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      An Anthem About Hugging Your Friends Again, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Rostam, Marcellus Juvann, Gogo Penguin 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.Frank Turner, ‘The Gathering’Who better than Frank Turner, the punk-intense British folk singer, to underscore the imminent joy of reconnecting with others? Turner is barking on “The Gathering” — which casually features Dom Howard (from Muse, on drums) and an inquisitive guitar solo from Jason Isbell — and fully in pulpit mode: “I’ve been missing the feeling when we close up the gaps between us/It’s better than the best benediction, more bracing than blood lust.” Generally, this sort of earnestness can be wearying (even after a very wearying year-plus of isolation), but Turner succeeds because he sounds like he’s just stomped out of a stuffy meeting to go yell on a street corner, frantic with euphoria. JON CARAMANICALump, ‘Animal’In Lump, which releases an album called “Animal” in July, Laura Marling sets aside her virtuosic acoustic guitar to collaborate with Mike Lindsay, the electronics wizard from the folktronica group Tunng. For the album’s title song, she gives herself terse syllable counts — “All that you want/Is to be heard” — as Lindsay supplies steady pulses and blips. But midway through, the metronomic pulse breaks down and Marling leaves her deadpan monotone to wail, “I need more.” Then she submits once again to the digital grid. JON PARELESKhaira Arby, ‘Ferene’The Malian singer Khaira Arby, who died in 2018, was a clarion vocalist who led an incendiary band, fusing Malian modes and rhythms and combining traditional string instruments — the tehardant and ngoni — with a psychedelic electric-guitar attack. “New York Live,” a newly released recording from her first concert in North America, magnificently captures the spiraling energy of her concerts. Listen to the whole remarkable set, or jump in near the peak with “Ferene,” with its intricate cymbal cross-rhythms, its exultant call-and-response vocals and its bursts of fuzz-toned guitar frenzy. PARELESRostam, ‘From the Back of a Cab’Rostam, formerly of Vampire Weekend, zeros in on the awkward intimacy of a particular moment: the cab ride to the airport, a last bit of togetherness before a strictly defined parting. “I am happy you and I got this hour,” he croons, over a nervous six-beat rhythm and echoey piano chords and guitar tones; the relationship stays tentative, conditional. PARELESRodrigo Amarante, ‘Maré’“Maré” means tide, and in his new single, the Brazilian songwriter Rodrigo Amarante compares destiny to a tidal ebb and flow, singing with a tone of weary acceptance. His music has its own push and pull, with three-against-two rhythms and a tangle of instrumental lines — guitars, percussion, a nasal synthesizer, a horn section, some whistling — that interlock but sound like they might collide at any moment. It sounds charmingly ramshackle; it’s not. PARELESGogo Penguin featuring Cornelius, ‘Kora (Cornelius Remix)’Gogo Penguin looks like a jazz trio — piano, bass and drums — but its music also has plenty in common with the repetition, terse motifs and inexorable evolution of electronica. Its new album, “Gogo Penguin Remixes,” hands over tracks from the 2020 “Gogo Penguin” to electronica wizards like Squarepusher, Machinedrum, 808 State and, on “Kora,” the Japanese producer Cornelius. The original’s pecking, stop-start piano theme hints at the plucking of an African kora; Cornelius extrapolates the implied harmonies of that theme to build a sustained, whooshing, buzzing, superstructure, as if he’s unveiling the tune’s futuristic inner life. PARELESJoe Lovano and Dave Douglas, ‘Life on Earth’The saxophonist Joe Lovano and the trumpeter Dave Douglas recorded the tracks that would become “Other Worlds,” the new album from their quintet, Sound Prints, in January 2020, just weeks ahead of a global shutdown. Most of the tunes on the album were done in just one take, and the band’s natural comfort comes through here. On “Life on Earth,” a swiftly shuffling Douglas tune, the pianist Lawrence Fields plays less and less as the trumpeter’s solo develops, moving from a colorist’s role to that of a jagged percussion instrument. Lovano’s tenor saxophone solo brings a sluice of energy flooding back in, until Fields and the bassist Linda May Han Oh finish off the solo section with briefly suspenseful, dashing statements of their own. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOMarcellus Juvann, ‘Wrong’“Hardheaded,” the fascinating new self-produced EP from the Houston rapper Marcellus Juvann, is full of clever, quirky, urgent and oddball beats. They’re uniformly potent, and a strong match for Juvann’s rapping, which he delivers in a lightly croaky, lightly stumbling, lightly swinging voice that telegraphs confidence and disaffection all at once. CARAMANICATrippie Redd featuring Playboi Carti, ‘Miss the Rage’A fan edit of this track has been making the rounds on TikTok, but this version is different, with a new Playboi Carti verse. Trippie Redd remains underappreciated and committed to SoundCloud rap staccato, and Carti sticks with his mewling yelps, all over a beat that suggests a starship shifting into warp gear. CARAMANICAElohim and Big Freedia, ‘Strut’As if 21st-century life weren’t surveilled enough, the Los Angeles producer and songwriter Elohim has enlisted the New Orleans bounce icon Big Freedia to join her in saying that even a sidewalk is a runway, a place to perform and be judged. The beat is downright perky, even