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      Pop Smoke’s Memory Lives On, and 14 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Xenia Rubinos, Swedish House Mafia, Soccer Mommy 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.Pop Smoke, ‘More Time’“Faith,” the second posthumous album from Pop Smoke, includes collaborations with Kanye West, Dua Lipa, 42 Dugg, Future and others. But this track, early in the album, is jarring and stark. Not simply because it’s still eerie to hear Pop Smoke rapping with a blend of menace and joy, but because of its chilling beat — produced in part by the rapper’s longtime collaborator Rico Beats, but also in part by Nicholas Britell, who has scored “Moonlight” and “Succession.” It is a familiar trick, these reverberating keys that stand stern sentry, but no less effective for it. Here is a splash of theater more visceral than any radio hit, any pop crossover. JON CARAMANICAXenia Rubinos, ‘Working All the Time’Xenia Rubinos’s “Working All the Time” is only two minutes long, but it’s as intricate as an arduous jigsaw puzzle. There are waves of skittish synths, air horns straight out of a Funk Flex set on Hot 97, a bridge that sounds like the glitchy maximalism of hyperpop, and last but not least, an interpolation of the traditional rumba “Ave María Morena.” Somehow, Rubinos makes sense of all these disparate pieces using her brassy, featherlight voice. Blink and you’ll miss that it’s a workers’ anthem, too: In one verse, Rubinos sings, “You better keep me poor and busy or I’d be a danger.” It’s a warning for those who try to crush the power of the people. ISABELIA HERRERASwedish House Mafia, ‘It Gets Better’I suppose you can absorb this song on the internet, where it is currently available. But the slick return of Swedish House Mafia — the Brobdingnagian kings of mainstream EDM, the clout champions of biggest-room house music — cries out for an open field, a dizzying laser show, a loss of sense of time and place. Hug a friend; the soundtrack of shared mayhem is upon us. CARAMANICAMahalia, ‘Whenever You’re Ready’A brisk, ratcheting, evolving ska-meets-trap beat carries “Whenever You’re Ready” by Mahalia, a British singer whose mother is Jamaican. It’s a semi-breakup song that flaunts confidence instead of pain. The singer is letting him go because he’s angry at her now, but she’s sure he’ll be back: “You won’t be gone for good,” she sings. “No, I’m not worried.” JON PARELESCaroline Polachek, ‘Bunny Is a Rider’Singing about a woman so elusive that a “satellite can’t find her,” Caroline Polachek makes staccato syllables and short phrases bounce all around the beat, working equally as percussion and melody. They’re just a few of the syncopated layers in a playful yet strategic production — by Polachek and her frequent collaborator, Danny L. Harle from the PC Music circle — that juggles whistling, triangle, birdsong and the giggles and gurgles of Harle’s baby daughter. “I’m so nonphysical,” Polachek exults, over the sustained bass tone that cushions the chorus. Nonsense: The song is built for dancing. PARELESSoccer Mommy, ‘Rom Com 2004’“Rom Com 2004” could have been a straightforward indie-rock love song, vowing “Just let me be yours like no one else before” over a march beat, guitar chords and a chorus with a proud leap in the melody. But Soccer Mommy — Sophie Allison — handed over her demo to the producer BJ Burton with instructions, she has said, to “destroy it.” He obliged with glitches, distortion, speed variations and exposed moments — making the song more appealing because it plays hard to get. PARELESTurnstile featuring Blood Orange, ‘Alien Love Call’From the forthcoming Turnstile album, “Glow On,” comes this shoegaze space-soul collaboration with Blood Orange (Dev Hynes). The video compiles mayhem-esque live footage more in keeping with the hardcore band’s usual rhythms, but perhaps this is the meditation before the rage. CARAMANICADave McMurray, ‘Dark Star’Dave McMurray is a longtime Detroit tenor saxophonist with decades of experience in rock, jazz, pop and R&B, mostly as a side musician. But he’s just released his second album for Blue Note as a leader: “Grateful Deadication,” a tribute to the Grateful Dead songbook. His cover of the classic “Dark Star” channels the epically trippy M.O. of a Dead performance: McMurray declares the melody over Wayne Gerard’s twinkling, distorted guitar; eventually, a dug-in backbeat sets in. Then a coolly grooving section opens up, and the saxophonist dishes out a solo that’s laced with greasy Motor City attitude but still takes its time, as if to bask in the California sun. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOHalf Waif, ‘Swimmer’The songs on “Mythopoetics,” Nandi Rose Plunkett’s new album as Half Waif, suffer and exult in all-consuming love. As “Swimmer” leaps from everyday sensation to all-out devotion and need — “I want to know they can’t take this away from me” — synthesizer arpeggios and vocal harmonies swarm around Plunkett’s ardent voice, like a suddenly racing heartbeat and an uncontainable obsession. PARELESYas, ‘Idea of You’A viscous tar pit of a track — slow, oozing bass tones, sparse drum-machine taps and gaping silences — hints at the difficulty of pulling free from an increasingly destructive relationship. Yas (the songwriter, singer, producer and violinist Yasmeen Al-Mazeedi) sings about being “in love with the idea of you” amid details of mental and physical abuse. The negotiations aren’t quite over; her voice rises to a fragile soprano as she decides, “You think that I want you back — I don’t.” PARELESKoreless, ‘White Picket Fence’Koreless — the Welsh producer Lewis Roberts — swerves between pastorale and rave on “White Picket Fence.” A keening female voice, uncredited and possibly built from samples, floats at first over a stately harpsichord; then fuzzy synthesizers arrive with a pulsing beat under that vocal melody, before it gets stretched and chopped up; then it’s sent back to harpsichord territory. In the video, directed by FKA twigs, club creatures climb out of a futuristic green car alongside a bucolic creek, where fishing ensues; urban artifice meets Nature. PARELESKarol G, ‘200 Copas’To a friend who’s still tearful about her ex, the Colombian songwriter Karol G (Carolina Giraldo Navarro) doesn’t mince words in “200 Copas” (“200 