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      Alan Vega Left a Robust Vault. The Excavation Begins With a New Album.

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      The Suicide singer died in 2016. Now his wife and musical partner, Liz Lamere, is releasing “Mutator,” an album the duo made in the mid-90s.In 1978, the adversarial New York duo Suicide played a show in Boston, opening for the Cars, local heroes who’d crossed over into pop success. Suicide performed a set of assaultive and static electronic music, and the unhappy audience demonstrated its distaste by throwing ashtrays, some of which hit the singer Alan Vega. But Vega and his bandmate, Martin Rev, had recently finished European tours opening for the Clash and Elvis Costello during which they caused a literal riot in Belgium. (It was later documented on a live recording, “23 Minutes Over Brussels,” named for the length of Suicide’s set before the gendarmes were summoned.)The day after the Boston gig, a local radio D.J. who’d seen it interviewed Vega and asked how it had gone. “Well, we beat the hell out of them,” Vega replied, laughing happily.Liz Lamere, Vega’s wife and musical partner for several decades, called the anecdote “a beautiful analogy for Alan’s life.” (Vega died in 2016 at 78.) “People think Alan sang about gloom and doom, all this negative stuff,” she said. “There was always a layer of beauty and hope in everything he did.”That contrast is an enduring hallmark of “Mutator,” a posthumous Vega album due April 23, which he and Lamere recorded in 1995 and 1996, and she recently produced and mixed with Jared Artaud, a Vega disciple who fronts the minimalist Brooklyn band the Vacant Lots.Liz Lamere and Vega in 1986, the year after they met at a party for his album “Just a Million Dreams.”John DiMiceliIt’s the first in a planned series of archival releases, drawn from what the singer called “the Vega vault,” that will be issued by Sacred Bones Records. The vault, a vast catacomb of Vega’s writings, paintings, drawings and music, includes a cassette tape that Artaud calls “the Holy Grail of the archive”: a soundboard recording of Suicide’s September 25, 1971, performance at Lincoln Center.When Vega and Lamere met in 1985, at a party for his album “Just a Million Dreams,” he was in his 40s and living at the Gramercy Park Hotel, and she was a Wall Street corporate lawyer two decades his junior. “We were both thunderstruck when we first saw each other,” she said during a video call from Florida, where she was visiting her mother, Toots, who briefly wandered into the frame. “Just a Million Dreams” was a tidy, new wave-sounding record helmed by hitmakers, and it was supposed to be Vega’s bid for pop success.“That was the mantra at his record company: ‘There’s a diamond in the rough here. He could be a rock star,’” Lamere said. The idea turned Vega’s stomach, Lamere said, “because that would take away some of his freedom to, as he said, be the research scientist in the basement.”At the time, New York’s punk rock era was starting to be documented, but “Suicide was never mentioned,” Lamere said. “And Alan would be like, ‘Do I exist? Did that all really happen?’” She got his song publishing rights in order and persuaded him to produce his own master recordings and then license them to record labels. They also began making music together in the Financial District loft where they lived with their son, Dante, now a 22-year-old hip-hop producer.The Vega-Lamere partnership wasn’t as unlikely as it might initially sound. Lamere played varsity soccer at Tufts before getting her law degree at Columbia, but she’d already exhibited signs of restlessness: She played drums in rock bands, including Backwards Flying Indians and SSNUB (an acronym for Sgt. Slaughter’s No Underwear Band), which performed at CBGB.Lamere said Vega’s record label believed he could be a rock star, an  idea that turned Vega’s stomach.via Saturn Strip, Ltd.Vega was known (to the extent he was known at all) for brandishing a bicycle chain onstage as a weapon, self-mutilating with broken glass and making music that was corrosively anti-commercial. But the musician born Boruch Alan Bermowitz had a life before Suicide, one that steered him toward art, confrontation, desperation, anxiety and compassion.Vega’s parents, Louis and Tillie Bermowitz, were Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who were able to move from the Lower East Side to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, thanks to Louis’s job as a diamond setter. Vega went to Brooklyn College where he majored in astrophysics, but got derailed when an art teacher saw him sketching one day and advised him to change course.At college, he met Mariette Birencwajg, a