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      Drake’s ‘Honestly, Nevermind’ Review: Now It’s Time to Dance

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      On his seventh album, “Honestly, Nevermind,” the pop disrupter who rethought rap’s relationship with melody opts for a new direction: nightclub abandon.For more than a decade, the Drake factory has been operating at full capacity — recalibrating the relationship between hip-hop, R&B and pop; balancing grand-scale ambition with granular experimentation; embracing the meme-ification of his celebrity. But in recent years, for the first time, it’s felt like the machines might be grinding to a pause. Maintaining the throne is hard work, and the wear and tear were beginning to show.What Drake has needed is an opportunity to refresh, a chance to be unburdened of old assumptions. It’s the sort of renewal you only really find after-hours.“Honestly, Nevermind,” Drake’s seventh solo studio album, which was released on Friday just a few hours after it was announced, is a small marvel of bodily exuberance — appealingly weightless, escapist and zealously free. An album of entrancing club music, it’s a pointed evolution toward a new era for one of music’s most influential stars. It is also a Drake album made up almost wholly of the parts of Drake albums that send hip-hop purists into conniptions.The expectations Drake is seeking to upend here, though, are his own. For almost the entire 2010s, hip-hop — and most of the rest of popular music — molded itself around his innovations. Blending singing and rapping together, making music that was unselfconsciously pop without kowtowing to the old way of making pop, Drake has long understood that he could build a new kind of global consensus both because he understood the limitations of older approaches, and because the globe is changing.Nevertheless, the bloated “Certified Lover Boy,” released last year, was his least focused album, and also his least imaginative — he sounded enervated, fatigued with his own ideas. What’s more, the people who have come up behind him may have exhausted them, too.Those conditions force innovation, though, and “Honestly, Nevermind” is a clear pivot, an increasingly rare thing for a pop icon. Drake fully embraces the dance floor here, making house music that also touches on Jersey club, Baltimore club, ballroom and Amapiano. Each of these styles has trickled up from regional phenomenon to tastemaker attention in recent years, and like the skilled scavenger he is, Drake has harvested bits and pieces for his own constructions.Part of why this is so striking is that Drake has made a career out of caress. His productions — always led by his longtime collaborator, Noah Shebib, known as 40 — were emphatically soothing. But the beats here have sharp corners, they kick and punch. “Currents” features both the squeaky-bed sample that’s a staple of Jersey club, and a familiar vocal ad-lib that’s a staple of Baltimore club. “Texts Go Green” is driven by jittery percussion, and the piano-drizzled soulful house buildup toward the end of “A Keeper” is an invitation to liberation.This approach turns out to be well-suited to Drake’s singing style, which is lean and doesn’t apply overt pressure. It’s conspiratorial, romantic, sometimes erotic — he’s never singing at you so much as he’s singing about you, in your ear.Most of the songs are about romantic intrigue, and often Drake is the victim. In places, this is a return to Instagram-caption-era Drake. “I know my funeral gonna be lit ’cause of how I treated people” he intones on the hard-stomping “Massive.” On the slurry “Liability,” he moans, “You’re too busy dancing in the club to our songs.”But part of the trade-off of this album is in lyrical vividness — on most songs Drake is alluding to things more than describing them. The words are prompts, suggestions, light abstractions that aim to emulate the mood of the production. (Also, social media moves too fast now, and doesn’t reward the same kinds of patient emotional poignancy that he excels at.)There is recent precedent for Drake’s choices here: Kanye West’s “808s & Heartbreak” and the more fleet parts of “Yeezus”; Frank Ocean’s flirtations with dance music.But music like this has always been a part of Drake’s grammar: think “Take Care” with Rihanna from 2011, with its Gil Scott-Heron/Jamie xx breakdown. Or the serene sunrise anthem “Passionfruit” from 2017 (which also had a Moodymann sample); “Fountains,” from “Certified Lover Boy,” a blissed-out duet with the Nigerian star Tems, was in this vein, too, but seemed to portend that the next hard Drake pivot would be toward Afrobeats, which he’s long engaged with, including collaborations with Wizkid.But Drake opted for club music — the average b.p.m. here is over 100 — building an explicit musical bridge to Black and queer musical subcultures. That said, the sweaty, countercultural house music that he’s taking influence from has also in recent years become a template for music of privilege — it is the soundtrack of the global moneyed elite, the same in Dubai and Ibiza as Miami and Mykonos. It’s music that’s inviting but also innocuous; it’s filled with meaning and reference, but also smooth to the touch.Drake is in an unenviable position only a handful of pop superstars have been in before — he is one of the most famous musicians on the planet, and his fame is premised upon being something of a chameleon. But it’s hard for a juggernaut to be nimble. Nevertheless, “Honestly, Nevermind” is the work of