Drinks”); she dismisses the guy with profanities after all the suffering he caused. Yet her 21st-century bluntness gets a traditionalist backing; while the rest of her album, “KG0516,” traverses modern Pan-American pop with all its technological tricks, “200 Copas” is an old-fashioned waltz backed by a few acoustic instruments, nothing more. The lyrics are decidedly impolite, but the predicament she sings about is not new. The new video has her leading a beach-bonfire singalong: solidarity against undeserving men. PARELESTainy and Yandel, ‘El Plan’“Dynasty” is a new collaborative album from Tainy and Yandel, two titans of reggaeton celebrating 16 years of eminence. With its sinister harpsichord, muted marimbas and a piercing dembow riddim, “El Plan” recalls the mid-00s reggaeton that required listeners practice dancing in front of the mirror. It’s all about the thrill of an after-hours dance-floor chase — the electrifying, will-it-or-won’t-it-happen energy of a night at the club. “Estoy esperándote y tú perreando sola,” Yandel says. “I’m waiting for you and you’re dancing alone.” Luckily, he knows he’s at the whim of his partner: “Pero tú dime cuál e’ el plan.” You tell me what the plan is. HERRERAMas Aya, ‘Momento Presente’It is easy to reference folkloric sounds, but have little to offer other than mere nostalgia. The instrumentalist Brandon Valdivia, better known as Mas Aya, escapes this fate masterfully on “Momento Presente.” More than a mere collision of past and present, the track is a study in the power of harnessing ancestral knowledge. Over six and a half minutes, Valdivia braids a skittish footwork beat with a flurry of Andean pan flutes, arpeggiated synths and polyrhythms. Halfway through, the voice of an elder reflects on centuries of protest, a reminder that the work of liberation is part of a continuum. One moment the song is celestial, transporting the listener 40,000 feet into the air. In another it is meditative, urging us into quiet introspection. HERRERAMatt Mitchell and Kate Gentile, ‘Trapezoids | Matching Tickles’In recent years the pianist Matt Mitchell and the drummer Kate Gentile have developed a book of pithy, one-bar-long compositions, which they play with small ensembles under the name Snark Horse. Through intense improvisation, taking equal cues from free jazz and metal, they morph and distend and scramble these little melodic fragments. On Friday, Snark Horse released its first album — a boxed set spanning no fewer than 49 tracks and five-and-a-half hours, mostly recorded at a three-day session in late 2019. “Trapezoids” is a Gentile composition, a crooked and incessant spray of notes, with Jon Irabagon’s saxophone further destabilizing the mix. It’s paired on this track with “Matching Tickles,” a Mitchell piece, which he plays more softly and abstractedly, as if it were the echo of another idea. RUSSONELLO More

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      Clairo Takes a Defiant Leap on ‘Sling’

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      The songwriter and producer’s second album is proudly retro and humbly indie, drawing on her emotional epiphanies and anxieties about the music industry.“Sling,” the second album from the introverted but openhearted musician Clairo, was inspired by two relatively common pandemic-era life changes: In the past year, the 22-year-old songwriter and producer born Claire Cottrill relocated to upstate New York, and adopted a dog.Fans have been acquainted with Joanie, a part chow chow/Great Pyrenees mix, via Clairo’s Instagram since she was a puppy. The musician’s gradual acceptance of Joanie’s unabashed dependency and unconditional love forms the emotional arc of the album. (Joanie is also credited with providing “chimes” and “snoring.”)One upstate lure was the scenic Allaire Studios in Shokan, N.Y., which Cottrill told Rolling Stone had a transformative effect on her sound: “Seeing mountains every day when you’re making music,” she said, “I suddenly felt the urge to put a horn on a song.” The transition from the gently kinetic pop of Clairo’s excellent 2019 debut album “Immunity” to the folk-pastoral “Sling” is a dramatic sonic leap akin to Taylor Swift’s shift between “Lover” and “Folklore.” Naturally, Clairo co-produced “Sling” with one of the architects of Swift’s Cottage of Sound, the ubiquitous Jack Antonoff.Clairo first came to prominence almost by accident, in 2017, when the charismatic, self-recorded video for her song “Pretty Girl” went viral. It was a YouTube phenomenon (75 million views) but its vibe now feels proto-TikTok: a casually dressed, slightly bored teenage girl passing time in her bedroom by performing for her camera and an imagined audience. The easy charm of the video may have unwittingly diverted some of the attention from Clairo’s songwriting, but it led to a record deal when she was 19.“Sling,” a strange, uncompromising and anti-commercial album, doubles down on the subtly defiant spirit that was already present on “Pretty Girl,” although this time Clairo’s target is not a narrow-minded partner but an entire industry poised to commodify and cash in on her artistry.“I’m stepping inside a universe designed against my own beliefs,” she proclaims on the bucolic but itchy “Bambi.” The album’s arresting first single, “Blouse,” features haunting backing vocals from fellow Antonoff collaborator Lorde; “Why do I tell you how I feel, when you’re too busy looking down my blouse?” the two women croon like a long-lost ’70s folk duo. “Mom, would you give me a ring? One for the ride, and one for the magazine,” she sings on “Management,” a winking critique of the sort of image creation she has felt pressured to stage in service of her career.Clairo may have initially arrived as an indelible product of the high-speed internet era, but the world “Sling” inhabits is miles from the nearest Wi-Fi connection. Its sound is proudly retro and humbly indie: Vampy Wurlitzers, woolly acoustic guitars and trilling woodwinds abound. At times, “Sling” sounds like Steely Dan’s “Pretzel Logic” had it been released on the D.I.Y. label K Records.Clairo co-produced “Sling” with Jack Antonoff, who has recently worked with Lorde and Taylor Swift.Adrian NietoUnfortunately, this sonic palette can make some of the less memorable songs bleed together, their meandering melodies and sludgy tempos