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      Drake’s ‘Certified Lover Boy’ Spends a Fourth Week at No. 1

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      The Houston rapper Don Toliver opens at No. 2, while the music industry turns its attention to the numbers for Adele’s comeback single.Drake returns to No. 1 on this week’s Billboard album chart, while the Houston rapper Don Toliver opens at No. 2 and the music industry keeps a close eye on the numbers for a song that will impact next week’s chart: Adele’s comeback single.Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy,” which arrived at No. 1 last month with blockbuster streaming numbers after nearly a year of teases and false starts, notched its fourth week at the top. In its sixth week out, “Certified” had the equivalent of 94,000 sales in the United States, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. Virtually all of that number is attributed to streaming, with nearly 126 million clicks online.After six weeks out, Drake’s album has racked up nearly 1.4 million equivalent sales, including 1.7 billion streams — a huge showing, but cooler than the release of the rapper’s last studio album, “Scorpion,” in 2018, which in its first six weeks had 1.8 million sales and 1.9 billion streams.Toliver, a protégé of Travis Scott, opened in second place with “Life of a Don,” his second studio album. It had the equivalent of 68,000 sales, including 64 million streams.YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s “Sincerely, Kentrell” is in third place, Meek Mill’s “Expensive Pain” is No. 4 and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” is No. 5. Last week’s No. 1, Taylor Swift’s “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” fell to No. 35.Attention is now shifting to the data rolling in for next week’s singles chart, with Adele’s song “Easy on Me” expected to arrive with huge numbers. Released late last week — in an unusual move, Adele tied its worldwide arrival to midnight British time, making it available in the United States on Thursday — it quickly attracted big streaming numbers. Spotify announced that the song had broken its record for the most-streamed track in a single day, and Amazon Music said it had gotten “the most first-day Alexa song requests” in that service’s history.On Monday, CBS announced “Adele One Night Only,” a two-hour special featuring a concert performance and an interview with Oprah Winfrey, coming on Nov. 14, five days before the release of “30,” Adele’s first album in six years. More

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      Finneas, a Pop Star’s Secret Weapon, Strides Into the Spotlight

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      He’s won eight Grammys alongside his sister, Billie Eilish, and worked with some of the genre’s biggest stars. Now the 24-year-old musician is arriving as a solo artist with “Optimist.”LOS ANGELES — There’s a ghoul hanging around Finneas’s house. A dark shadow spinning past the window of his otherwise sunny and calm music studio. “The way it moves, it catches your eye at the wrong time,” he said. It spooks him.You could be forgiven for thinking that Finneas, 24, the multi-instrumentalist who’s earned a global following — and eight Grammys — as the producer and songwriting collaborator of his teen-phenom sister Billie Eilish, is a little goth. As siblings, their work is often not just brooding but haunted, even deviant. Finneas’s debut studio album as a solo artist, released on Friday and entitled “Optimist” (“it’s aspirational,” he told me) features a track called “The Kids Are All Dying,” followed shortly by “Love Is Pain.” With his vocals at a ballad pitch, it is suffused with generational and personal anxiety, along with the gloss of romance.So it was with the ghoul — Halloween décor, put up by Finneas’s girlfriend, the social media personality Claudia Sulewski, while he was out of town. (He was mystified that it didn’t creep her out.) Finneas isn’t a prince of darkness, but he is forthcoming about his fears. Emotionally unfiltered, confessional: “It’s kind of how I am, on and off the microphone,” he said.The studio is where he works out those feelings. Except for the first track’s subtle violin and cello, he wrote, performed, arranged and produced “Optimist” entirely on his own, playing all the instruments (bass, guitar, piano, synths, and doing the drum programming and sound effects). “It was like, why you would build your own house if you were a carpenter,” he said, sitting barefoot and cross-legged on a rolling chair in his studio here recently, in ripped jeans and bed head. “Why would I hire someone else to do something I know how to do and can execute myself? And it’s also really fun.”Since he and Eilish broke through with her album “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” in 2019, Finneas has been increasingly in-demand as a producer. One of those Grammys was for producer of the year, nonclassical; at 22 he was the youngest person ever to win in that category. He has recorded with Selena Gomez, Camila Cabello and a handful of other artists, many of them young women.Billie Eilish and Finneas took home armloads of Grammys for her 2019 album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”Amanda Edwards/Getty ImagesCabello said she wrote “Used to This,” widely understood to be about the beginnings of her relationship with the musician Shawn Mendes, in two days with Finneas. “It felt like just downloading with a friend,” she said in an email. “He is so detail-oriented in his own music, and his lyrics are so about the small little things, like my favorite poetry, that he really influenced where the writing went.”After the session, Finneas “wrote me a long text explaining his production choices,” she said. He added atmospheric touches like the whoosh of a trolley before the song mentions San Francisco, “tequila glasses clinking, the guitar solo when I say the ‘calluses on your fingers’ line,” Cabello wrote. “He really is like a painter or a poet, and he captures these huge feelings by focusing in on the little details.”Tove Lo, the Swedish singer-songwriter, worked on two tracks with Finneas in 2019. One was the hedonist pop ditty “Bikini Porn,” another an introspective, off-kilter ode. “I find him really good at finding the ‘nerve’” of a song, she wrote in an email. He’s “not so focused on the format, but what feeling you want to feel next in the song. He’s also not afraid to go somewhere unexpected without losing the sentiment of it all.”She added that Finneas’s work with his sister gave her confidence that her own perspective would be heard in the studio. “It was such a chill energy, and I felt very comfortable throwing out any idea that popped into my head without thinking it over too much first,” she said.Like his sister, Finneas — born Finneas Baird O’Connell — began playing music as a kid, encouraged by his parents, Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell, workaday actors who home-schooled their children, prioritizing a creative family life. “For my third birthday, I asked for a hi-hat cymbal and a conductor’s baton,” Finneas said. His parents delivered. “And we were in the middle floor of a triplex.” (Sorry, neighbors.)