someone unbothered by the potential for alienating old allies. The last two years have been unmooring, and the pandemic has freed artists to do the unexpected simply by removing the old reward structures. (Structurally, “Honestly, Nevermind” is a similar turn to the Weeknd’s electro-pop experiment “Dawn FM,” released in January.)The coronavirus era has also nurtured the rise of hip-hop scenes that thrive in the virtual chaos of social media. That’s been most evident in the rise of drill, which has been recentering hip-hop in grit and nerve. Even though Drake has toyed with drill before, collaborating with Fivio Foreign and Lil Durk, among others, “Honestly, Nevermind” is an anti-drill record. Drake is 35 now, and undoubtedly reckoning with how to live alongside his children’s children.He only truly raps on two songs here: “Sticky,” which verges on hip-house (“Two sprinters to Quebec/Chérie, où est mon bec?”), and “Jimmy Cooks,” the final song, which features 21 Savage, samples Playa Fly and feels like a pointed coda of bluster after 45 minutes of sheer ecstatic release.That’s the sort of hip-hop insider wink that Drake albums have long flaunted, but as he and his fans age, they may not be the stuff of his future. Whether “Honestly, Nevermind” proves to be a head fake or a permanent new direction, it’s maybe an indication that he’s leaving the old Drake — and everyone who followed him — in the rear view. Like a great quarterback, he’s throwing the ball where his receivers are already heading, not where they’ve been.Drake“Honestly, Nevermind”(OVO/Republic) More

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      Bartees Strange Ponders Success in Dire Times

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      On his second album, “Farm to Table,” the indie-rock singer and songwriter finds no easy comforts in his own ascent.By chance, choice and artistic inclination, Bartees Strange has been a lifelong outlier — a position his songs grapple with, exult in and constantly question on his second studio album, “Farm to Table.”His father served in the Air Force, often overseas, and Bartees Leon Cox Jr. was born in England and lived in Greenland and Germany, among other places, before his family settled in Mustang, Okla. He sang in church choirs with his mother, who also performed opera, and he started producing music in a homemade studio in his teens. He began releasing songs on SoundCloud a decade ago, and he played in hardcore bands in Washington, D.C. and in the self-described “post-hardcore” Brooklyn band Stay Inside.Instead of following a Black musician’s stereotyped path into hip-hop or R&B — though he draws on both — Strange, now 33, found his own voice in indie-rock, adopting the churning guitars and destabilizing synthesizers of bands like TV on the Radio, Bloc Party, Radiohead and the Cure. Most of the tracks on his debut EP as Bartees Strange, “Say Goodbye to Pretty Boy,” which was released in March 2020 just as pandemic restrictions began, were moody, volatile, radically reworked versions of songs by the long-running indie-rock band the National.Forging an indie-rock career is an uncharted, self-conscious path at the best of times, navigating revelation and obfuscation, rawness and craftsmanship, instincts and commercial objectives. “I could give the pain for the bankroll,” Strange sang in “In a Cab,” on his debut album, “Live Forever,” released in October 2020. Anything but tentative, “Live Forever” introduced Strange in all his multiplicity. He constructed hurtling rockers (“Boomer”) and pulsating electronic beats (“Flagey God”); he examined yearning and rage, confessions and inventions. “I lie for a living now/that’s why I can’t really tell you stuff,” he sang in “Mustang,” named after his longtime hometown.The pandemic delayed an indie-rocker’s usual next step: touring. But by the time concerts resumed, “Live Forever” had been embraced by listeners and fellow musicians. Strange played opening slots for Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, Courtney Barnett and the National; he recorded a fervid band performance that was released in 2021 as “Live at Studio 4”; he did remixes and guest appearances with Bridgers, Illuminati Hotties and others.“Farm to Table” reflects all the conflicting feelings of personal success during dire times. “There’s reasons for heavy hearts/This past year I thought I was broken,” Strange sings in “Heavy Heart,” as the album begins. But the music evolves from lament to gallop, with guitars pealing and piling on as Strange glances through a whirlwind year: travel, loneliness, someone’s death, a romance, growing up: “Some nights I feel just like my dad/Rushing around,” he sings, troubled yet surging ahead.His past also looms in “Tours,” as Strange picks an acoustic guitar and juxtaposes fragmented childhood memories of military postings and family separations — “Where is Kuwait? Is that in the States?” — with his own life on the road. Not that he’s complaining too much; in “Cosigns,” he flaunts and marvels at his ascending career, name-checking his tour mates, but he also worries over his own rising expectations. The track opens with bleary synthesizers and mock-casual rapping, then gathers echoing guitars and a heftier beat until Strange is belting, “Hungry as ever/there’s never enough!”The album’s most richly moving song is “Hold the Line,” an elegy for George Floyd that he recorded in October 2020. “What happened to the man with that big ol’ smile/He’s calling to his mother now,” Strange sings with tender