failing to distinguish themselves. Tracks like “Partridge,” “Wade” and “Zinnias” get lost in dense, dizzying thickets of their own creation.Clairo sings in a low murmur that occasionally surges with great emotion — “Sling” makes the case that her most direct vocal precursor is either Elliott Smith or Phil Elverum — and her various co-producers have experimented with different methods of recording her voice. If the avant-pop producer Danny L. Harle threatened to drown it out with bells and whistles on her 2018 EP “Diary 001,” Antonoff sometimes gives it too much space to roam. Rostam Batmanglij, the atmospheric-pop-minded producer who collaborated with Clairo on “Immunity,” had helped her find a middle ground, buoying and giving structure to her delicate sensibility without overwhelming it.Clairo does pull off that balance, though, on the new album’s second track, “Amoeba,” a highlight anchored by funky, insistent keyboards and a steady beat — a song that manages to brood and saunter at the same time. Even more affecting is the acoustic ballad “Just for Today,” which, like the stunning “Immunity” song “Alewife,” finds Clairo to be a fearlessly vivid correspondent from the darkest corners of her depression. “Mommy, I’m afraid I’ve been talking to the hotline again,” she sings, her voice sounding childlike in its desperation but suddenly relieved by the release of this confession.“Just for Today” is further proof of a pleasant surprise: There was always more depth to Clairo’s sadness and songcraft than could be conveyed by the three-minute synth-pop ditty that made her famous. It also demonstrates that her music is at its most lucid and effective when an extended hand — or paw — is drawing her back up to the surface. The definitive version of “Just for Today” might be the demo she posted to Instagram in January 2021, the night after she wrote it. “At 30, your honey’s gonna ask you what the hell is wrong with me,” she croons, and then suddenly dissolves into giggles. A yelping Joanie has jumped up and thudded against her guitar, trying to snuggle into her lap.Clairo“Sling”(Fader Label/Republic Records) More

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      Britney Spears Can Hire a New Lawyer of Her Choice, Judge Rules

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      The decision came as the singer continues to challenge whether her life should be governed by a conservatorship set up 13 years ago on her behalf.More than 13 years after being deemed mentally unfit to choose her own legal representation, Britney Spears can hire a high-powered Hollywood lawyer, a Los Angeles judge ruled on Wednesday, signaling a new phase in the battle to end the conservatorship that controls the singer’s life.The decision by Judge Brenda Penny came at the first hearing since Ms. Spears, 39, called the conservatorship that she has lived under since 2008 abusive and said that she wanted it to end without her having to undergo additional psychiatric evaluations.Ms. Spears’s emotional speech on June 23 triggered a flurry of court filings in recent weeks as those involved in the conservatorship traded blame for the singer’s unhappiness and professed lack of personal agency. Her longtime court-appointed lawyer, Samuel D. Ingham III, asked to resign, as did a wealth management firm that was set to share control of Ms. Spears’s estate with her father, James P. Spears.On Wednesday, the judge accepted Mr. Ingham’s resignation, along with that of co-counsel he had brought on, allowing Ms. Spears to hire Mathew S. Rosengart, a former federal prosecutor, who has worked with celebrities including Sean Penn and Steven Spielberg.Britney Spears fans gathered on Wednesday to show their support for the pop star ahead of a hearing that would allow her to choose her own legal representation in the fight to end her conservatorship.Axelle/Bauer-Griffin, via FilmMagicMr. Rosengart, who is expected to aggressively pursue a path to end the legal arrangement, attended the hearing in person on behalf of Ms. Spears. When the judge asked Ms. Spears, who appeared remotely by phone, if she wished to retain Mr. Rosengart, the singer said that she did and that they had spoken recently.Lawyers for Mr. Spears did not object to allowing Ms. Spears to choose her new lawyer.The decision was met with cheers outside of the courtroom, where dozens of fans representing the Free Britney movement shared news updates through a pink bullhorn, leading to hugs and tears. Among the crowd was Representative Matt Gaetz, who called for a change to federal laws overseeing conservatorships.After Mr. Rosengart was approved by the judge, Ms. Spears, emotional and at times audibly crying, read a written statement, reiterating her desire to terminate the conservatorship without undergoing an evaluation. She added that she wanted her father removed as conservator and charged with abusing his role.Ms. Spears said that the conservatorship had ruined her life. “I’m here to get rid of my dad,” she said.Mr. Rosengart then asked for Mr. Spears to resign on the spot, but a lawyer for Mr. Spears declined, calling the request inappropriate.Mathew S. Rosengart, a former federal prosecutor, who has worked with celebrities including Sean Penn and Steven Spielberg, will represent Ms. Spears in her conservatorship case.Bethany Mollenkof for The New York TimesOn Wednesday, Judge Penny also accepted the resignation of Bessemer Trust, the investment firm that asked to resign after Ms. Spears’s speech in court, potentially leaving the singer’s estranged father once again in sole control of her roughly $60 million estate.Scrutiny over Ms. Spears’s conservatorship has increased in recent months, culminating in her asking in court last month how she could still be considered unable to care for herself even as she continued to bring in millions of dollars as a pop star. The conservatorship that oversees her personal life and finances was approved by the court in 2008, after Mr. Spears petitioned for legal authority over the singer because of concerns about her mental health and substance abuse.Yet even before her speech in court in June, Ms. Spears had long expressed serious objections to the conservatorship and questioned her father’s fitness as conservator, confidential court documents recently obtained by The New York Times revealed.At the previous hearing, Ms. Spears also raised questions about Mr. Ingham’s advocacy on her behalf, saying that she had been unaware that she could ask to terminate the conservatorship. “I’m sorry for my ignorance, but I honestly didn’t know that,” she said, adding: “My attorney says I can’t — it’s not good, I can’t let the public know anything they did to me.”