direct the video, in which Yanya jogs and cruises around London while insisting defiantly, “I’m not waiting for no one to save me.” The collaboration was an extension of the powerful role family has played in Yanya’s music since she first picked up the guitar — a gift for a teenage Daniel that landed in her sister’s hands. “Each time you’re pushing the limits in your head of what you can achieve and what you can do together,” Yanya, 26, said in a separate video call. “My idea of what’s possible and realistic now is so much bigger than when I started out.”Many of the lyrics on “Painless,” Yanya’s excellent new album out Friday, deal with what she described as the connection between your “environment and the way you feel or the way you think about something.” It was created at a time when Yanya was re-examining her lineage and her ties to her homeland, an experience that forms an unspoken undercurrent connecting these songs.Yanya’s parents are both visual artists: her mother is a textile designer and her father a painter whose work has been exhibited in the British Museum. Daniel — a filmmaker, photographer and creative director — has directed every one of her sister’s music videos, beginning with the moody, low-budget clip for “Small Crimes,” from Yanya’s 2016 debut LP. Her younger sister, Elif, is a visual artist and designer.Calling from her manager’s office in London on a February morning, clad in a kelly-green turtleneck sweater and wired earbuds, Yanya recalled weekend family outings in West London and sketching in museums, but added that her upbringing wasn’t completely bohemian. “When people say, ‘Oh, you’ve got artist parents,’ they imagine you painting on the walls and being real hippies,” she said. “But they were quite strict, serious about homework and school.”Once Yanya got ahold of the guitar, she played constantly. When she started performing at local shows and open mic nights, Daniel glimpsed a part of her sister’s inner life that she’d never before seen. “It’s like, oh, there’s this whole side of you that we don’t know,” she said.In conversation, Yanya is soft-spoken and thoughtful but not necessarily shy; Daniel described her as “calmly confident.” (And tirelessly musical: “She hums 24/7.”) Since her first EP, “Small Crimes” from 2016, Yanya’s music has often sounded like someone’s private stream-of-consciousness externalized in the legible grammar of well-crafted melodies. Her singing voice can move deftly from a low, smoky hush to a suddenly impassioned wail.Yanya’s breakout came with her acclaimed 2019 album “Miss Universe,” an eclectic collection of spiky indie-rock, singer-songwriter meditations and even a few jazz-influenced compositions. The album’s sounds were so varied, Yanya said, that she decided to come up with a thematic concept to tie it all together. And so “WWAY Health” was born — a fictitious self-help service that allowed Yanya, in surreal and darkly hilarious interludes spaced throughout the album, to lampoon modern wellness culture. “Congratulations, you have been chosen to experience ‘paradise,’ as a part of our What Will You Experience? Giveaway,” she intones in a robotic voice on one such track. “Don’t forget to leave a review in the comments section.”“It just seems like a waste of an opportunity not to work with my family when I can,” Yanya said, “because everyone seems to make cool things.”Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesWhen she began writing “Painless,” though, she wanted the album’s through line to be not thematic so much as “a more cohesive, signature sound.” Skittish electronic-influenced beats, textured guitar tones and introspective lyrics are woven together on “Painless” to create an immersive listening experience. The songs are enlivened by subtle flourishes and small moments of upended expectations, like the guitar distortion that blossoms after the final chorus of the record’s centerpiece “Midnight Sun.” “In some kind of way I am lost,” Yanya sings with a stirring mix of melancholy and hope on the affecting final track. “In another life I was not.”“Painless” was created when Yanya was reconsidering her family history. Her father is Turkish, and moved from Istanbul in the 1980s to work in London’s art scene. Her mother is of Irish and Barbadian descent, and the ancestors on Yanya’s maternal grandfather’s side were enslaved. Though she always knew this, Yanya said it has recently caused her to think more deeply about her own sense of place, her relationship to England, and what exactly it means to “be from somewhere.”After George Floyd’s murder, Yanya’s aunt was inspired to research and map out their family’s history more meticulously than ever before, and even to meet with the living ancestors of her family’s enslavers. The experience affected Yanya deeply. “I used to feel like my family’s history wasn’t necessarily tied into the history of this country, and I felt I didn’t have as many ties to where I was,” she said. “But now I’m seeing those ties, and they’re a bit more insidious than I’d imagined.”On Instagram, Yanya has publicized the work of Tteach Plaques, an organization that seeks to “contextualize statues, buildings and institutions enriched by the trans-Atlantic slave trade.” Last August, Tteach installed a plaque in Bristol Cathedral honoring the life of Yanya’s great-great-great grandfather John Isaac Daniel, who was born enslaved to a British family that owned sugar plantations in Barbados. The exhibit featured photographs and biographies of his descendants, including Yanya and her siblings.Before this reckoning, Yanya and her family also sought to demystify the process of making art. In 2015, Daniel started Artists in Transit, a program that provides art supplies to communities in need. Before the pandemic, Daniel and Yanya were bringing art projects to migrant families in Greece, and in the past two years they’ve been focused on outreach closer to home, in London. “You can make a career” out of art, she said, “and you can make jobs out of it, so it should always be an option for everybody.”Her family members continue to set this example for her, and even as Yanya gears up to release and tour her second full-length record, she remains curious about art forms other than music. Last year, she took an evening printmaking course taught by her father at a nearby college. “You’re learning how to print onto metal plates, etching into it, and using acid,” she said. “It’s a very technical process, so that was really cool.”What best prepared her for a career in music, she said, was getting to observe her parents in the everyday rhythms of an artist’s life: driving to shows, unpacking materials, hanging paintings. “You can kind of see the labor behind it that you don’t really think about,” she explained. “As I was growing up, seeing how much time they put into their work and practice really solidified in my head that this is work and it doesn’t really stop. It’s not something where you get somewhere and you stop doing it. It’s constantly going on, and constantly changing.”“It just seems like a waste of an opportunity not to work with my family when I can,” she added, “because everyone seems to make cool things.” More