Holocaust survivor from Belgium, and they married in 1960. She is the author of “Mindele’s Journey,” a 2012 book that memorialized her family, most of whom were killed by the Nazis. In a 2016 blog post, Mariette Bermowitz wrote thatthe Swiss surrealist painter Kurt Seligmann, who taught Vega, considered him “a prodigy.” Vega also studied with the abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, another significant influence.To Lamere, this is the context that’s needed to understand her husband: “Alan came out of the Great Depression, post-Holocaust, Jewish immigrant parents. There was always a connection to what was happening to the underdog — the disenfranchised, the disempowered, the oppressed.”The young Bermowitzes lived a domestic life in Brooklyn. He worked for the welfare department (where he learned about government funding for the arts, which was soon to play a big role in his life) and painted in the evenings. In 1969, Vega saw Iggy Pop and the Stooges at Flushing Meadow Park in Queens, and was inspired to commit himself to a life of ideas and art. “And he made the decision, which was a very difficult one, to leave his married life,” Lamere said. (“My world crashed in,” Mariette wrote on her website.)Vega moved to Manhattan and helped run Museum: The Project of Living Artists, a Greenwich Village space that was open to performing and visual artists, political activists and anyone else 24 hours a day, thanks to the government funding he had secured. Late one night when he was there experimenting with musical feedback, he met Martin Rev (born Martin Reverby), a jazz keyboardist from Brooklyn. The two formed Suicide, initially with Vega on trumpet and Rev on drums, before they switched to vocals and keyboards.Vega tried to explain that the band name referred not to any particular suicide, but to the country’s. “America, America is killing its youth,” he howled on “Ghost Rider,” over Rev’s distorted, two-note organ riff. It was music made with an abundance of ideas and audacity, and a lack of money. Rev played a $10 Japanese keyboard, and a few years later added a $30 Rhythm Prince drum machine that spit out chintzy rumba beats.Gigs were hard to get. Record deals? forget it. By the time Suicide released its first album in late 1977, Vega was 39, making him the senior citizen of downtown punk.Lamere, Vega and Jared Artaud, the musician who befriended Vega and later helped mix and produce “Mutator.”Hillary ArcherThe singer Lydia Lunch, who’d recently moved to New York, wandered into Max’s Kansas City one night and joined the nine other people who’d come to see Suicide. The music “was raw, sexy, psychotic — but there was also a romance to it, with almost a doo-wop quality,” she said in an interview. “But it was Alan’s stare and intensity that was amazing. He was a Method singer — he was in those songs. If he saw you, he was seeing right frickin’ through you.”“And he and Martin were both really nice, on top of that,” she added.Artaud, who worked on the vault release, did not meet Vega until after his band covered a Vega song on “Psych Out Christmas,” a 2013 compilation. By then Vega was in what he called “the Tony Bennett phase of my career,” in which he was treated not as a pariah or a freak, but as a revered elder. He showed his light sculptures in prestigious galleries. His music was used in fashion shows by Agnès B. and Dries Van Noten. The Rollins Band covered Suicide’s “Ghost Rider” on the soundtrack to “The Crow,” which sold three million copies, and Bruce Springsteen did a version of “Dream Baby Dream.”“Suicide’s like the Beatles to me and my band,” Artaud said. He had “a close relationship” with Vega, who lived only one subway stop away. In 2012, Vega had a stroke, which slowed him to a shuffle, and his health continued to decline.“I think he knew his time wasn’t long,” Artaud said. “He would hint at things like ‘When I’m not here,’ or ‘When I’m gone.’ I felt we were building this kind of pact. The heaviest thing for me was when he said, the last time I saw him, ‘I’m ending. You’re beginning. And I’m passing the torch down to you.’”The posthumous album “Mutator” exemplifies Vega’s extremist senses of doom and beauty. On “Fist,” Vega croons “Destroy the dominators,” over a bed of swamp-crawling synths and a deadpan hip-hop beat, while on the bucolic ballad “Samurai,” he declaims lyrics that are by turns ominous (“Missing girls/Who’s been killing ’em?”) and impenetrable.Artaud is helping Lamere catalog and digitize the Vega vault. “It will take some time,” he said. Vega liked to record a bunch of songs, then move on to the next bunch without releasing or mixing the first, which has left a sprawling jumble of his work: “He was always focused on tomorrow.” More