“He told me I should keep it to myself, really,” Ms. Spears said.It is unknown what private discussions Mr. Ingham and Ms. Spears have had over the years about ending the conservatorship, but Mr. Ingham said last month that he would step aside if asked.Mr. Ingham was initially named as her court-appointed representative while Ms. Spears was hospitalized and found to lack the capacity to hire a lawyer at the outset of the conservatorship.A lawyer for the singer’s mother, Lynne Spears, who is an interested party in the conservatorship, asked the court to allow the singer to choose her own lawyer this month, arguing that Ms. Spears should not be held to a decision made in 2008: “Her capacity is certainly different today.”The decision to allow Ms. Spears to hire her own lawyer was not a foregone conclusion. Since the singer had previously been found unfit to do so, the judge could have appointed her a new lawyer from a court-approved panel or required Ms. Spears to undergo a medical evaluation to prove her capacity to choose one herself.Jodi Montgomery, Ms. Spears’s current personal conservator, had suggested what is known as a guardian ad litem, who would have been responsible for reporting Ms. Spears’s choice to the court, along with any potential concerns about the pick, and then retaining the private counsel if approved. But the judge deemed that step unnecessary.Mr. Spears had also called for an investigation into his daughter’s claims of abuse — including that she was forced to perform and remain on birth control — arguing that he has not been in contact with her and has not overseen her personal care for nearly two years.But Mr. Rosengart, along with a lawyer for Ms. Montgomery, a professional conservator who took over Ms. Spears’s personal care on an ongoing temporary basis in the fall of 2019, did not agree on how best to proceed with an investigation.Lawyers for Ms. Montgomery, citing text messages from Ms. Spears, have said that the singer wishes for Ms. Montgomery to continue in her role for the time being. They added that Ms. Montgomery was currently working on a “comprehensive Care Plan” with Ms. Spears’s medical team that would “offer Ms. Spears a path to ending her Conservatorship of the Person, as she so unequivocally desires.”A representative for Ms. Montgomery said in court on Wednesday that Ms. Spears’s medical team strongly recommended that Mr. Spears not be involved with the conservatorship.Now, attention will turn to Mr. Rosengart’s strategy. Should he file to terminate the conservatorship altogether on behalf of Ms. Spears, someone else involved in the arrangement — most likely Ms. Spears’s father — could object, possibly triggering a trial before the judge makes a final decision.In addition to raising the stakes of the conservatorship fight, the recent developments have led to an increase in legal billings. This week, one set of lawyers for Mr. Spears filed an updated petition seeking approval by the court for more than $1 million in fees for about eight months of work.Under the California conservatorship system, Ms. Spears is responsible for paying the lawyers working on all sides of the arrangement, including those arguing against her wishes.“This system is broken,” Gladstone N. Jones, a lawyer for Lynne Spears, said in court on Wednesday. “This is lawyers gone wild.”The next hearing in the case is scheduled for Sept. 29.Samantha Stark contributed reporting from Los Angeles. More

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      Rolling Stone Hires Daily Beast Editor as Its Top Editor

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      Noah Shachtman, an experienced online journalist with a newsy sensibility, will lead the pop music bible founded in 1967.Rolling Stone has chosen Noah Shachtman, the top editor of the news site The Daily Beast, as its next editor in chief, the magazine announced on Thursday, calling on him to continue the transformation of the 54-year-old pop music bible into a digital-first publication.Mr. Shachtman, 50, said in an interview that he plans to bring along The Daily Beast’s newsy approach and web metabolism when he starts his new job in September.“It’s got to be faster, louder, harder,” he said. “We’ve got to be out getting scoops, taking people backstage, showing them parts of the world they don’t get to see every day.”Mr. Shachtman will succeed Jason Fine, who stepped down in February after five and a half years as the top editor to take a job overseeing Rolling Stone’s podcasts, documentaries and other media ventures.The selection of Mr. Shachtman was driven by Gus Wenner, Rolling Stone’s president and chief operating officer and a son of Jann S. Wenner, who co-founded the magazine as a 21-year-old college dropout from a San Francisco apartment.The elder Mr. Wenner sold a majority stake in Rolling Stone to Penske Media, the publishing company led by the auto-racing scion Jay Penske, in 2017. Two years later, Penske Media bought the remaining stake from BandLab Technologies, a music technology company based in Singapore.“I love that his strength is in an area where we need to get stronger,” Gus Wenner, 30, said of Mr. Shachtman. “But he’s certainly got the skill set on long-form pieces, and that’s going to continue to be super important, too.”