desolation, answered by a keening slide guitar; later, he imagines himself in Floyd’s place.Nothing goes unmixed in Strange’s songs. His productions metamorphose as they unfold, restlessly shifting among idioms; his lyrics refuse easy comforts. In “Mulholland Dr.,” he sets up a skein of guitar patterns like a latter-day Laurel Canyon production, gleaming prettily even as he sings about misgivings and mortality: “I’ve seen how we die/I know how we lose.” And in “Wretched,” he’s desperately missing someone, feeling lost and abandoned, blurting out that “My life feels wrong without you.” But the music carries him, a spiraling crescendo with guitars and synthesizer swells, kicking into a four-on-the-floor beat, pumping toward a final realization: “Sometimes it’s hard, but you know I’m thankful.”Bartees Strange“Farm to Table”(4AD) More

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      Drake Looks for Love, Repeatedly, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by beabadoobee, Perfume Genius, the Beths 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.Drake, ‘Falling Back’Less than 10 months after “Certified Lover Boy,” Drake has returned to monopolize summer. His surprise-released seventh album, “Honestly, Nevermind,” is a balmy mood piece —somewhere between a D.J. mix and one very long song — and after a series of weighty, overstuffed albums, it’s refreshing to hear him return to a lighter register, à la the 2017 mixtape “More Life.” (As I type this, “Passionfruit” is trending on Twitter.) Drake showcases his softer side on highlights like the club-ready, house-influenced “Massive,” and the pensive, tuneful “Overdrive,” one of several tracks partly produced by the South African D.J. Black Coffee. And though “Honestly, Nevermind” finds Drake singing more often than not, those who prefer his rapping will appreciate the relentless flow of “Sticky” and the cheeky closing track “Jimmy Cooks,” which features a sharp verse from 21 Savage.But it’s the kinetic “Falling Back,” the album’s first proper track and single, that best sets the scene: A throbbing electronic beat (produced by the D.J.s Rampa, &Me, Alex Lustig and Beau Nox) allows Drake the space for some Auto-Tuned crooning about — what else — a once-promising relationship turned sour. “How do you say to my face, ‘Time heals?’” he sings in a reedy, vulnerable falsetto, “Then go and leave me again, unreal.” The track’s video, though, is more of a lark, playfully sending up Drake’s heartbreaker reputation and imagining a time when he finally settles down and gets married — to 23 different women. Quips his mother, Sandi Graham, “I think he’s really taking these ones seriously!” LINDSAY ZOLADZRhys Langston featuring Fatboi Sharif, ‘Progressive House, Conservative Ligature’The polysyllables fly fast, then go on to accelerate wildly in “Progressive House, Conservative Ligature” by the Los Angeles rapper Rhys Langston, from a coming album called “Grapefruit Radio.” The producer Opal-Kenobi supplies loops of blurry, undulating piano chords and synthesizer swoops, shifting pitch every so often. Langston syncopates his verbal abstractions in double time and then triple time, delivering conundrums like: “Creative manners to skip and erase from moment to moment/abstract, realist, most problematic version of futurism.” It’s both virtuosic and defiantly nonchalant. JON PARELESbeabadoobee, ‘10:36’“I didn’t think you’d fall in love — you’re just a warm body to hold,” Bea Kristi sings on “10:36,” a tale of an emotionally lopsided relationship that will appear on her upcoming second album, “Beatopia.” Her feelings may be indifferent, but the song itself is exuberant — a bright, hooky blast of lo-fi pop propelled by punchy percussion and a bouncy chorus. ZOLADZThe Beths, ‘Silence Is Golden’Elizabeth Stokes is desperate for some peace and quiet on “Silence Is Golden,” the latest track from the New Zealand rockers the Beths and the first single from their forthcoming third album, “Expert in a Dying Field.” Antic percussion and squalling guitars mimic the anxiety induced by an avalanche of urban distractions, like sirens, jet planes and “6 a.m. construction”: Sighs Stokes, “It’s building and building and building until I can’t function at all.” She finally gets what she’s after in the final moments of the song, when the instruments suddenly cut out and she’s left to repeat the chorus contentedly a cappella. ZOLADZJulia Jacklin, ‘I Was Neon’The Australian songwriter Julia Jacklin doesn’t get very specific about the relationship she’s apparently left behind in “I Was Neon.” All she offers are hints like, “I was steady, I was soft to the touch/Cut wide open, did I let in too much?” Midway through the song, she arrives at the more important question: “Am I gonna lose myself again?” She repeats it more than a dozen times over an unswerving drumbeat and a language of rock obsession that dates back to the Velvet Underground — two drone-strummed electric guitar chords — with more guitars and voices arriving to wrangle over whether she’ll stay trapped in past habits. PARELESPerfume Genius, ‘Photograph’Mike Hadreas’s sixth and most abstract album as Perfume Genius, “Ugly Season,” is a work that entwines sound and movement, as he began composing it as an accompaniment to the choreographer Kate Wallich’s 2019 piece “The Sun Still Burns Here.” The beautifully spooky “Photograph” has the feel of a ghostly waltz: Drifting synthesizer riffs and groaning ambience provide the backdrop for Hadreas’s darkly romantic croon — “no fantasy, you