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      Screamers, a Missing Link of Los Angeles Punk, Is Missing No More

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      An archival release marks the technical debut of a band that helped build a scene, 44 years later.K.K. Barrett hadn’t spoken to Tommy Gear in two decades when he reached out about releasing a secret stash of their old music. There were no hard feelings — the two had simply grown apart over the years — but it was tricky business, regardless. Their band, Screamers, was something of a phantom in the history of Los Angeles punk rock.Despite being one of the most popular acts of the scene’s budding years in the late ’70s, routinely packing shows alongside peers like X and Germs, there had never been an official Screamers release. No LPs, no EPs — not even one measly single. To a certain subset of punk fans, Barrett may as well have been suggesting that he and Gear release the true contents of Area 51. But a five-song, 15-minute 12-inch called “Screamers Demo Hollywood 1977” will be out on Friday.“It wasn’t meant to have an afterlife,” said Barrett, 68, who’s best known as a production designer (“Being John Malkovich,” “Her”), on a video call. “It was just something we did. You document things.”The set was recorded at the band’s then-headquarters, a charming Craftsman in Hollywood dubbed “the Wilton Hilton,” solely as a means to get gigs early on. But after the music was recovered from Barrett’s archives 40-plus years later, and dusted off by the label Superior Viaduct, Gear relented.“Honestly, it wasn’t as if we were adverse to a record per se,” said Gear, the group’s main architect and songwriter, along with the vocalist Tomata du Plenty, in a phone interview. “We actually had conversations with managers and record company people at the time, because they clearly thought we were drawing people to clubs and getting press. But frankly, they didn’t know what to do with us. We didn’t fit their paradigm. And, of course, they were making offers that were useless, anyway.”Gear was speaking on the record about his former band for the first time in at least 30 years, by his estimation. Any lack of promotion on his part aside, though, the shadow of Screamers has been growing substantially since the rise of internet-aided bootlegs and YouTube. These “Hollywood 1977” demos are among the hissy, unauthorized recordings already out there, but hearing a cleaned-up version, transferred from the original reel-to-reel tape, is like stepping into the Wilton Hilton after years of being stuck outside, listening from the street.“It’s not always easy/To get what you deserve,” du Plenty howls on “Punish or Be Damned,” over dueling distorted keyboards, one played by Gear, the other by David Brown, who left the group in late 1977. (He went on to co-found the seminal underground label Dangerhouse; du Plenty died of cancer in 2001, at 52, his illness having been complicated by a long battle with H.I.V.) Barrett anchors the group on drums, playing in tandem with a drum machine. There were no guitars, then or ever, in the band. “We’re talking about a period before ‘punk’ became a bin at a record store,” said Gear.Gear, right, with Barrett in 1978, said the band was an experiment. “You know how chemistry experiments are: They’re going to be a panacea or they’re going to blow up in your face.” Ruby Ray/Getty ImagesThe Screamers story takes place in Southern California, but Gear and du Plenty met in Seattle, as part of the queer performance-art troupe Ze Whiz Kidz, and soon formed a heavy glam band, the Tupperwares, ultimately deciding to try their luck in Hollywood. Barrett was an aspiring visual artist from Oklahoma, and left for Los Angeles with $100 in his pocket. The quartet adopted the Screamers name and were immediate icons among the sea of misfits flocking to the city. (The artist Gary Panter designed their logo of a hair-spiked punk, roaring full tilt.)“Was there something in the water?” said John Doe, the singer and bassist for the band X, who also felt a calling to move West on a whim in 1976. “Yeah, it was cheap rent. And people could own cars — and a sense of freedom.”A clique of “50 people, 60 tops,” according to Barrett, constituted the entirety of the initial Los Angeles punk scene. Concerts were just as much a social event as a musical one, and the nascent Slash magazine served as a “newsletter” for those who were hanging out. At that point, the crowd was notably diverse and free thinking, particularly in terms of sexuality.“I thought it was very inclusive,” said Joan Jett, who was one of those 50 or 60 people, and whose group the Runaways was a source of inspiration to many soon-to-be punks. She also produced the only Germs album, “(GI)” from 1979. “It was wonderful, actually. Some of the best times of my life I remember — or don’t remember — are from that time period.”It would prove to be a fleeting moment. By 1980, the scene’s music was transforming into something else entirely: faster, angrier. Eventually, conceptual acts like Screamers faded away. (A contentious, drawn-out film project known as “Population: 1,” made by the filmmaker Rene Daalder, drove the group apart as well.)Gear said the band was an experiment. “You know how chemistry experiments are: they’re going to be a panacea or they’re going to blow up in your face.” Since moving on, he has lived a private life — he cited his age as “ageless” — working mostly in the “personal computer world,” he said.The arrival of the first-ever Screamers release, almost a half-century late, seems to tie a bow on the band’s saga — but it may reopen it more than anything else. As to whether there’s any danger in ripping away the mystique that was so central until now, Barrett isn’t worried.“Whenever you try to dig out something from artistic scenes, you end up with crumbs that get you a flavor of what it might’ve been,” he said. “Those documents add up to tell a new truth, because the real truth is missing a lot of parts. So I feel like we’ve left some bread crumbs. And this is a pretty good one.” More