“Five years from now, I want Rolling Stone to be at the forefront of content creation across any platform: films, podcasts, the website, the magazine,” Mr. Wenner added. He cited, among other things, the Rolling Stone channel on the gaming platform Twitch.Before becoming the top editor of The Daily Beast in 2018, Mr. Shachtman covered technology and the defense industry as a freelance journalist and an early blogger. He later founded and edited the Wired blog “Danger Room,” a winner of a National Magazine Award in 2012.He brought to The Daily Beast a hard-hitting style reminiscent of New York’s tabloids. In recent years, the site, which the editor Tina Brown and the media entrepreneur Barry Diller started in 2008, kept a close watch on the Trump administration, the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking case and conservative media outlets.Tracy Connor, The Daily Beast’s executive editor, will serve as interim editor in chief after Mr. Shachtman’s departure next month, the chief executive, Heather Dietrick, announced in a staff memo. Ms. Dietrick added of Mr. Shachtman: “Under his guidance, we made a bigger impact and reached more people in diverse formats than ever before. He was at our helm but also in the trenches every day.”Mr. Shachtman said that Rolling Stone would continue to cover pop music, digital culture and the entertainment industry, and that its outlook would often be skeptical. Some critics have contended that the magazine has sometimes veered away from journalism into fandom.“Rolling Stone’s at its best when it’s both celebrating great art and taking down bad actors,” Mr. Shachtman said, adding that he has little interest in cozying up to celebrities.In a statement, Mr. Penske said of Mr. Shachtman: “His experience, journalistic integrity and thought leadership make him the ideal choice to take this iconic brand into the next phase of growth and innovation.”Mr. Shachtman in Brooklyn with Rolling Stone’s chief executive, Gus Wenner, who said the magazine had become profitable again.Guerin Blask for The New York TimesA money-losing enterprise as recently as three years ago, Rolling Stone is now profitable, Mr. Wenner said. The monthly print edition, with a circulation of roughly 500,000, according to the Alliance for Audited Media, is profitable by itself, he added.In 2018, the magazine returned to its old large-size format, 10 inches by 12 inches, after a decade on newsstands in the more common 8-by-11 size. Rolling Stone started charging for online access last year. It attracts around 30 million unique visitors each month, Mr. Wenner said.Mr. Shachtman and Mr. Wenner are white men at a magazine known for publishing in-depth articles on white male rock gods like John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend and Mick Jagger when the baby boom generation was ascendant.“We’re in a different era now,” Mr. Shachtman said. “No one appreciates the legacy of Rolling Stone more than me. But legacy is very different from future.”Mr. Wenner said he had considered “a very diverse and wide range of candidates” for the job of leading the magazine.“Diversity continues to be one of our biggest priorities, and it’s something Noah and I and Jay discussed at great length,” he added. “Continuing to bring in incredible leaders within the staff from all backgrounds will be a top mandate and priority of Noah’s.”Although he is a longtime journalist, Mr. Shachtman knows his way around a chord progression. From college into his 30s, he played bass in a series of ska, reggae and dub bands, including the 3rd Degree and Skinnerbox NYC. Along the way he played New York’s CBGB, Washington’s 9:30 Club and other storied venues.“He was good at appreciating the groove and holding things together,” said Jon Natchez, a saxophonist in the rock group the War on Drugs, who played alongside Mr. Shachtman in a ska band called Stubborn All-Stars.Mr. Shachtman, who lives in Brooklyn, said he had kept tabs on the latest in youth culture through his two sons, noting the social gaming platform Roblox as an example.“Getting into the spaces that are too weird, too confusing and too dangerous for parents to be in — that’s where Rolling Stone’s got to be,” he said. More

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      Laura Mvula Set Her Sound Free. It Ended Up in the ’80s.

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      After five years between albums, the award-winning English songwriter changed everything, trading orchestras for synthesizers and cranking up the beat.The English songwriter Laura Mvula changed nearly everything as she made her third album. She changed her sound, her songwriting method, her collaborators and (involuntarily) her label. After two award-winning, brilliantly idiosyncratic albums of time-warped orchestral pop, Mvula’s latest, “Pink Noise,” swerves in an entirely different direction: toward the brash, glossy, synthesizer-driven R&B-pop of the 1980s.“I need to be able to go — wherever,” Mvula, 35, said in a video chat from her living room in London. “There’s the feeling of risk, of not quite knowing what I’m doing. This was always going to be an album of liberation and championing myself. It’s channeling everything I want to channel without holding back.”Behind her, with its strings and hammers exposed, was the battered upright piano she learned to play as a child. Every so often, her cat, Marley, wandered by.Mvula was born Laura Douglas; her parents are from St. Kitts and Jamaica. She grew up in the suburbs of Birmingham, England, feeling like an outsider: a Black girl in a “predominantly white middle-class neighborhood,” she recalled. “I was never quite sure of where to place myself.”Her family was devoutly Christian, and Mvula’s songs often invoke prayer. (One new song, “Church Girl,” juxtaposes her naïve youthful expectations with the disillusionments of adult life, wondering, “How can you dance with the devil on your back?”) She sang regularly in church and also studied classical music, playing violin.She earned a degree in composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire. She also sang in Black Voices, an a cappella group directed by her aunt; wrote songs for her neo-soul/fusion jazz group, Judyshouse; and led school choruses and gospel choirs before concentrating on her own performing career. By then she had married a fellow conservatory student, Themba Mvula, an opera singer who was born in Zambia.Mvula’s 2013 debut album, “Sing to the Moon,” willfully and elegantly ignored most 21st-century sounds. In songs about idealism and self-affirmation, Mvula drew on conservatory skills to bolster the raw soul passion in her voice. She reached back to the studio pop of the 1950s and 1960s, writing plush harmonies backed by orchestral arrangements, dramatic choirs and jazz-tinged rhythm sections. The album earned comparisons to vintage Nina Simone, and was nominated for the Brit Awards and the Mercury Prize; it won her two MOBO awards, which recognize British “Music of Black Origin.” Mvula sang at the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize concert.