were meant for me,” he sings — that adds yet another layer to the song’s lush, beguiling atmosphere. ZOLADZFKA twigs, ‘Killer’Even if FKA twigs weren’t suing Shia LaBeouf for sexual battery, “Killer” would be chilling. “I don’t want to die for love,” she sings in her highest, most fragile register. The track is starkly transparent — keyboard chords, electronic blips and drums, sustained bass lines, multitracked vocals, dub echoes — with a terse pop structure of short phrases and repeated intervals; she sings about attraction, intuition, self-doubt, denial and gaslighting. It’s an elegant crystallization of pain. PARELESRöyksopp featuring Jamie Irrepressible, ‘Sorry’The Norwegian electronic duo Röyksopp periodically sets aside dance beats for ballads. That’s what it does on “Sorry,” an abject apology that arrives as a preview of its next album, “Profound Mysteries II.” It begins with melancholy piano chords reminiscent of Erik Satie, then opens up a bassy abyss as Jamie Irrepressible — the British singer Jamie McDermott — thoroughly indicts himself for abandoning a lover: “I hate myself for running scared,” he croons. “No heroics, I know, will bring you back.” For the last half of the song, all he can do is repeat, “I’m sorry.” PARELESAlanis Morissette, ‘Heart — Power of a Soft Heart’Alanis Morissette arrived in the 1990s as a voice of righteous wrath and determined self-rescue. Her pandemic project has been “The Storm Before the Calm,” an album of wordless meditation tracks striving for serenity. It’s a collaboration with Dave Harrington, who has worked with Nicolas Jaar in the psychedelic rock project Darkside. “Heart — Power of a Soft Heart” has uplift built into its foundation — three slow, ascending piano notes that are repeated throughout the track and enfolded in other tones: chimes, cymbals, hovering guitar notes and Morissette singing “ah,” sustaining a magnificent hush. PARELESVadim Neselovskyi, ‘Waltz of Odesa Conservatory’Vadim Neselovskyi’s third-stream pianism shares the qualities of a sculpture carved in ice: finely wrought detail, sharply traced; glinting elegance; coolness to the touch; refractions of light. His right and left hands converse with each other in eager, enchanted dialogue. Since moving to the United States two decades ago, Neselovskyi has collaborated with leading elders in jazz, like Gary Burton and John Zorn, but on his new album, “Odesa: A Musical Walk Through a Legendary City,” he sits alone at the piano. The record is a tribute to the Ukrainian seaport where he was raised, and although he composed the suite in 2020 based on personal inspirations — remembering his childhood there, as his father, a Ukrainian Jew, fought cancer — the album inevitably takes on a different cast now that this Russian-speaking, cosmopolitan city is in the throes of war. Before he joined the New York jazz world, Neselovskyi was a classical prodigy; “Waltz of Odesa Conservatory” calls back to the 1990s, by way of some Baroque piano turns, when he was the youngest student ever admitted to the school. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO More

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      Digging Into Bob Dylan and Lou Reed’s Archives

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherLast month, the Bob Dylan Center opened in Tulsa, Okla., offering researchers unparalleled access to Dylan’s archives and peeling back the layers on his songwriting process, long the object of study and fascination. And this month, “Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars” opened at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center — it’s the first exhibition drawn from Reed’s archive, which was acquired by the New York Public Library.Both of these seek to offer deeper understandings of these rock icons, but they also offer the opportunity for alternate narratives to emerge. Dylan and Reed always carefully tended to their own mythologies — now the behind-the-scenes tools are available for all to see.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the value of even the unlikeliest ephemera, the difference between public and private archives and the specific ways Dylan and Reed found methods to distance themselves from their pasts.Guest:Ben Sisario, The New York Times’s music business 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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      Rolling Stones Concert Postponed After Mick Jagger Tests Positive for Virus

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      The Rolling Stones postponed a stadium concert in Amsterdam on Monday, after Mick Jagger tested positive for the coronavirus.According to a statement from the band, Jagger — who has said in interviews that he was vaccinated, and urged fans to get their shots — tested positive “after experiencing symptoms” upon arriving at the Johan Cruijff Arena. The announcement came shortly before the show was to begin, and The Associated Press reported that some fans were already in the stadium when the announcement went out. Jagger, 78, had posted a short video to Twitter on Sunday saying he was looking forward to the show.The band said the Amsterdam show would be rescheduled. The next date on its 60th anniversary tour is set for Friday in Bern, Switzerland.The music industry has been moving forward at full steam for the return of concerts and festivals, after two years when live events were shut down entirely or held in reduced numbers. While new tours are being announced regularly, artists as varied as the Strokes, Ringo Starr, J Balvin and Haim have canceled individual shows and even entire tours.Broadway has also rebounded. And at least one show will go on despite the news that its star has been infected: Hugh Jackman, who plays Professor Harold Hill in a strong-selling revival of “The Music Man,” on Monday said he had tested positive for the coronavirus, one day after he attended and performed at the Tony Awards. The producers of “The Music Man” said that the actor Max Clayton, who is Jackman’s standby, would play Harold Hill, the character ordinarily played by Jackman, through June 21.This is the second time he has tested positive; he previously did so in late December, when the show was forced to cancel several dates, just after its opening. More