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      Justin Bieber Reclaims No. 1, With Demi Lovato Close Behind

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      The manager Scooter Braun’s clients battled for the Billboard 200’s top spot, while Rod Wave slipped to third place.Justin Bieber’s new album, “Justice,” has returned to No. 1 for a second time, beating out Demi Lovato’s latest in a tight race for the top.“Justice,” which opened at No. 1 two weeks ago, then dropped to No. 2, reclaimed the Billboard 200 chart’s peak position with the equivalent of 75,000 sales in the United States, including 89 million streams and 6,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking service. Bieber, 27, has had eight albums go to No. 1, but this is the first time that one of them has accumulated more than a single week at the top since “My World 2.0,” which notched four chart-topping weeks in 2010.Close behind is Lovato’s “Dancing With the Devil … The Art of Starting Over,” which opened with the equivalent of 74,000 sales, including nearly 47 million streams and 38,000 copies sold as a full package.Bieber and Lovato share the same manager, Scooter Braun, who has also been in the news lately as the former owner of Taylor Swift’s first six albums, which she has pledged to rerecord as an assertion of control and economic revenge. (Over the last 21 months, Braun’s company, Ithaca Holdings, bought Swift’s former label, Big Machine, for $300 million to $350 million, then sold Swift’s recordings to an investment firm associated with the Disney family, also for more than $300 million, and then Ithaca sold itself for just over $1 billion.)Swift’s first rerecorded album, “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” was released last Friday and is expected to open at No. 1 on next week’s chart with big numbers.Also this week, “SoulFly” by Rod Wave, last week’s top seller, fell to No. 3 in its second week out. Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4. And “Destined 2 Win” by the New York rapper-singer Lil Tjay opened at No. 5. More

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      In Rina Sawayama, Elton John Found a Collaborator and a Friend

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      From left: RINA SAWAYAMA, singer, 30; and ELTON JOHN, singer, 74. Photographed at John’s home in Old Windsor, England, on March 1, 2021. New Friends The rising star and the established icon who’ve discovered they have a lot in common. From left: RINA SAWAYAMA, singer, 30; and ELTON JOHN, singer, 74. Photographed at John’s home […] More