“It’s just me on this album,” Finneas said. “There’s no one else sharing the oxygen.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesHe fell in love with songwriting when he was about 12, and his mom, a singer and guitarist herself, offered a kind of songwriting boot camp. As an exercise, she had the kids write from a different person’s perspective — a TV character, say. “I definitely think that sculpted us both, and especially him,” Eilish said in a phone interview. “Songwriting is about truth and honesty, but it’s also storytelling.”As a teenager, Finneas taught himself production. Now, there’s an infrastructure to learn studio skills from home, and 5-year-olds are making beats on TikTok. But back then, in the woolly days of 2014, Finneas said, his biggest resource was “guys on YouTube who run worship bands in church.”Though he described himself as “areligious,” at 16 and 17, he was staying up all night in his bedroom at his parents’ house in Los Angeles, learning how to record a bass line or comp a vocal in Logic, the audio software, from Christian rockers. His first band, the Slightlys, played a couple of local shows with the Warped Tour; he and his sister had also spent years singing in the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus — “harmony school,” Finneas called it. That was the extent of his formal musical training. By 2016, he and Eilish had their first viral hit, “Ocean Eyes.”They have what he called a “creatively monogamous relationship.” He also co-wrote and produced her sophomore album, released this summer, and tours with her. She says he is her best friend.Road tripping home from an event in Temecula, Calif., this spring in the family minivan, the whole clan heard “Optimist” for the first time. “We stopped and got burgers” — vegan burgers — “and he played us his album,” Eilish said. “We listened to it twice, and it was very touching — I love it. Finneas is the most talented person I know.”“It’s funny to me that he made an album with only a few songs,” she added (there are 13 songs!) “because the dude writes so much. And everything he writes, it’s so good, it’s, like, really upsetting to me. Because I am not a fast writer and I am not an easy writer. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, and he makes it look so, so easy. It’s infuriating.”Finneas, Peaches and Eilish’s preferred microphone.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesAn old mic that Eilish records with stands at attention in Finneas’ home studio; some smiley Murakami pillows followed him from his childhood bedroom, where he and Eilish made their breakthrough album. The studio is not otherwise very ornamented — a pile of platinum album plaques loll, unhung, in the bathroom. A fountain in the courtyard outside burbles audibly; Finneas purposefully didn’t seal off the studio from outside sound (the burbling is there, very faintly, on many of his songs, he said). He recorded about half of “Optimist” at home, before a burst pipe flooded the space and forced him into a rental studio. No biggie: his Gen Z-laptop-producer ethos is that “you can make stuff anywhere.”Outside of touring, he’s fairly domestic: Sulewski, his girlfriend of three years, YouTubes their seemingly wholesome relationship (they once spent two hours making a gingerbread house).“I definitely don’t think your best work requires tension or struggle,” he said. “I’ve made heartbreaking songs that I love as a very happy person.”His dotes on his pit bull, Peaches, for whom he named a non-lyrical, piano-only étude on his album — the sort of track that might get cut if there was another artist to answer to. “When I’m producing for other people, including Billie, no matter how much say I have, I care the most that it’s theirs, and they feel ownership, and they love it, you know?” he said. “And so, it’s really fulfilling to make something exactly how I want it to be and then put it out and live with it. It’s just me on this album. There’s no one else sharing the oxygen.” More

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      Adele Returns With Power and Restraint, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear new tracks by serpentwithfeet, Blackstarkids, Stromae 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.Adele, ‘Easy on Me’Six years have passed since Adele released “25,” her diamond-certified third studio album. In that time, just about everything in the music business has changed: Streaming is firmly the default distribution option, sing-rapping and pop-punk are the most popular stylistic frameworks and TikTok has essentially stripped down songcraft for parts.But no one’s told Adele, who was a nuclear-class warhead vocalist then, and remains one now, and whose approach to making music hasn’t changed at all. “Easy on Me” is the first single from “30,” her fourth studio album, which will be released next month. It was shaped, she’s said, by the tumult in her personal life. Adele is a singer whose most joyous songs are laden with the same damp melancholy as her most wounded ones.Her true gift, though, is restraint — knowing just how patiently to dole out her voice, hovering over each syllable as if slowly laying cinder blocks, methodically robbing her targets of air. That’s captured in the song’s opening lines: “There ain’t no gold in this river/That I’ve been washing my hands in forever,” a straightforward record of a baptism that turns to drowning. Abetted by a piano, she continues apace, detailing a relationship to which she gave all, until she didn’t. It is a deft and almost soothing dismissal, made even more tense by the feeling that even at her most pointed, she’s holding a little something back. JON CARAMANICAFinneas, ‘Love Is Pain’For once, Finneas matches the glum, whispery insights of his sister, Billie Eilish, in a song that recognizes