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      Dua Lipa Brings Her Lockdown Anthems to the Arena

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      The pop star’s second album, “Future Nostalgia,” is ambitious and impressive. Onstage, the production didn’t match the LP’s ecstasy.Many of the best Dua Lipa songs start with an easily absorbable concept — “Physical,” “Levitating,” “Cool” — and emanate outward from there. Her music is fleet, stomping and appealingly icy: industrial-grade club-pop that’s mindful of history while flaunting the latest in polish and panache.The songs are very tightly wound, though. Lipa is a lightly regal singer who often sounds removed from the hiss and purr of her production, as if she’s performing to the track and not with it. Great dance-floor-oriented music often connotes abandon, but Lipa exudes control. She’s a pop superstar, but not quite a full pop personality.Maybe that’s why on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden, she, like the other 20,000 or so people in attendance, came to sing along to Dua Lipa songs.That is, naturally, what many have been doing for the past few years, especially the two since the release of Lipa’s “Future Nostalgia,” one of the first excellent albums of the Covid era. It was, for a little while, the soundtrack of our collective hallucination about the possibilities that had been wrested away by social isolation, a set of clinically ecstatic, pointedly unbendable anthems designed for megaclubs that wouldn’t reopen for months or more.Given the sheer popularity of Lipa’s music, the show was modest.The New York TimesIn many ways, Lipa, 26, is a pop superstar for diminished times. From Madonna to Katy Perry to Lady Gaga to Rihanna to Billie Eilish, the most successful figures in the last few decades of pop music built worlds. They are philosophers of the body and aesthetics as much as sound.Lipa’s music doesn’t ask questions, though, or suggest alternate interpretations. It is — especially on songs like the buoyant “New Rules” and “Electricity” (made with Mark Ronson and Diplo, working under the Chicago house music-evoking name Silk City) — perhaps overly studious, though in the best way. At times, Lipa sounds like she’s doing devoted analysis of the club-pop of the early 1990s, not a nostalgist so much as a historical re-enactor.But Lipa’s ambition isn’t academic-scaled, it’s domination-focused. And that requires something more than pinpoint recreations. This performance, part of her Future Nostalgia Tour, had the thrill of listening to Lipa songs on the radio — a wonderful way to lose yourself when you have to keep your eyes on the road.Given the sheer popularity of Lipa’s music, the show was modest, a concept-less, box-checking production that severely underplayed Lipa’s stadium-size goals. A meager arrangement of balloons dropped from the rafters during “One Kiss.” Lipa and her dancers oozed through a pro forma umbrella routine during “New Rules.” Later, a handful of orbs and stars limply dangled from the ceiling. During “We’re Good,” Lipa sat on the stage singing, while nearby, an inflatable lobster hovered … menacingly? Not quite that. More woozily. (The accompanying animation on the big screen at the back of the stage recalled Perry’s cheekiness, which is not generally part of Lipa’s arsenal.)Throughout the night, Lipa was flanked by dancers and roller skaters.The New York TimesThe New York TimesThroughout the night, Lipa was flanked by up to 10 dancers and two roller skaters. She is a labored dancer, choosing choreography that emphasizes small, tart movements while telegraphing big sentiment: a power stomp out to the end of the runway on “New Rules,” an extreme dose of hair whipping on “Future Nostalgia.” But rarely did the theater of the presentation match the drama of the songs themselves.As for the songs, the arrangements were faithful and emphatic — they filled the space that the happenings onstage did not. Lipa never sang more forcefully than the arsenal of backup singers and prerecorded vocals that were bolstering her. On her albums, she sings with an occasional growl, but whenever those moments arose here, she appeared to pull back from the rigor. (Lipa’s dancers were given an elaborate video introduction at the beginning of the show. At the end of the night, she introduced her band members by name, but — pointedly? — not her backup singers.)It was not unpleasant — “Break My Heart” was cheerful, “Don’t Start Now” was punchy, “Cool” was ethereal. But these were closed loops, reinforcement of feelings already experienced more than jumping-off points for growth. All in all, inhibition outweighed risk — a perfect recreation of a time when we were all inside, wondering if we’d ever be set free.“Future Nostalgia” was, for a little while, the soundtrack of our collective hallucination about the possibilities that had been wrested away by social isolation.The New York Times More

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      The Enigma of Big Thief

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherThe Brooklyn band Big Thief has become one of the indie-rock breakout success stories of recent years. With its evolving indie-folk sound, the band has inspired both passionate fandom and committed detractors — it is an intimately-scaled band that inspires big feelings. Its fifth album, “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You,” is out now.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the sonic evolution(s) of Big Thief, the space the band occupies in contemporary indie-rock circles (and in the historical arc of indie’s embrace of American heritage music), and how to think critically but generously about music that doesn’t necessarily speak to you as a listener.Guests:Jon Dolan, reviews editor at Rolling StoneSam Sodomsky, associate editor at PitchforkConnect 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