“I wanted to feel uncomfortable in my own listening mind,” Mvula said.Nicole Fara Silver for The New York TimesMvula’s 2016 album, “The Dreaming Room,” grappled with, among other things, the end of her marriage and her bouts of depression and panic attacks; she suffered from monophobia, fear of being alone. As she sang about despair and exaltation, her music deepened the orchestrations while occasionally adding some funk. Mvula also went public with her mental-health struggles, appearing on the BBC program “Generation Anxiety.” (She has improved lately with therapy, she said.)Although “Sing to the Moon” reached the Top 10 in Britain, and one of its singles, “Green Garden,” entered the British Top 40, accolades and awards didn’t equal more hits. Months before “The Dreaming Room” won the Ivor Novello award, a top British award chosen by songwriters, Sony Music informed Mvula in a brief email that she was being dropped from the roster. “I was not used to the reality of the commercial music industry,” she said. “It was just so curt. It was, like, ‘Here endeth your value to us.’”Mvula was already reassessing her songwriting. “There was this pressure put on me, and that I put on myself, to make something new,” she said. “I had all these tags in my head. You know, ‘Created her own genre of music, created her own lane.’ But then I found myself like, ‘So what does this mean? Where do I go next?’”Between recording contracts, Mvula toured as the opening act for David Byrne in Britain. Her stripped-down shows sparked new attention from Briony Turner of Atlantic Records U.K., who is now the company’s co-president. Turner had wanted to sign Mvula before her Sony deal. Now, Turner said from London, “She had moved into this unexpected new realm, and I was blown away. I signed her because I think she’s a genius. I love what she stands for culturally and musically.”Mvula told Turner she had been thinking about 1980s R&B and that she wanted to experiment with collaborators. Her ideas, she now admits, were nebulous. “I had been boasting about making a record that I wanted to dance to, but that was an outright lie,” Mvula said. “I had no real plans. I had no sketches, I had nothing. I was just trying to magic it into reality.”With Atlantic’s help, Mvula tried songwriting sessions that were “like speed dating,” she said. None panned out until Turner suggested Dann Hume, a producer from New Zealand who ended up co-writing and co-producing the entire album with Mvula. “Little did I know my life was going to change,” Hume said by phone from southern Wales.Mvula had set up a home studio in her clothes closet in London. One day, she said, “I told myself that when I went in that closet, the next thing needs to be the thing that releases me. And I stopped thinking. I decided I’m not going to say, ‘I want to create an orchestral palette with these textures.’ I’m not going to go to the keyboard and just play all the chords and the voice things that I enjoy. I’m not going to play the familiar shapes any more. I’m just going to play the first thing that comes.”That first thing was the bass line of “Safe Passage,” the album’s opener: a celebration of moving on and sharing pleasure. “I went so rudimentary,” Mvula said. “I took my index finger and ‘dum-dum-dum,’” she said, jabbing an imaginary keyboard and singing some syncopated low notes. “And then a snare, I really wanted that to be a fiery sound. It wasn’t until I finished it that I was like, that’s kind of ’80s. This is a path to explore, a sound world.”She brought the tracks to the studio, Hume was enthusiastic and the album took off. “I knew that she wanted to make something big and bold,” Hume said. “She made clear from the very beginning that she didn’t want to retrace any steps. I accepted that, and we never really looked back.”For her new songs, Mvula consciously sought sparser, more open structures. “I wanted to move away from the richness of harmony — from using as many notes as I wanted, as many chord changes,” she said. “I decided that this time I was going to work with two or three elements. The harmony would be implied, and sometimes it would be obscured, completely ambiguous.“I wanted to feel uncomfortable in my own listening mind,” she added. “I didn’t want to feel like, ‘Oh, I know what that chord will make them feel.’ I wanted to move away from that bag of tricks.”The production of “Pink Noise” — a technical term for the whooshing sound of white noise, which mixes every frequency, but with the lows boosted — revels in the whip-crack drums, gleaming keyboard tones and spatial immersion of 1980s pop. Mvula ruled out using the instrument she wrote songs on: the piano. She also sang even more freely and forcefully than before. “On the older records, I think I was still trying to please the teacher. I’m still scared to offend, to show certain blemishes or tones or parts of my voice. But all those things — in ‘Pink Noise,’ I let go of it.”“There was this pressure put on me, and that I put on myself, to make something new,” Mvula said.Rosie Matheson for The New York TimesThere’s ample nostalgia in Mvula’s new music. “You hear me as my 14-year-old self listening to late-80s and early ’90s soul and R&B,” Mvula said. “My first record was ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.’ I was obsessed with Sting. I was obsessed with Michael Jackson and Prince. Now, I just stopped trying to get in the way of it all.“And you might say a lot of the songs on this record, it’s Black music, whatever that means,” she added. “Before this, I had been disassociated with Black music because I wrote for strings and horns. So I think I was subconsciously wanting to just do away with that — like, why did I place myself in this box?”Still, “Pink Noise” is not entirely a throwback. Mvula’s own musical instincts persist, with jagged, leaping melodic lines cantilevered over the beat, not-quite-dissonant counterpoint and unexpected blooms of vocal harmony. “That’s just Laura’s mind,” Hume said. “She’s got such great musical knowledge, but she always wants to come at it from a different angle. If she knows how to do it, she doesn’t want to do it. She only wants to do it if it’s pushing it further.”The album is full of songs about love found (“Pink Noise,” “Safe Passage”) and lost (“Magical,” “Conditional”). But the “most important” song on the album, Mvula said, is “Remedy.” It was written during a 2020 lockdown in Britain, while Mvula watched Black Lives Matter protests and spoke with family members about generations of racism. She recalled thinking, “I’m not going to be marching on the streets, but I’m going to offer a song. I suddenly felt this overwhelming privilege to be a part of this reaching the threshold: No more.” Over a bluntly slamming beat and a mesh of assertive, interlocking synthesizer and horn-section lines, the chorus of “Remedy” sums up many people’s experience of 2020: “How many more must die before the remedy?