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      Kate Bush Rides ‘Stranger Things’ to a New High on the Singles Chart

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      “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” hit No. 4 on the U.S. singles chart this week, 37 years after its release. Harry Styles’s “As It Was” is still No. 1.Thirty-seven years ago, the British singer-songwriter Kate Bush released the song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” as part of her album “Hounds of Love.” The single went to No. 3 in Britain and No. 30 in the United States, and took its place as a signature piece of Bush’s catalog — an intense ballad with a driving beat, a playful synthesizer melody and Bush’s dramatic vocals.Then came “Stranger Things.”After “Running Up That Hill” was featured prominently in the latest season of “Stranger Things,” the 1980s-period horror-drama on Netflix, the song began to climb the charts again, posting huge numbers on streaming services and catching fire on TikTok. It has now reached No. 2 in Britain — held off only by Harry Styles’s “As It Was” — and this week climbed four spots to reach No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, the standard U.S. pop singles chart, Bush’s highest position ever. It was Spotify’s most streamed track throughout the world last week, with 57.2 million clicks (about a million more than “As It Was”), and is showing no signs of slowing down.While “Running Up that Hill” has been big on streaming services, radio stations have been slow to play it, giving Styles an advantage when it comes to the Billboard chart. “As It Was” holds at No. 1 on the Hot 100 — which is computed from a song’s success in streaming, sales and airplay — for a sixth week.“Running Up That Hill” is the latest example of a decades-old song finding surprising success. In 2020, Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” became a streaming hit after an Idaho potato worker made a TikTok video of himself listening to it while drinking Cran-Raspberry juice. And this year, Nirvana’s 31-year-old “Something in the Way” made its first appearance on the Hot 100 after the song was used in “The Batman.”In a note on her website, Bush, who rarely gives interviews, wrote, “How utterly brilliant!” in response to the song’s chart success. “So many young people who love the show, discovering the song for the first time.” She added:The response to “Running Up That Hill” is something that has had its own energy and volition. A direct relationship between the shows and their audience and one that has stood completely outside of the music business. We’ve all been astounded to watch the track explode!On this week’s album chart, the Puerto Rican reggaeton star Bad Bunny jumps one spot to claim his second week at No. 1 with “Un Verano Sin Ti,” beating out Post Malone’s new “Twelve Carat Toothache,” which opens at No. 2 with the equivalent of 121,000 sales, including 128 million streams. Styles’s “Harry’s House,” the top seller for the last two weeks, fell to No. 3. Future’s “I Never Liked You” is No. 4, and Kendrick Lamar’s “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers” is in fifth place. More

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      SZA’s ‘Ctrl’ Bonus, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Saucy Santana, Demi Lovato, Joyce Manor 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.SZA, ‘Jodie’One way to satiate fans who have been clamoring for your long-delayed next album: just keep adding new material to the one they already love! Five years ago this week, SZA released her widely adored debut “Ctrl,” and though she’s put out a handful of singles and made some celebrated feature appearances since then (including her Grammy-winning Doja Cat collaboration “Kiss Me More”), she’s yet to follow it up with a full-length. As a stopgap, though, SZA offered fans seven previously unreleased tracks this week on a deluxe edition of “Ctrl.” The best of them is “Jodie” — already a fan favorite, since a demo version leaked last year. “Stuck with just weed and no friends,” she laments on the buoyant track, which balances a confessional tone with self-deprecating humor. Her vocals are melodically nimble but endearingly off-the-cuff, as though you’re overhearing an animated conversation she’s having with herself. LINDSAY ZOLADZSaucy Santana featuring Latto, ‘Booty’Whether the exuberant horns deployed on Saucy Santana’s “Booty” are sampled from Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” or “Are You My Woman? (Tell Me So)” by the Chi-Lites (which provided the original sample for “Crazy in Love”) is immaterial — it’s pure cheat code either way. “Booty” functions as a kind of conceptual bootleg remix of the Beyoncé classic, a