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      Prince’s Unearthed, Disillusioned Funk, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Doja Cat featuring SZA, Twenty One Pilots and Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi.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.Prince, ‘Welcome 2 America’Prince recorded an album called “Welcome 2 America” in 2010, but shelved it before his death in 2016; his estate will release it in July. Maybe Prince decided the album was too bleak. Its title song is ominous, funky, seemingly improvisational and deeply cynical about an era of misinformation, exploitation and distraction. A pithy, stop-start bass line leaves space for dissonant little solos, while Prince’s vocals are deadpan spoken words: “Truth is a new minority.” He’s answered by women singing precise, jazzy harmonies and layering on more messages: “Land of the free, home of the brave,” they sing with a swinging lilt. “Oops, I mean, land of the free, home of the slave.” JON PARELESDoja Cat featuring SZA, ‘Kiss Me More’The first single from the forthcoming Doja Cat album “Planet Her” features SZA and mixes the breeze of lite 1980s funk with the bawdiness of 2020s hip-hop, a juggling act that Doja Cat has pioneered, if not trademarked, by now. JON CARAMANICAMajid Jordan, ‘Waves of Blue’Crisply ecstatic new-wave R&B from the Toronto duo Majid Jordan. What’s most impressive about “Waves of Blue,” besides its spot on texture, is its modesty — the singer Majid Al Maskati doesn’t over-sing to emphasize his point, and the producer Jordan Ullman builds synths like pillars, unostentatiously building a whole world. CARAMANICATwenty One Pilots, ‘Shy Away’“Shy Away,” the first song from a May album called “Scaled and Icy” from the genre-agnostic Ohio duo Twenty One Pilots, starts off as jittery electro before expanding into the dreamy, arms-outstretched pop that keeps arenas and hearts full. There’s a Strokesian energy to the track, but the lyrics don’t bristle with angst; they (not so gently) nudge a loved one to start on a new path. CARYN GANZMiguel, ‘So I Lie’Over the last decade, Miguel has placed his darkest thoughts and most experimental music on his series of “Art Dealer Chic” EPs; he released “Art Dealer Chic Vol. 4” on Friday. In “So I Lie,” he sings, in a soulful falsetto, about fear, pressure, and alienation from himself: “I can barely breathe, treading water/Smile on my face while I’m turning blue/Nobody cares, just work harder/I do what I can to avoid the truth.” The chorus, repeating, “Lie, lie, lie,” would almost be jaunty if it weren’t surrounded in swampy rhythms, wordless voices and hollow echoes, like all the anxieties he can’t evade. PARELESCoultrain, ‘The Essentials’A singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist hailing from St. Louis, Aaron Michael Frison has been making music as Coultrain for well over a decade, pulling together what sounds like a hybrid of the early 2000s Soulquarian scene, the spiritual jazz of Lonnie Liston Smith and the kind of dusty old Southern soul records that you’d find hiding in the dollar bin. On “The Essentials,” from his new album, “Phantasmagoria,” over a glutinous backing of synths, vocal overdubs, bass and drums, he professes his commitment (“’Cause there’s no other for me/It ain’t no coincidence that you reflect my eyes”) before dipping into a wily rap verse and capping things with a mystical choral passage that sounds a note of uncertainty: “I wish I could promise forever/If I could promise forever/I would promise forever to you,” he sings, the layers of his voice all in a conversation with each other. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLORhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi, ‘Calling Me Home’Looming mortality becomes a refuge in “Calling Me Home,” written by the celebrated old-timey singer Alice Gerrard. It’s the sentiment of a man on his deathbed: “I miss my friends of yesterday.” The song provides the title for “They’re Calling Me Home,” the new album by the opera-trained singer, fiddler, banjo player and traditional-music explorer (and MacArthur “genius grant” recipient) Rhiannon Giddens with her partner, the early music expert Francesco Turrisi. She sings it in long-breathed lines, sometimes ended in Appalachian yips, accompanied by stark, unyielding drones, as if she’s a lone voice making itself heard before eternity. PARELESKat & Alex, ‘Heartbreak Tour’An earnest power country slow-burner from the new duo Kat & Alex, who competed on “American Idol” last year, and who sing in both Spanish and English (though not here), “Heartbreak Tour” is delivered with soul music conviction and just the right touch of melodrama. CARAMANICAMon Laferte featuring Gloria Trevi, ‘La Mujer’The Chilean singer Mon Laferte infuses vintage styles with up-to-date sentiments and fierce attitude. Her new album, “Seis,” looks toward Mexican music, and she shares “La Mujer” (“The Woman”) with one of her idols: the Mexican singer and songwriter Gloria Trevi. They trade verses and share choruses in a bolero with punchy organ chords and rowdy horns, escalating from sultry self-confidence to unbridled fury at a man who’s getting decisively dumped: “Goodbye, sad coward,” is Laferte’s final sneer. PARELESQueen Naija featuring Ari Lennox, ‘Set Him Up’Over a slow-motion strut of a bass line and a glass of chardonnay in the lyrics, Queen Naija and Ari Lennox sweetly intertwine their voices, enjoying each other’s explicit details about their latest hookups. Then they realize it’s the same guy — and the conversation turns into a conspiracy to “Set Him Up.” Female solidarity reigns. PARELESSteve Slagle, ‘We Release’Riding a slick, whipsaw groove, “We Release” casually calls back to a mainstream jazz sound from the 1970s, while serving as a proud opening shot for the saxophonist Steve Slagle’s new album, “Nascentia.” Now 69, he composed and recorded all the material during the coronavirus pandemic, providing him a project and a jolt of energy amid trying times. An unerring optimism of spirit is palpable throughout, as he’s joined here by a number of fellow jazz veterans: Jeremy Pelt on trumpet, Clark Gayton on trombone, Bruce Barth on piano, Ugonna Okegwo on bass and Jason Tiemann on drums. RUSSONELLO More