where real life falls short of romantic fantasy. It’s from his debut album, “Optimist,” released on Friday. Over plain piano chords, he sings about moments like “That hollow feeling in your chest/as you both wordlessly undress after a fight,” without any easy consolation. JON PARELESserpentwithfeet, ‘Down Nuh River’“Down Nuh River” is equal parts down-home and cryptic. It’s rooted in the task-oriented rhythms of work song and playground chant: “Go go go go on swim on down nuh river now/oh you tryna get me in trouble now.” The beat syncopates an octave-hopping bass line against a muffled thump and one-handed piano chords. But it’s not so simple: serpentwithfeet — Josiah Wise — keeps shifting and multiplying his layers of vocals and effects, hinting at hallucinations and revelations if someone will “swim to the deepest part/that’s where all the wishes are.” PARELESStromae, ‘Santé’Breaking an uncharacteristically long public silence, the Belgian songwriter, singer, rapper and producer Stromae (Paul van Haver) has reappeared with “Santé,” which celebrates everyday people — Rosa, Albert, Celine, Arlette — doing their jobs. The track feels electro-Andean, matching the strumming of a small guitar to one of Stromae’s irresistible whistling synthesizer hooks. PARELESJuls featuring Fireboy DML, ‘Intentionally’Juls’s beats possess a textured softness, like a satin slip dress. And frankly, that’s probably what you should be wearing when listening to “Intentionally,” a new track from the British-Ghanian producer and Fireboy DML. “Just love me intentionally/I don’t want no temporary,” purrs the Nigerian vocalist. The song, from Juls’s first studio album, is sweet, simple desire, a lilting promise of mutuality and tenderness. ISABELIA HERRERANikara Warren, ‘Run Ricky’“Run Ricky” is the lead single from “Black Wall Street,” the debut album from the young vibraphonist Nikara Warren. The track shows off her skills as an instrumentalist, bandleader and rapper, starting with an insinuating bass line from Parker McAllister and some light boom-bap from David Frazier Jr. on drums. Horns, keyboards, guitar and Warren’s vibraphone fill in around them, and she rattles off a rap about Ricky, a young Black artist felled by violence. “Damn Ricky, you should’ve done the impossible,” she says as the verse closes. But this doesn’t bring the tune to its climax; the group continues for another three minutes, Hailey Niswanger’s tenor saxophone and Stephen Fowler’s trumpet stay melded as the groove shifts, inflected with funk and then rock and then Afro-Cuban clave. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLODos Santos, ‘Alma Cósmica’Like a spaghetti western from the ’60s, Dos Santos’s “Alma Cósmica” is a burst of narrative mystery. “¿Adónde voy? ¿De dónde soy?” wonders bandleader Alex Chavez. We may not know where he’s going or where he’s from, but the production keeps us going: a twanging guitar and an insistent shaker curl together, twisting into mutant chicha. HERRERAWalker Hayes, ‘U Gurl’Walker Hayes’s country hit “Fancy Like” is an advertisement masquerading as a song that has been now fully repurposed as an advertisement. It is a happenstance smash, and also lightly craven — lightly because Hayes never fully commits to the bit; at times he seems to be singing a parody of advertising jingles. He’s a little wry, but not so much that it derails the pitch. That tenor is deployed, too, on Hayes’s new single, “U Gurl,” a kind of faint caricature of hypermasculine country talk-singing: “So the way you walk is suggestive/strip-mall-town impressive/Girl, I hate to see you go, but I love to watch you exit.” It’s familiar text, delivered with a mildly arched eyebrow. And it’s effective — a “can you believe I’m doing this?” scorcher to follow the “can you believe we got away with that?” smash. CARAMANICABlackstarkids, ‘Piss Drunk Kids’#dreampop #hiphop #Y2K #Tumblr #skaterat #shoegaze #kawaii #emo. CARAMANICAEels, ‘Good Night on Earth’A fuzz-toned guitar riff and a snappy beat carry “Good Night on Earth,” a quintessential Eels song: hoarse, succinct, dry-eyed and well aware of life’s ironies. PARELESCamilo and Evaluna Montaner, ‘Índigo’The cheerfully, even relentlessly wholesome Colombian songwriter Camilo and his wife (as of 2020), Evaluna Montaner, have copiously documented their romance on social media as well as in songs. “Índigo” continues to merge those content streams in a breezy, hand-clapping, yacht-rock duet, all strumming guitars and close harmonies, that exults in amorous bliss — “I won without playing the lottery,” they sing — as the video flaunts a positive pregnancy test and a baby bump. PARELESEdward Simon, ‘Country’Not a note goes to waste in the translucent playing of Edward Simon, a Venezuelan pianist who is now the longest-serving member of the esteemed SFJAZZ Collective. He recorded “Solo Live” in Oakland, during a 2019 concert at the Piedmont Piano Company, on his 50th birthday. On “Country,” the album’s lone original, a rolling melody over a repeated pattern of farseeing chords gives way to a long, looping improvisation that culminates in chunky, rhythmic cross-talk between Simon’s left and right hands. RUSSONELLO More

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      ‘The Velvet Underground’ Review: And Me, I’m in a Rock ’n’ Roll Band

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      Todd Haynes’s documentary paints a jagged, revelatory portrait of the New York avant-garde scene of the 1960s.Sometime in the 1960s, John Cale, a classically trained Welsh violist with avant-garde leanings, met Lou Reed, a middle-class Jewish college dropout from Long Island who dreamed of being a rock star. Their creative partnership, encouraged by Andy Warhol and enhanced by the mercurial presence of the German model, actress and singer Nico, was the volatile bedrock of the Velvet Underground, a commercially marginal band that altered the course of popular music.The Velvet Underground story is hardly obscure, and in outline it might fit fairly neatly in the standard music-documentary template. Early struggle gives way to (relative) triumph, and then the whole thing blows up in a squall of battling egos, substance abuse and self-destructive behavior. In the aftermath life goes on, solo careers are pursued, and the survivors — fans as much as artists — look back with mellow affection on the wild and heady past, brought alive by excavated television footage.