way of trumpeting an alliance that could be actual, virtual or theoretical. Most listeners won’t parse it out. Consider it a savvy stroke by Saucy Santana, whose “Material Girl” was the best kind of TikTok breakout — a catchphrase that was in fact connected to an outsized personality. “Booty” is his first major label single, and it has a couple of other borrowings, too: a flow from J-Kwon’s “Tipsy,” a nod to Bubba Sparxxx’s “Ms. New Booty.” But mainly this onetime makeup artist is having fun in the shrinking space between fan and star. JON CARAMANICALizzo, ‘Grrrls’Another entry in the gratuitous remake sweepstakes of 2022: Lizzo reimagines the Beastie Boys’ hypercrass “Girls” as a celebration of female friendship: “That’s my girl, we codependent/If she with it, them I’m with it.” CARAMANICABeach Bunny, ‘Entropy’“Somebody’s gonna figure us out,” Lili Trifilio sings with bracing confidence, “and I hope they do ’cause I’m falling for you.” The hopelessly catchy opening track from the Chicago pop-rock band Beach Bunny’s forthcoming second album, “Emotional Creature,” is all about throwing caution to the wind and going public with a clandestine romance. There’s a fitting clarity to the song’s production and arrangement: glimmering guitars, steady percussion and Trifilio’s voice at the forefront as she sings such openhearted lyrics as “I wanna kiss you when everyone’s watching.” ZOLADZDemi Lovato, ‘Skin of My Teeth’Demi Lovato — the child star turned grown-up hitmaker who survived a 2018 drug overdose and has come out as nonbinary — leverages notoriety and a setback into fierce punk-pop with “Skin of My Teeth.” It’s an armor-plated confession that begins “Demi leaves rehab again” and rides seismic drums, cranked-up guitars and an “ooh-woo-hoo” pop hook to claim solidarity with everyone struggling with addiction. “I can’t believe I’m not dead,” they belt, adding, “I’m just trying to keep my head above water.” JON PARELESJoyce Manor, ‘You’re Not Famous Anymore’“40 Oz. to Fresno,” the new album from the Torrance, Calif., rock band Joyce Manor, is a relentlessly tuneful 17-minute collection of all-killer, no-filler power-pop. An obvious highlight is the punchy “You’re Not Famous Anymore,” which sounds like something that would have gotten a lot of play on mid-90s alternative-rock radio — the sort of song that would have seemed like a mere novelty hit until it ended up stuck in your head for weeks. “You were a child star on methamphetamines,” the frontman Barry Johnson sings, “Now who knows what you are, ’cause you’re not anything.” Accompanied by head-bopping percussion and a surfy guitar, Johnson’s archly acidic delivery cuts through the rest of the song’s mock-breezy atmosphere. ZOLADZJoji, ‘Glimpse of Us’A splendid and striking piano ballad from the singer Joji, who finds middle ground between 1970s soft rock and James Blake. His singing is lightly unsteady, meshing an unnerving sadness with a know-better resilience. CARAMANICAJulius Rodriguez, ‘In Heaven’The 23-year-old pianist and multi-instrumentalist Julius Rodriguez has been wowing audiences at New York clubs for more than half his young life. In a story that’s already become part of jazz’s 21st-century lore, from the time Rodriguez was 11 his father would drive him in from White Plains to partake of jam sessions at Smalls. Cats were floored from Day 1. The other big portion of his musical education took place in church, where he started out even younger as a drummer, and those two big influences resound throughout “Let Sound Tell All,” Rodriguez’s highly anticipated debut album. On “In Heaven,” an invocation written by Darlene Andrews and first recorded by Gregory Porter, Rodriguez joins up with another rising star, the singer Samara Joy. He accompanies her molasses-rich vocals with fanned-out harmonies, channeling Kenny Barron and Hank Jones, sweeping from heavy clusters of notes to threads of crystal clarity. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOSonic Liberation Front and the Sonic Liberation Singers featuring Oliver Lake, ‘Ain’t Nothin’ Real But Love’“Love is an emotion in action,” the eminent saxophonist, poet and visual artist Oliver Lake, 79, recites over the Sonic Liberation Singers’ suspended, open-vowel harmonies. “Ain’t nothin’ real but love/It moves independently of our fears and desires.” Lake recently performed a series of farewell shows with Trio 3, the avant-garde supergroup that he has played in for more than three decades — but it should come as little surprise that as he closes one chapter, the ever-prolific Lake has opened another: “Justice,” on which this track appears, is the first LP to feature Lake’s vocal compositions. At times wild and purgative, the album is also full of moments like this one: poised, stubbornly hopeful, grounded in Lake’s memories of a more revolutionary age and seeking to stir that energy up again. RUSSONELLO More

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      Island Records’ Chris Blackwell Finally Tells His Story