/Can you hear all my people cry for the remedy?”But Mvula also, hesitantly, allows herself to have some fun on the album. “Got Me” goes skipping along on a triplet groove that harks back to Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel,” as Mvula invites a lover to “do what you wanna do.”She didn’t want to put it on the album, she said. “But Dann was so passionate! He was like, ‘It’s such a good jam!’ And the label were like, ‘This is the big single that’s going to radio.’ The whole art versus commerce thing really blew up in my face again,” she said with a smile.“And it’s cool. I have a jam,” she added. “And I eat my hat. I’m learning about the universality of music. It just goes wherever it wants to go. And I’m learning that my fears, my insecurities — they’re not going to be allowed to prevent me from walking the path I’m meant to walk.” More

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      What’s Next for Britney Spears and Her Conservatorship Case

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      The judge overseeing the legal arrangement controlling the singer’s life and finances approved the hiring of Mathew S. Rosengart, a former federal prosecutor, as her lawyer on Wednesday.Three weeks after Britney Spears denounced the conservatorship that has long controlled her personal life and finances as abusive in an impassioned courtroom speech, a Los Angeles judge said the singer can hire her own lawyer on Wednesday.Judge Brenda Penny approved Ms. Spears’s choice of Mathew S. Rosengart, a prominent Hollywood lawyer and former federal prosecutor who is expected to take a more aggressive approach and push for the conservatorship to end, according to a person briefed on the matter.At a June 23 hearing, Ms. Spears spoke out for the first time at length about her life under the arrangement, which was put in place in 2008 amid concerns about her mental health and potential substance abuse, and said she wants it to end. Since her remarks to the court, there has been a flurry of court filings by those involved in managing the conservatorship.One of the most pressing questions going into the Wednesday hearing involved Ms. Spears’s legal representation. When the conservatorship was imposed in 2008, a judge declared the singer unfit to hire her own counsel; a court-appointed attorney, Samuel D. Ingham III, has represented her since.In her June 23 speech, Ms. Spears raised questions about whether Mr. Ingham had done enough to educate and support her. In a particularly shocking claim, Ms. Spears said that she did not know that it was possible for her to petition to terminate the conservatorship.After Ms. Spears spoke out last month, Mr. Ingham asked the court to step down. A law firm that Mr. Ingham had recently brought on to assist him, Loeb & Loeb, also submitted a resignation letter. On Wednesday, Judge Penny approved both Mr. Ingham and Loeb & Loeb’s resignations.Here are four questions that remain as the case continues.1. Will the Court Investigate Ms. Spears’s Account?Days after Ms. Spears told the court that she had been abused under her conservatorship — saying that she was forced to take mood-stabilizing drugs and was prevented from removing her birth control device, placing the blame for her treatment on her management team, caretakers and family — her father, James P. Spears, called for an investigation.Mr. Spears has been the key player in the arrangement from the beginning. In her speech, Ms. Spears described him as someone who had approval over everything in her life, saying, “he loved the control.”In court filings, Mr. Spears’s lawyers requested an evidentiary hearing into his daughter’s account, writing, “it is critical that the Court confirm whether or not Ms. Spears’s testimony was accurate in order to determine what corrective actions, if any, need to be taken.”They also attempted to distance Mr. Spears from questions about her well-being, arguing that he was “simply not involved in any decisions related to Ms. Spears’s personal care or medical or reproductive issues” after late 2019, and had been cut off from communicating with her.Lawyers for Jodi Montgomery, a professional conservator who took over Ms. Spears’s personal care from her father on an ongoing temporary basis in 2019, responded forcefully, calling Mr. Spears’s request “procedurally defective” and “wholly improper,” as well as a “thinly veiled attempt to clear his name.”On Wednesday, Mr. Rosengart, along with a lawyer for Ms. Montgomery, did not agree on how best to proceed with an investigation.2. Who Will Be in Charge of Ms. Spears’s Finances?Ms. Spears’s fortune, which is now estimated near $60 million, has been controlled by her father (sometimes alongside a co-conservator) for the entirety of the conservatorship; a wealth management firm, Bessemer Trust, was appointed as a co-conservator last year after Ms. Spears requested that her father be removed from the role.About a week after the June 23 hearing, Bessemer Trust requested to resign, according to court documents, citing Ms. Spears’s criticisms of the arrangement. Once the firm became aware of Ms. Spears’s wish to terminate the conservatorship, the filing said, Bessemer no longer wished to be involved. On Wednesday, Judge Penny approved its resignation.The question is now whether Mr. Spears will be allowed to remain as the sole conservator of Ms. Spears’s estate, despite both a formal request from her lawyer and Ms. Spears’s own emotional plea that he be removed. “I’m here to get rid of my dad,” Ms. Spears said in court on Wednesday.Mr. Rosengart, asked the singer’s father to resign as conservator on the spot, but a lawyer for Mr. Spears declined, calling the request inappropriate.3. Should