“The Velvet Underground” has some of those elements, but it’s directed by Todd Haynes, a protean filmmaker who never met a genre he couldn’t deconstruct. While not as radical as “I’m Not There,” his 2007 Bob Dylan anti-biopic, this movie is similarly committed to a skeptical, inventive reading of recent cultural history. It’s not content to tell the story in the usual way, and it finds revelation in what might have seemed familiar.Haynes doesn’t just want you to listen to the reminiscences of band members and their friends, lovers and collaborators, or to groove on vintage video of the band in action. He wants you to hear just how strange and new the Velvets sounded, to grasp, intuitively as well as analytically, where that sound came from. And also to see — to feel, to experience — the aesthetic ferment and sensory overload of mid-60s Manhattan.A lot of eloquent people are on hand to talk about what it was like. Cale and Maureen Tucker, the drummer, the two original Velvet Underground members who are still alive, share their memories, as do some of Reed’s old friends and surviving members of the Warhol circle.Their faces, shot in gentle, nostalgic, indirect light, share the screen with a rapid flow — a kinetic collage — of images. While those images sometimes document places, events and personalities — offering up Allen Ginsberg, Max’s Kansas City and a news clip about the downtown scene narrated by Barbara Walters — they serve more importantly to link the Velvets’ music to the experimental cinema of the time.From left, Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol, Reed and Tucker in a split-screen frame from the film, which places the band in context of the aesthetic ferment of mid-60s Manhattan.Apple TV+Warhol was, along with everything else, a filmmaker, as was his associate Paul Morrissey. Haynes dedicates “The Velvet Underground” to the memory of Jonas Mekas, the great champion and gadfly of New York’s cinematic vanguard who died in 2019. In the film, Mekas marvels at the sheer abundance of artistic activity in the city in the early ’60s, and the constant blending and cross-pollination that was taking place. Traditional boundaries — between poetry and painting, high art and low, film and music, irony and earnestness — weren’t so much transgressed as shown to be irrelevant.It was a remarkable time, but not exactly a golden age. Haynes respects the art too much to idealize the artists, or to impose retrospective harmony on their dissonances. The overt cruelty and menace of the music — the droning and distortion behind lyrics about addiction, sadism and sexual exploitation — didn’t come from nowhere.The film critic Amy Taubin, who appeared in a Warhol film about “the most beautiful women in the world,” bluntly recalls that the Factory, Warhol’s headquarters, was a bad place for women, who were valued for their looks rather than their talents. An aspect of Warhol’s genius was a gift for using people, and often using them up. Reed, who died in 2013, is a posthumously beloved figure, but not many of his contemporaries would describe him as a nice person.And niceness was, in any case, antithetical to what the Velvet Underground was trying to do. “We hated that peace and love crap,” Tucker says. The artist Mary Woronov, who toured with the Velvets on the West Coast, elaborates on their hostility to the California counterculture: “We hated hippies.” Never a political band, it nonetheless articulated a powerful protest — against sentimentality, stupidity, false consciousness and positive thinking — that would sow the seeds of punk rock and later rebellions. Testimony to their influence is provided by the singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman, who estimates he saw them live 60 or 70 times when he was a teenager in Boston, and whose enthusiasm is undimmed more than half a century later.Drop a needle on any Velvet Underground record — or queue up a playlist, if that’s how you roll — and what you hear will sound new, frightening and full of possibility, even on the thousandth listen. “The Velvet Underground” will show you where that perpetual novelty came from, and connect the sonic dots with other, contemporaneous artistic eruptions. As a documentary, it’s wonderfully informative. It’s also a jagged and powerful work of art in its own right, one that turns archaeology into prophecy.The Velvet UndergroundRated R. “Heroin,” “Venus in Furs,” “Sister Ray” — you do the math. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and on Apple TV+. More

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      Remi Wolf Turns Bedroom Pop Into Hypercolored Explosions

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      The 25-year-old Los Angeles musician’s debut album, “Juno,” is a collage of sounds, emotions and cultural detritus filtered through her own unique energy.LOS ANGELES — Remi Wolf rolled up to an indoor trampoline park in Van Nuys on an August afternoon feeling frazzled. She’d been busy all day, making bugged-out visuals for her songs and prepping for tour. Then the traffic coming from the Eastside of Los Angeles was bad. So, so bad.She’d be ready to sit and talk by the vending machines in a minute, but first she needed to bounce.Wolf took off her light-purple Crocs and pulled on the regulation orange grip socks, which managed to complement her mishmashed look: a recently resurrected Urban Outfitters top she got in high school and a promo cap for a record label she’s not even signed to over her pile of brown curls. At 25 years old, Wolf was at least a decade older than almost everyone else ricocheting across the field of trampolines. Then she hit two forward somersaults.On Friday, Wolf will release her debut album, “Juno.” It’s a collection of nerves, anxieties and self-recriminations set to ebullient melodies and unbound sonic collages. “Juno” was largely written and recorded during the pre-vaccine period of the pandemic. While many artists burrowed into the aesthetics of quiet during this era of isolation, Wolf turned the tumultuous emotions pent-up inside of her into hypercolored explosions.