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      In a new memoir, the 84-year-old founder of Island Records reflects on helping bring the music of Bob Marley, U2 and Grace Jones to the world.Most music industry memoirs are front-loaded with celebrity name-dropping. “The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond” by Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records — whose success with Bob Marley, U2, Steve Winwood and Grace Jones would offer plenty to boast about — instead opens with a parable.In 1955, Blackwell was a wealthy, 18-year-old Englishman whose family was part of Jamaica’s colonial elite. Lost and thirsty after his motorboat ran out of gas, Blackwell came across a Rastafari man — a member of what was then still an outcast group feared by Anglo-Jamaicans as menacing “black heart men.” But this Samaritan in dreads took Blackwell into his community, offering him food, water and a place to rest; the young visitor awoke to find his hosts softly reading from the Bible.That encounter set Blackwell on a remarkable path through music, with Jamaica at its center. He is one of the people most responsible for popularizing reggae throughout the world, and as Island grew to a trans-Atlantic mini-empire of rock, folk, reggae and pop, it became a model for nimble and eclectic indie labels everywhere.Yet it may be impossible now to not also see the Rastafari episode through the lens of race and colonialism, as the story of a privileged young man gaining access to the primarily Black culture that would make him rich and powerful. Blackwell, who turns 85 this month, acknowledged that debt in a recent interview.“I was just somebody who was a fan,” he said, in a mellow upper-class accent shaped by his time at British public schools. “I grew up amongst Black people. I spent more time with Black people than white people because I was an only child and I was sick. They were the staff, the gardeners, the grooms. But I got to care a lot about them and got to recognize very early how different their life was from mine.”When asked why he started the label, in 1959, he said: “I guess I thought I’d just have a go. It wasn’t about Chris Blackwell making a hit record or something. It was really trying to uplift the artists.”From left: U2’s the Edge, Bono, the band’s manager Paul McGuinness, Blackwell and Adam Clayton.L. Cohen/WireImage, via Getty ImagesALTHOUGH HE IS from the same generation of music impresarios as Berry Gordy and Clive Davis, who have been tending their reputations in public for decades, Blackwell is perhaps the most publicity-shy and least understood of the so-called “record men.” As label boss or producer, he has been behind era-defining music by Cat Stevens, Traffic, Roxy Music, the B-52’s, Robert Palmer and Tom Tom Club, not to mention U2 and Marley.Yet in his heyday Blackwell went so far to avoid the limelight that few photos exist of him with Marley — he did not want to be seen as the white Svengali to a Black star. Meeting last month for coffee and eggs near the Upper West Side apartment where he spends a few weeks a year, Blackwell had a thin white beard and was dressed in faded sweats and sneakers. Back in Jamaica, his preferred footwear is flip-flops, or nothing at all.“It’s not an exaggeration to say Chris offered a role model to some of us on how to live,” Bono of U2 wrote in an email. “I remember him saying to me once standing outside one of his properties: ‘Try not to shove your success in the face of people who don’t have as much success. Try to be discreet.’ His perfect manners and plummy tremolo of a voice never came across as entitlement. He was himself at all times.”Paul Morley, the music journalist who wrote “The Islander” with Blackwell, said it was only after Blackwell sold Island to PolyGram in 1989, for nearly $300 million — it is now part of the giant Universal Music Group — that he began to show any interest in claiming his place in history.“Chris always likes to be in the background,” said Jones, who released her first Island record in 1977. “I’m even surprised that he’s done the book.”BORN IN 1937 to a family that had made its fortune in Jamaica growing sugar cane and making rum, Blackwell grew up on the island around wealthy Brits and vacationing celebrities. His mother, Blanche, was friendly with Errol Flynn and Noël Coward. She also had a longtime affair with Ian Fleming, who wrote his James Bond novels at the nearby GoldenEye estate — though in the book and in person Blackwell goes no further than describing the two as “the very best of friends.”By the late 1950s, Blackwell was involved in the nascent Jamaican pop business. He supplied records to jukeboxes and the operators of “soundsystems” for outdoor dance parties; “I was pretty much the only one of my complexion there,” he recalled.Soon he began producing records of his own. In 1962, Blackwell moved to London and began licensing ska singles — the bubbly, upbeat predecessor of reggae — which he sold to shops serving Jamaican immigrants out of the back of his Mini Cooper.In 1964, he landed his first hit with “My Boy Lollipop,” a two-minute slice of exquisite skabblegum sung by a Jamaican teenager, Millie Small. The song went to No. 2 in Britain and in the United States, and sold more than six million copies, though Blackwell was aghast at how instant stardom had transformed Millie’s life. Back in Jamaica, her mother seemed to barely recognize Millie, curtsying before her daughter as if she was visiting royalty. “What had I done?” Blackwell wrote. He swore to no longer chase pop hits as a goal in itself.“The Islander,” which arrived on Tuesday, makes a case for the record label boss not as a domineering captain but as an enabler of serendipity. Shortly after his success with Millie, Blackwell saw the Spencer Davis Group, whose singer, the teenage Steve Winwood, “sounded like Ray Charles on helium.” In 1967, Blackwell rented a cottage for Winwood’s next band, Traffic, to jam, and seemed content to just see what they came up with there.