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      Prince’s ‘Welcome 2 America,’ an Unreleased Album, Is Due Out in July

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      The politically minded, never-before-heard 2010 album will be the first complete project released from Prince’s storied vault.For the first time since Prince died unexpectedly in 2016, the singer’s estate will release a completed — but never-before-heard — album from his storied vault of leftover music.Until now, the estate has largely focused on rereleasing some of the biggest albums of Prince’s career, like “1999” and “Sign o’ the Times,” or on compilations like “Originals,” made up of the singer’s demos that became hits for other artists.But on July 30, “Welcome 2 America,” a 12-track album recorded at Prince’s Paisley Park Studios in 2010, will finally see the light of day.In its announcement, the estate called “Welcome 2 America” a document of “Prince’s concerns, hopes and visions for a shifting society, presciently foreshadowing an era of political division, disinformation, and a renewed fight for racial justice.” The album touches on “golden parachutes, the superficial nature of social media, reality TV-fueled celebrity culture, and corporate monopolies in the music industry, ultimately concluding that America is the ‘Land of the free/home of the slave,’” the estate said.It also included a quote about the album from Prince at the time, written in his trademark style: “The world is fraught with misin4mation. George Orwell’s vision of the future is here. We need 2 remain steadfast in faith in the trying times ahead.”In line with that message, songs from the album include titles like “Running Game (Son of a Slave Master),” “Born 2 Die” and “One Day We Will All B Free.” On the title track, Prince sings, “Distracted by the features of the iPhone/Got an application, 2 fix Ur situation.”From 2010 to 2012, Prince played more than 80 concerts on a tour of the same name, but he never explained why he shelved the related “Welcome 2 America” album.It has been a fraught road for the estate since the singer died from an accidental overdose of an opioid painkiller five years ago this month. While Prince was known for fastidious control over his career, including retaining ownership of much of his music, he left no will. Prince was determined to have six family members who qualified as heirs, although one — a half brother — has since died.The release of “Welcome 2 America” will come via Legacy Recordings, a division of Sony Music Entertainment, which began releasing Prince music after an earlier $31 million deal between the estate and Universal Music was rescinded by a judge.The estate has since faced tax problems with the I.R.S., which said that the estate is worth $163.2 million — nearly double the $82.3 million claimed by the estate’s administrator, Comerica Bank & Trust. (A judge overseeing the estate has referred to a state of “personal and corporate mayhem.”)Prince’s vault at Paisley Park, his studio complex outside of Minneapolis, is thought to contain hundreds — or potentially thousands — of unreleased songs. More