Ms. Spears’s Conservator Be Granted Security?Since Ms. Spears’s speech, there has been a “marked increase in the number and severity of threatening posts” about Ms. Montgomery on social media, as well as other communications threatening violence or death against her, she said in a court filing.As a result, Ms. Montgomery has asked the court to require Ms. Spears’s estate to pay for her security, if Mr. Spears approves. A court filing on her behalf said that Ms. Montgomery sent the threats to the security company that Mr. Spears used, and it recommended that she retain 24/7 protection.Mr. Spears has objected to that arrangement. In his own court filing, lawyers asserted that Ms. Montgomery’s security services would exceed $50,000 per month for an indefinite period — an expense he called unreasonable. He also argued that such payments would set a standard in which Ms. Spears would need to cover security costs for anyone receiving threats as a result of the high-profile case.“Ms. Montgomery is not the only person involved in this conservatorship who has received threatening communications and/or death threats,” lawyers for Mr. Spears wrote.4. Is a Request to End the Conservatorship on the Way?The legal machinations that have followed the June 23 hearing all lead to the same question: Will Ms. Spears formally appeal to terminate the conservatorship?In court on Wednesday, Ms. Spears reiterated her wish that the conservatorship end without her undergoing additional psychiatric evaluations. Now that she has a new lawyer, it is likely only a matter of time before she submits formal paperwork to terminate the arrangement.After that, it is possible that someone else representing the conservatorship — most likely Ms. Spears’s father — could object to the termination, triggering a trial before the judge makes a final decision.Chris Johnson, a trust and estate lawyer in California who has worked with conservatorships and is not involved in the Spears case, said that judges tend to rely heavily on the opinions of medical experts in considering whether to end a conservatorship and that Ms. Spears would probably have to be evaluated again.“In many cases, it can be harder getting rid of a conservatorship than establishing it in the first place,” Mr. Johnson said. More

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      ‘We Intend to Cause Havoc’ Review: Zambia Rock, Rediscovered

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      This new documentary takes its title from the acronym of WITCH, a once-popular Zambian combo.“Zamrock” is the tag applied to the music of several rock bands from Zambia dating from the early 1970s into the ’80s. Once known as Northern Rhodesia, the country in southern Africa achieved its independence in 1964. Zambian rockers applied British Invasion psychedelic accents to infectious rhythms derived from both their own continent’s musical traditions and James Brown.A new documentary directed by Gio Arlotta, “We Intend to Cause Havoc,” takes its title from the acronym of WITCH, a once-popular Zambian combo. Arlotta, who is from Italy, came upon the band’s music by happenstance, then conducted a pilgrimage to find its makers. In the footage here, he travels with a couple of European musicians, Jacco Gardner and Nic Mauskovic, who visit archives and studios and hook up with the only surviving member of the original group, the charismatic singer and songwriter Emmanuel Chanda, whose stage name was Jagari (after, yes, Mick Jagger).Chanda is now a fervent Christian who works at a private gemstone mine, hoping to earn not necessarily riches but sustenance for his family. The music business in the United States was never a picnic for artists, but in Zambia “distribution” was practically synonymous with getting ripped off by pirates. Chanda is not bitter; nor is the guitarist Victor Kasoma, once of the band The Oscillators. Both men are eager to jam with the enthusiastic and slightly callow visiting Europeans.The movie picks up when the narration shifts from Arlotta’s to tag-team Chanda and the knowledgeable Eothen Alapatt, the head of a label that reissues Zamrock. The music itself is exciting enough that it washes out some of the unpleasant taste of the film’s early “white people discovering stuff” tone. And Chanda himself is incredibly winning, especially when he takes the stage.We Intend to Cause HavocNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV and Altavod. More

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      Olivia Rodrigo Holds at No. 1 With ‘Sour’

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      The singer-songwriter’s debut album has now spent three weeks in the Billboard 200’s peak position.This week on the music charts, Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” returns as the No. 1 album, while BTS’s song “Butter” closes in on her record for the year’s longest-running top single.“Sour,” which came out in May, rises two spots this week to claim its third time at No. 1, with the equivalent of 88,000 sales in the United States, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. It is only the second LP of 2021 to spend at least three times in the top spot, after a 10-week run by Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album.” (Taylor Swift’s “Evermore,” which came out in December, had three weeks at the top through early January.)For Rodrigo, the chart success comes after news emerged last week that songwriting credits for one of her singles, “Deja Vu,” were quietly changed. In addition to Rodrigo and her co-writer, Dan Nigro, the credits for that song now include Swift and two writers of her 2019 song “Cruel Summer,” Jack Antonoff and St. Vincent. None has commented on the change, but in interviews Rodrigo has mentioned “Cruel Summer” as an influence.The K-pop juggernaut BTS tops Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart this week for a seventh time with “Butter.” So far this year, Rodrigo has the longest run at the peak with “Drivers License,” which was No. 1 for eight weeks.Also on this week’s album chart, Doja Cat’s “Planet Her” holds at No. 2, Lil Baby and Lil Durk’s “The Voice of the Heroes” is No. 3 and Wallen’s “Dangerous” is No. 4. The Chicago rapper G Herbo’s new “25” opens at No. 5 with the equivalent of 46,000 sales, including 61 million streams. More