“It’s not mellow at all, but it is very introspective,” she said. “I have a lot of energy. As a person, I can just go and go and go until I crash. And then I’m, like, depressed, or whatever.”As the nebulously defined genre of bedroom pop breaks out beyond the barriers of the bedrooms it was once made in, Wolf has emerged as one of its most engaging talents, bolstered by an unconventional charisma and a powerful voice. “Remi is always pushing what it means to be pop and what it means to be a pop star — not even deprecating it, but just being able to laugh and think about pop music in a totally different way,” said Lizzy Szabo, a senior editor at Spotify who oversees Lorem, the influential, Gen Z-targeted playlist that has become part of Wolf’s dominion.A onetime competitive skier, Wolf took the dedication she once brought to the sport to her music.Emily Monforte for The New York TimesLike many people her age, Wolf has a keen ability to slurp up the often doofy flotsam of the recent past and make it seem far cooler than it was in the first place. That manifests itself in her love of hot-pink novelty trucker hats and candy-raver eye makeup, but it also applies to her taste in music. During a recent sold-out show at the Roxy in Los Angeles, Wolf covered MGMT’s “Electric Feel,” Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” and a portion of Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me,” all with a relatively straight face.She’s found unlikely inspiration in the Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis, one of the most maligned (if possibly misunderstood) lyricists to make it into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She calls him “my king” (with more emphatic language) and even named one of the best songs on “Juno” after him. Like Kiedis’s, many of Wolf’s lyrics seem entirely free associative as she references an orgy at Five Guys and a plane flight to Mars.“I just follow these little wormholes in my head,” she said. “I just like to go down whatever imagery I think is describing how I’m feeling.”Despite how nonsensical the lyrics may seem when isolated, to Wolf there is an internal logic behind all of them. Well, most of them. She knows exactly what she means in her song “Grumpy Old Man” when she says she’s got “feelings in my feelings” and “violets on my violence,” but admits that she came up with the line about having “boobies on my booty” just because those words are fun to sing.Earlier this year, Wolf released “We Love Dogs!,” a compilation of remixes of her earlier songs. It included interpretations from known genre twisters like Nile Rodgers and Panda Bear, but also a version of “Photo ID,” her most streamed song, featuring the ascendant star Dominic Fike, who’s become a friend. “A lot of people have their style figured out or maybe a general sound,” Fike said. “She has something special in how she puts together her songs. I feel like Remi is a real singer. Every once in a while they come around, and she’s one of those.”Despite being raised in the largely flat and snowless Bay Area city of Palo Alto, Wolf began training as a downhill ski racer at 8 years old. She spent weekends staying at a cheap hotel in Truckee, a town near Lake Tahoe. She went to the Junior Olympics twice. “I was bouncing between different friends all the time, so nothing ever felt safe,” she said. “I became very independent and very insular in my own being.”When she was 16, Wolf quit competing and threw herself into music with the same resolute mind-set that’s required of athletes. “Once I stopped skiing, I was like, ‘OK, I need something else to do just as intensely and just as hard,’” she said. She started a duo with her friend Chloe Zilliac called, naturally, Remi and Chloe. At 17, Wolf tried out for “American Idol” and got invited to Hollywood, but her experience there didn’t last long.While participating in an after-school music program, a teacher teamed her up with another one of his pupils, a young multi-instrumentalist named Jared Solomon. He had them play “Valerie” by Amy Winehouse, with her singing and him on guitar. “We were instantly like, ‘Whoa, you’re really good,’” Wolf said.Solomon joined Remi and Chloe’s backup band, and they’d rehearse in his garage twice a week before he left to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston. When Wolf graduated from the U.S.C. Thornton School of Music a few years later, Solomon reached out to see if he could crash at her place while passing through Los Angeles as his friend’s tour D.J. The two hadn’t really talked in five years; he ended up staying for a week. They experimented on a few songs together in that span, including “Sauce,” a slinky jam that remains one of Wolf’s most popular tracks.“I knew obviously people were like, I’m growing, blah blah blah. Now I’m like, life is about growth,” Wolf said of life after getting sober. “Which never occurred to me. It’s so insane.”Emily Monforte for The New York TimesAt the time, she had been trying to break into the music industry as a songwriter. “I was on a bunch of Adderall and I was psychotic at that point,” Wolf recalled. “Then he came through, then we did our thing and then we were like, holy [expletive]!”Solomon became and remains Wolf’s closest musical collaborator. “We’re just so locked in to each other’s energy, especially musically,” Wolf said. “It’s hard for people to penetrate that.” Wolf produced most of the songs on “Juno” with him (he uses the name Solomonophonic), though more established figures including Kenny Beats and Ethan Gruska contributed to a few songs on the album, too. Solomon also plays in her live band, towering over Wolf in a Pantera T-shirt with cutoff sleeves.The earliest work that Wolf put out often leaned toward jazzy soul — which she attributes to her love of major and minor seventh chords — but with “Juno” she widened the scope. While Erykah Badu remains a constant influence, during the album’s making she listened to artists like Jack White, Beck, Sheryl Crow and Michelle Branch. “I’m kind of a rock singer,” Wolf said. “That’s what I started singing, and then I moved more into soulier stuff. But I’m a belter. I love screaming.”A significant moment in Wolf’s personal life also had a major impact on “Juno”: she entered rehab during the summer of 2020, a change that was at least three years in the making. Before, Wolf said, she frequently drank to the point of blacking out. While she said she was usually able to function in her daily life, she had started getting into huge fights with family, friends and collaborators.“I did it for myself obviously, but I did it for my career,” she said of her sobriety. “There was just something in me being like, ‘Don’t destroy this. Don’t destroy your life.’”Drinking left Wolf feeling awful all the time. Her sobriety revitalized her energy and excitement, but it also forced her to confront all kinds of emotional issues that she didn’t make space for with her goal-oriented approach. “So much came up that I didn’t even know existed,” she said. “I didn’t even know what growing as a human was. I knew obviously people were like, I’m growing, blah blah blah. Now I’m like, life is about growth. Which never occurred to me. It’s so insane.”When the interview was over, Wolf returned to the trampolines. She took a few flying leaps onto a gigantic inflatable pillow before deciding to grab a final ride on the zip line. She climbed the steps to the top of the platform, listened to a safety spiel from the attendant and then turned around to give a thumbs up to the security camera mounted on the wall. And then, she was off. More