“It wasn’t about Chris Blackwell making a hit record or something,” Blackwell said. “It was really trying to uplift the artists.”Daniel Weiss for The New York TimesA little over a decade later, Blackwell put Jones together with the house band at Compass Point, the studio he built in the Bahamas. Jones said the results made her a better artist.“I found my voice working with Chris,” she said in an interview. “He allowed me to be myself, and extend myself, in a way, by putting me together with musicians. It was an experiment, but it really worked.”When U2 began working on its fourth album, “The Unforgettable Fire,” the band wanted to hire Brian Eno as a producer. Blackwell, thinking of Eno an avant-gardist, opposed the idea. But after talking to Bono and the Edge about it, Blackwell accepted their decision. Eno and Daniel Lanois produced “The Unforgettable Fire” and its follow-up, “The Joshua Tree,” which established U2 as global superstars.“When he understood the band’s desire to develop and grow, to access other colors and moods,” Bono added, “he got out of the way of a relationship that turned out to be crucial for us. The story reveals more on the depth of Chris’s commitment to serve us and not the other way around. There was no bullying ever.”BLACKWELL’S MOST FASCINATING artist relationship was with Marley, where he used a heavier hand and had an even greater impact.Although Island had distributed 1960s singles by the Wailers, Marley’s band with Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh, Blackwell did not meet them until 1972, after the group finished a British tour but needed money to return to Jamaica. He was immediately struck by their presence. “When they entered they didn’t look broken down,” he said. “They looked like kings.”Yet Blackwell advised them that to get played on the radio, they needed to present themselves not as a simple reggae band but as a “Black rock act,” and go after “college kids” (code for a middle-class white audience). Blackwell recalls that Livingston and Tosh were skeptical but Marley was intrigued. The three recorded the basic tracks for their next album in Jamaica, but Blackwell and Marley then reworked the tapes in London — bringing in white session players like the guitarist Wayne Perkins and the keyboardist John Bundrick.The resulting album, “Catch a Fire,” was the most sophisticated-sounding reggae release of its time, though it also kicked off a debate that continues today: How much was Marley’s sound and image shaped by Blackwell and Island for the sake of a white crossover? That question comes into bolder relief when Blackwell recounts the origins of “Legend,” the hits compilation that Island released in 1984, three years after Marley died.In the book, Blackwell writes that he gave the job to Dave Robinson of Stiff Records, who came to work at Island after Blackwell made a deal with Stiff. Robinson, surprised by the low sales of Marley’s catalog, targeted the mainstream white audience. That meant refining the track list to favor uplifting songs and limit his more confrontational political music. Marketing for the album, which included a video featuring Paul McCartney, downplayed the word “reggae.”It worked: “Legend” became one of most successful albums of all time, selling 27 million copies around the world, according to Blackwell. And it did not erase Marley’s legacy as a revolutionary.From left: Junior Marvin, Bob Marley, Jacob Miller and Blackwell in 1980.Nathalie DelonMarley’s daughter Cedella, who runs the family business as the chief executive of the Bob Marley Group of Companies, had no complaints. “You can’t regret ‘Legend,’” she said in an interview. “And if you want to listen to the loving Bob, the revolutionary Bob, the playful Bob — it’s all there.”Throughout “The Islander,” Blackwell drops astonishing asides. He passed on signing Pink Floyd, he writes, “because they seemed too boring,” and Madonna “because I couldn’t work out what on earth I could do for her.”Still, it is sometimes puzzling what Blackwell omits or plays down. Despite the centrality of reggae to Island’s story, giants of the genre like Black Uhuru and Steel Pulse are mentioned only briefly. Blackwell writes about former wives and girlfriends but not his two sons.Even those who might take offense still seem in awe. Dickie Jobson, a friend and associate who directed the 1982 film “Countryman,” about a man who embodied Rastafarianism, gets little ink. “Chris’s best friend in life was my cousin Dickie Jobson, so I was a little disappointed in the book where Dickie is only mentioned three times,” said Wayne Jobson, a producer also known as Native Wayne. “But Chris has a lot of friends,” he said, adding that Blackwell is “a national treasure of Jamaica.”The latter chapters of the book are the most dramatic, where Blackwell recounts how cash-flow shortages — Island couldn’t pay U2’s royalty bill at one point, so Blackwell gave the band 10 percent of the company instead — and bad business decisions led him to sell Island. “I don’t regret it, because I put myself there,” Blackwell said. “I made my own mistakes.”In recent years, having sold most of his music interests, Blackwell has devoted himself to his resort properties in Jamaica, seeing it as his final legacy to promote the country as he would an artist. Each improvement or tweak to GoldenEye, for example, he sees as “remixing.”“If you say it yourself it sounds soppy,” Blackwell said. “But I love Jamaica. I love Jamaican people. Jamaican people looked after me. And I’ve always felt that whatever I can do to help, I would do so.” More