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      Olivia Rodrigo’s Emotional Road Trip, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Westside Gunn, Rosanne Cash, Dry Cleaning 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.Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Deja Vu’OK, now that she’s got her license, here comes the road trip. Olivia Rodrigo’s “Deja Vu” opens in the car, with the singer recalling fonder times with an ex. As on “Drivers License,” there are three parties — Rodrigo, that former beau and the specter of that person’s new love, and it’s unclear which of the other two causes Rodrigo more anguish. The lyrics are plain and pinpoint pained: “That was our place, I found it first/I made the jokes you tell to her.” About halfway through, “Deja Vu” turns severely Swiftian, with lyrical asides about listening to music, a yelping section almost directly cribbed from Swift’s “Cruel Summer’” and a familiar power struggle over who taught who about cool music. Rodrigo would like to make it clear, though, that she is no mere student: “Play her piano but she doesn’t know/That I was the one who taught you Billy Joel.” JON CARAMANICAWestside Gunn, ‘Julia Lang’Hazy, pugnacious and glowering, the latest from Westside Gunn is ragged in the best early ’90s way, so convincing in its fuzz and stagger that it’s almost like a recovered memory. CARAMANICARosanne Cash featuring John Leventhal, ‘The Killing Fields’Rosanne Cash considers her own past, her family’s Southern roots, and the South’s history of lynchings and injustice in “The Killing Fields.” She sings, “The blood that runs on cypress trees cannot be washed away/by mothers’ tears and gasoline.” The melody is mournful and minor-key; a lone, lightly strummed guitar supplies most of the accompaniment. And at the end, Cash resolves, “All that came before us/is not who we are now.” JON PARELESHalf Waif, ‘Take Away the Ache’Half Waif — the songwriter Nandi Rose — lets herself be buffeted by the paradoxes of love in “Take Away the Ache.” She sings, “I know that I’m asking for more than you can give/but isn’t love just living like that?” It’s a dizzying three-and-a-half minutes, veering amid minimal electronic abstractions, piano ballad and dance-floor thumper, all held together by passionate yearning. PARELESNaomi Cowan, ‘Energy’The Jamaican singer Naomi Cowan sets her usual reggae aside in “Energy,” an ingenious, multi-leveled mesh of syncopations and silences produced by Izy Beats. Plucked strings, sporadic bass tones, finger snaps, flickering electronic hi-hats and teasing, elusive backup vocals poke in and out of the mix as Cowan chides an ex who ghosted her before declaring, “Love and war, baby, I’m no casualty.” PARELESDry Cleaning, ‘Unsmart Lady’“If you like a girl, be nice — it’s not rocket science,” Florence Shaw deadpans on “Unsmart Lady,” a new single from the London four-piece Dry Cleaning that plays out almost like a psych-rock update of Nada Surf’s “Popular.” On Dry Cleaning’s excellent debut album “New Long Leg,” out on Friday, Shaw is equal parts frontwoman and spoken-word poet, weaving the random linguistic detritus of modern life into loose, surreal narratives. (She used to collect snippets of overheard conversations and intriguing phrases in her phone’s Notes app; when her friends asked her to join their band, she mined that found material for lyrics.) “Unsmart Lady” begins as a kind of curt, one-sided conversation, but by the end it has transformed into an imagistic meditation on the absurdities of femininity, like a “foot squeezed hopefully into a short boot.” Around her, the band unleashes its fury, but Shaw’s delivery stays steady — the gimlet eye of a storm. LINDSAY ZOLADZMdou Moctar, ‘Afrique Victime’Mdou Moctar, a guitarist, singer and bandleader from Niger, deploys everything he has drawn from Saharan traditions and Western rock in the calm-to-storm buildup of “Afrique Victime,” the title song of an album due May 21. He warns, “Africa is a victim of so many crimes/If we stay silent it will be the end of us,” while the beat gallops ahead. Soon, his electric guitar leaps up from the band’s rhythmic core to trill, twirl, swoop and scream. PARELESAG Club featuring Icecoldbishop, ‘Noho’The excellent “Noho,” from the new album by the consistently refreshing AG Club, features a frictionless collision of Bay Area hip-hop traditions: the slow-and-low and the loopily exuberant. CARAMANICADopolarians, ‘The Bond’Dopolarians began in 2018 as a project uniting free-jazz musicians based in Arkansas with elder luminaries from the free-jazz world: the bassist William Parker, the drummer Alvin Fielder Jr. and the saxophonist Kidd Jordan. Their debut album, “Garden Party,” seesawed between singsong lyricism and reckless entanglement. The group has just released a new LP, “The Bond,” and while the lineup has changed — Brian Blade now fills the drum chair after Fielder died in 2019 at 83; Jordan, now 85, is no longer in the group — the loose but intense feel remains the same. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO More

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      Taylor, Billie, Demi, Blackpink: The Pop Star Documentary Boom

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      It used to be that stars had to be reliably famous for a long time before documentary cameras chased them around. But everything is filmed now, anyhow, and pop stars are embracing this sort of serious treatment at earlier phases in their careers.In recent years, that’s meant entries from Taylor Swift, who used it to reset her public politics; Billie Eilish, who reinforced her relentless chill; Shawn Mendes and Ariana Grande, who mostly preened; and Blackpink, which took the chance to reveal more than the usual K-pop group.Perhaps the most extreme example is the current YouTube docu-series “Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil,” a stark and sometimes harrowing retelling of the pop star’s trials with addiction and sexual assault.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how the documentary boom parallels the rise in social media self-documentation, how art is deployed in service of purported authenticity, and what happens when the person being documented is more in charge than the director.Guests:Simran Hans, a film critic at The ObserverCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editor More