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      Adele Announces ‘30,’ Her First Album in Six Years

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      The singer’s long-awaited return will start this week, with the release of a single, “Easy on Me,” followed by a new album on Nov. 19, she announced on Wednesday.Almost six years to the day since the release of her previous blockbuster album, Adele will make her long-awaited return to the music industry with a new album on Nov. 19, she announced Wednesday on social media.Titled “30,” in line with her previous LPs “19,” “21” and “25” — for the ages Adele was while writing them — the singer, now 33, said in a statement that the album came out of “the most turbulent period of my life.”In 2019, Adele filed for divorce from her husband of two years, the charity executive Simon Konecki. The couple have a young son.“I’ve learned a lot of blistering home truths about myself along the way,” Adele wrote in her announcement.She compared the music to “that friend who, no matter what, checked in on me even though I’d stopped checking in with them because I’d become so consumed by my own grief,” adding: “I’ve painstakingly rebuilt my house and my heart since then and this album narrates it.”“30” will be preceded on Thursday night — midnight in the United Kingdom — by a single, “Easy on Me,” produced by Greg Kurstin, who collaborated with the singer on “Hello,” the chart-topping lead song from “25,” in 2015.Described in a recent Vogue cover story as a “a gut-wrenching plea of a piano ballad,” “Easy on Me” was previewed by Adele on Instagram on Saturday, and features the lyrics:“Go easy on me, babyI was still a childDidn’t get the chance toFeel the world around me.”Yet even as Adele’s new music is widely expected to be among the most commercially successful of the year, based on her track record of world-beating sales, the singer is also managing expectations as she re-enters a changed business.“There isn’t a bombastic ‘Hello,’” she told Vogue. “But I don’t want another song like that. That song catapulted me in fame to another level that I don’t want to happen again.”The track debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for 10 weeks. But streaming — which now accounts for 84 percent of recorded music revenue in the United States, according to the Recording Industry Association of America — was still catching on. When “25” was released, on Nov. 20, 2015, it was not made available on services like Spotify and Apple Music until seven months later, instead relying on traditional sales.That resulted in a record-breaking 3.38 million albums sold in the United States during its first week — nearly a million more than the next-highest-selling release in the Nielsen/SoundScan era. (The company, now MRC Data, began tracking point-of-sale data in 1991.)The album “25” has since been certified 11-times platinum and won six Grammys in 2017, making Adele the first artist ever to sweep the top three categories — record of the year, song of the year and album of the year — on two separate occasions. (She did the same in 2012, with “21.”)Unlike Adele’s previous releases, “30” is expected to be available on streaming services upon release, although Vogue reported that the singer was “adamant that it come out in tangible form,” on CDs and vinyl, as well.According to reports, the new album will feature collaborations with the producers and songwriters Max Martin and Shellback, who worked on the previous Adele single “Send My Love (to Your New Lover)”; the singer-songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr. (“When We Were Young,” from 2015); the producer Inflo; and the composer and producer Ludwig Goransson, known for his work with Childish Gambino and on films like “Black Panther.”“I was so fragile when I was writing it that I wanted to work only with a few people,” Adele said in her Vogue interview, citing Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” as a “very big reference.”And while the singer’s divorce helped to inspire the album, it is not the only subject, she said. “It was more me divorcing myself,” Adele explained, invoking “self-destruction,” “self-reflection” and “self-redemption.”In recent years, the singer has also taken to working out two or three times a day, leading to significant weight loss (“I realized that when I was working out, I didn’t have any anxiety”); hosted “Saturday Night Live” as a nonmusical guest; and entered into a relationship with LeBron James’s agent Rich Paul (“I know what I want”).“I’ve shed many layers but also wrapped myself in new ones,” Adele wrote in her statement on Wednesday, “discovered genuinely useful and wholesome mentalities to lead with, and I feel like I’ve finally found my feeling again. I’d go as far as to say I’ve never felt more peaceful in my life.” More

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      Paddy Moloney, Irish Piper Who Led the Chieftains, Dies at 83

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      The band he fronted for nearly 60 years toured the world, collaborated with rock stars and helped spark a renaissance for traditional Irish music.Paddy Moloney, the playful but disciplined frontman and bagpiper of the Chieftains, a band that was at the forefront of the worldwide revival of traditional Irish music played with traditional instruments, died on Monday in Dublin. He was 83.His daughter Aedin Moloney confirmed the death, at a hospital, but did not specify the cause.For nearly 60 years the Chieftains toured extensively, released more than two dozen albums and won six Grammy Awards. They were particularly known for their collaborations with artists like Van Morrison, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Nanci Griffith and Luciano Pavarotti.“Over the Sea to Skye,” the Chieftains’ collaboration with the flutist James Galway, peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard classical album chart in 1996.“Our music is centuries old, but it is very much a living thing,” Mr. Moloney told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1989. “We don’t use any flashing lights or smoke bombs or acrobats falling off the stage.” He added, “We try to communicate a party feeling, and that’s something that everybody understands.”In 2012, when he was vice president, President Biden told People magazine that his desire was to sing “Shenandoah” with the Chieftains “if I had any musical talent.” He invited them to perform at his inauguration this year, but Covid-related restrictions kept them from traveling.“Over the Sea to Skye,” the Chieftains’ collaboration with the flutist James Galway, peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard classical album chart in 1996.Mr. Moloney was a master of many instruments: He played the uileann pipes (the national bagpipes of Ireland), the tin whistle, the bodhran (a type of drum) and the button accordion. He was also the band’s lead composer and arranger.Asked in 2010 on the NPR quiz show “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me” what he thought was the sexiest instrument, he chose the pipes.“I often call it the octopus,” he said, “and so, I mean, that’s something that gets every part of you moving.”The Chieftains performed at the Great Wall of China, in Nashville and in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, joining with Roger Waters of Pink Floyd to play “The Wall.”Their best-known recordings included “Cotton Eyed Joe,” “O’Sullivan’s March,” “Bonaparte’s Retreat” and “Long Black Veil” (with Mr. Jagger). Their 1992 album “Another Country,” a collaboration with country artists like Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and Chet Atkins, won the Grammy for best contemporary folk album.Their other Grammys included one for best pop collaboration with vocals for “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?,” a collaboration with Mr. Morrison from their album “The Long Black Veil,” released in 1995, and one for best world album, for “Santiago” (1996), consisting of Spanish and Latin American music.Mr. Moloney had an affinity for country music.“I always considered Nashville like another part of Ireland, down to the south or something,” he said on the website of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in 2020. “When I’ve come over there and played with musical geniuses like Sam Bush or Jerry Douglas or Earl Scruggs, they pick everything up so easily. You don’t have to duck and dash.”The last track on “Another Country” — “Finale: Did You Ever Go A-Courtin’, Uncle Joe/Will the Circle Be Unbroken” — features Ms. Harris, Ricky Skaggs and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Rambles, a cultural arts magazine, described it as “the closest you will come to an Irish hooley on record,” a reference to an Irish party with music. The track, the magazine said, sounded like “a few pints were quaffed and the boxty bread was passed around before the assembled greats of music decided to have a musical free-for-all.”Mr. Moloney in 2012. That year, the 50th anniversary of their founding, the Chieftains embarked on a tour that ended on St. Patrick’s Day at Carnegie Hall.Greg Kahn for The New York TimesPatrick Moloney was born on Aug. 1, 1938, in Donnycarney, in northern Dublin. His father, John, worked in the accounting department of the Irish Glass Bottle Company. His mother, Catherine (Conroy) Moloney, was a homemaker.Paddy came from a musical family: One of his grandfathers played the flute, and his Uncle Stephen played in the Ballyfin Pipe Band. Paddy began playing a plastic tin whistle at 6 and began studying the uileann pipes shortly afterward, under the tutelage of man known as the “King of the Pipers.”He took to the pipes easily, gave his first public concert when he was 9 and performed on local streets.“There were five pipers around the Donnycarney area,” he told Ireland’s Own magazine in 2019. “I’d go around the cul-de-sac playing like the pied piper, and my pals would be following behind me.”After leaving school in the 1950s, he started working at Baxendale & Company, a building supplies company, where he met his future wife, Rita O’Reilly. He joined the traditional Irish band Ceoltóirí Chualann in 1960 and formed the Chieftains in 1962; the name came from the short story “Death of a Chieftain” by the Irish author John Montague.In the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Moloney was an executive of Claddagh Records, of which he was a founder, and produced or oversaw 45 albums in folk, traditional, classical, poetry and spoken word.The Chieftains — who hit it big in the mid-1970s with sold-out concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London — were strictly an instrumentalist ensemble at first. But in the 1980s the band pivoted from their early purism, and Mr. Moloney emerged as a composer, writing new music steeped in Irish tradition.The Chieftains began to blend Irish music with styles from the Celtic diaspora in Spain and Canada as well as bluegrass and country from the United States. They collaborated with well-known rock and pop musicians and with an international assortment of musicians as far-flung as Norway, Bulgaria and China.On his own, Mr. Moloney branched into writing and arranging music for films, including “Barry Lyndon” (1975), “Babe: Pig in the City” (1998) and “Gangs of New York” (2002).In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by two sons, Aonghus and Padraig; four grandchildren; and a sister, Sheila.In 2012, on the 50th anniversary of their founding, the Chieftains teamed up with 12 folk, country, bluegrass, rockabilly and indie rock artists — including Bon Iver, the Decembrists, the Low Anthem and Imelda May — to record the album “Voice of Ages.” They also embarked on a tour that ended at Carnegie Hall on St. Patrick’s Day.“What’s happening here with these young groups,” Mr. Moloney told The New York Times at the time, explaining the album’s concept, “is they’re coming back to the melody, back to the real stuff, the roots and the folk feeling of them all. I can hear any of them singing folk songs.” More

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      How Xenia Rubinos Freed Herself on a New Album, ‘Una Rosa’

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      On her third LP, the singer-songwriter brings her brassy vocals to a surreal, electronic universe.Xenia Rubinos stuck her head inside a white, doughnut-shaped couch, trying to get a better feel for the furniture’s globular shape. Earlier, she had plastered her face on an oblong, clear sculpture made out of plastic, smushing her right cheek up against the material.Navigating a museum devoted to the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi on a cloudless late September afternoon, Rubinos, a New York singer-songwriter, approached each sculpture with the same free-spirited curiosity as she does her own music. (You’re allowed to touch some, and Rubinos wasn’t shy about going all in.) When we arrived, she suggested we tour the space in reverse order. “I just like coming in and taking the gas out of all of the things,” she said with a chuckle. “I don’t know anything about it, I don’t have to,” she said of Noguchi’s sculptures. The art “activates me.”Over the past eight years, Rubinos’s own art has activated her listeners with its imaginative dissection of punk, R&B, jazz and hip-hop. Her first two albums, “Magic Trix” (2013) and “Black Terry Cat” (2016), artfully collaged genres and braided incisive lyrics about identity and police brutality, among other themes. The Puerto Rican-Cuban artist possesses a smoky wisp of a voice, and it holds all the experimentation together. Both releases established her as a promising figure in Brooklyn’s independent music landscape.Rubinos’s third album, “Una Rosa,” out Friday, arrives as a rich statement about finding creative freedom. “It’s a thick listen,” Rubinos said. “It was thick even for me as I was making it.” The album touches on heavy topics at a heavy moment: mourning, heartbreak, the pressures of capitalist productivity, the killing of Breonna Taylor. One moment Rubinos nimbly intones melodies from a José Martí poem through a dense glaze of Auto-Tune, the next she growls through gritted teeth over a gauzy lattice of synths.The emphasis on synths marks a turning point for Rubinos, who has always focused on eclecticism but emerged from a more formal jazz background: She studied jazz composition at the Berklee School of Music, but felt deeply alienated by the sexism and elitism of that scene. “I got there and I hated the way that I was objectified,” she said. “That just made me shut down and completely hide myself. I would wear baggy clothes all the time. I didn’t want to be sexualized at all, and I wanted to be taken seriously.”On “Una Rosa,” she releases herself. The vocal performances on tracks like “What Is This Voice” and “Don’t Put Me in Red” are deliciously fragile and imperfect, which Rubinos found refreshing after years of striving for perfection. “It was like, ‘Nothing to prove to anybody here, and we’re just doing music.’ This is what this song calls for. This is what this idea sounds like,” she said.Electronic music has intrigued Rubinos since she was a child. When she was 12, she recorded herself on a Casio keyboard and a karaoke machine. “I would hold the microphone up to it and I would program a little beat on the keyboard that had drum instruments,” she said. “I thought I was Blu Cantrell,” she added with a cackle.For “Una Rosa,” she was inspired by the Dominican experimentalist Kelman Duran, the Afro-Caribbean spiritualists Ìfé and the spiky electronics of the producer Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, who is of Indigenous descent. All of these artists, she said, have a singular capacity to borrow elements of pop music and place them in a surreal, electronic palette — a gap she had long yearned to close in her own music.The melody of the title track, an electronic reimagining of a Puerto Rican danzón by José Enrique Pedreira, returned to Rubinos in the early hours of a melancholy morning during the spring of 2019. She remembered the tune was from a color-changing fiber optic flower lamp her great-grandmother once owned, but it took her two years to identify it as a composition by Pedreira. That lamp served as the inspiration for the album artwork of “Una Rosa.”During the recording process, Rubinos said she became “obsessed” with traditional Cuban rumbas. She was especially enthralled by a snippet in the documentary “Las Cuatro Joyas del Ballet Cubano” (“The Four Jewels of Cuban Ballet”). Eventually, she traveled to Havana in search of its origin, and she spent time visiting the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, where a family friend is a dancer.Electronic music has intrigued Rubinos since she was a child.Tonje Thilesen for The New York Times“I would go to write for the record, and I would play clave for five hours not knowing what I was doing,” she said. “Sacude,” one of the album’s standouts, came to her in a flurry during that period: the syncopated insistence of a clave pulsates under the brassiness of Rubinos’s voice, a wall of synths shape shifting in the chorus. “Cuanto quisiera salir de esto ya/Si sigo este rumbo/Pronto me sorprende la muerte,” she sings in Spanish. “Oh, how I wish I could escape from this already/If I stay on this course/Soon, death will sneak up on me.”This is one of the album’s greatest gifts: its sense of high drama. Many moments on “Una Rosa” recall the narrative tension of a tragic film, like “Did My Best,” a chronicle about the sorrow of sudden loss peppered with the sound of exploding fireworks, closing doors and clicking car turn signals; or “Ay Hombre,” a bleeding-heart torch song that evokes the anguish of classic bolero singers. Rubinos refracts these sounds through an electronic prism, reshaping them as soundtracks for imagined romances and deaths in the 21st century.The album’s narrative urgency was born out of a period of turmoil for Rubinos, who said she felt drained after a long span of nonstop touring and performing. “When I came back from that, I was on empty and I didn’t feel like writing songs. I didn’t feel like listening to songs,” she said. “In my personal life I felt like [expletive].”She sought guidance from a curandero, a healer, who did a spiritual cleanse and diagnosed her with “pérdida de espíritu,” or “loss of spirit.” She also began working with a choreographer friend, trying to reconnect to her body through the pleasure of dance and improvisational movement.While all of these experiences played a part in “Una Rosa,” Rubinos said the album isn’t about a journey of healing. “I struggle with talking about the context of what happened to me going into this record, because the music itself is not about depression or about mental health,” she said. “Es difícil, a veces.” It’s difficult, sometimes, she explained in Spanish. “There always has to be a message or there always has to be this takeaway from every song,” she added. “And it’s hard for me, because it’s not so linear.” More