if the message is oppressive. Still, sometimes a sidewalk is just a sidewalk. PARELESCarlos Niño, ‘Ripples, Reflection, Loop’Ambient music is having a moment, fed partly by our urge for peace amid the anxiety of a pandemic, but also by a need for contact with the outside world — for physicality and touch. A lot of the quiet-seeking, time-stretching music that’s coming out from artists like Claire Rousay, Lea Bertucci and Ben Seretan isn’t primarily electronic; it lives up to the “ambient” designation more literally, ensconcing voices or instrumentals in the sounds of the outdoors. The Los Angeles-based percussionist and producer Carlos Niño’s new album, “More Energy Fields, Current,” places him and a small coterie of musician friends inside a wider environment, playing loops and gentle improvisations and long synthesizer chords. On “Ripples, Reflection, Loop,” he’s joined by the New Age pioneer Laraaji, the pianist Jamael Dean and the vocalist Sharada, who’s heard from what feels like a distance — and then startlingly, comfortingly up close. RUSSONELLO More

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      Chloe Moriondo and girl in red, Maestros of Growing Pains

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      Moriondo cited Marie Ulven (who records as girl in red) as an early influence. Both are releasing new albums that showcase frank emotions and more ambitious productions.Chloe Moriondo began posting YouTube videos in 2014, when she was 11 years old, part of the early waves of young people who built their musical identity on the platform, one bedroom-pop song at a time. She’d been growing up in public for years by August 2019, when she posted a video titled “a ramble about self identity, growth, and being a lesbian.”She was evolving, she said, and a lot of the old songs she’d sung (or even listened to) no longer felt quite right. Her tastes were changing, and her confidence was growing. A month later, she posted a cover of girl in red’s “Bad Idea,” and at the end of the performance, spoke about how influential girl in red’s music was becoming on her own songwriting.When the Norwegian teenager Marie Ulven began posting songs online as girl in red in 2016, she quickly attracted fervent attention for her ecstatically frank and utterly candid declarations of gay love, and quickly built a community for whom girl in red fandom was a safe space for identity expression.Ulven also provided a raw foundation that’s now being built upon, both by her acolytes and also herself, as is clear from two excellent new releases: “If I Could Make It Go Quiet,” the first full-length girl in red album, and “Blood Bunny,” Moriondo’s major label debut album.On the robust and vividly plain-spoken “Blood Bunny,” Moriondo, now 18, is a pop-punk whiz, deftly hopping between musical approaches from spare to lushly produced, and emphasizing intimate, cut-to-the-bone lyrics. Most songs are about relationships that don’t quite congeal, like “Manta Rays,” when she sings, “My therapist will tell me that it’s best to let it be/but I wanna light fires, I wanna explode/I want to be everything you want to know.”Moriondo writes with a winning bluntness, both about her own shortcomings and the objects of her obsession. “I wanna be with her all day/I’m a bitch to everyone else anyway,” she shrugs on the crystalline “Strawberry Blonde.” On the frisky, muscular “Take Your Time,” she bemoans her fate of being in thrall to someone who’s no longer around: “I wanna know/what will it take to make you let me go/You don’t fade like old stick and pokes.”Musically, Moriondo has absorbed several waves of punk praxis. On “I Want to Be With You,” she’s a maximalist, comfortable with jet-engine-intense production, and “Girl on TV” is keenly tuneful, verging on Avril Lavigne, or even Ashlee Simpson territory. But some songs on this album, like “Rly Don’t Care” and “Favorite Band,” are redolent of the earliest, and sparest, girl in red singles — direct production, and the simple joys of expressing oneself in first person, reveling in the emphatic, liberating power of the “I.”Moriondo is part of a microgeneration influenced by Ulven’s loud and uncomplicated transparency. (She had been scheduled to open for Ulven on tour last year before the pandemic.) Ulven is 22 now, and her emotional circumstances have become more complex. “If I Could Make It Go Quiet” finds her in the throes of romantic anxiety, singing about relationships that are buckling under the weight of her success. “If I ever make it back/Will I find what we once had?” she sings on “Hornylovesickmess. “Guess I ruined us pretty bad/So don’t ever take me back.”Ulven is also astute in capturing the pain of coming in runner-up for someone’s affections. “I can’t be your midnight love/When your silver is my gold,” she sings on “Midnight Love,” with vocals suggesting an unusually spooky Dusty Springfield.Early in her career, Ulven’s production was unfussy, but as she’s developed, her songs have become amplified. “Did You Come?” is rife with moaning feedback, and the lightly curdled “You Stupid Bitch” pulses with a wall of sound that nods to new wave.“If I Could Make It Go Quiet” was produced entirely with the Norwegian musician Matias Telléz, the only exception being “Serotonin,” which is also produced by Finneas, Billie Eilish’s brother and sonic architect. It’s a lush song that’s also risky, singing about a painful, chaotic internal tug of war:I getIntrusive thoughtsLike cutting my hands offLike jumping in front of a busLike how do I make this stopAnd yet Ulven’s vocals are rendered dreamily, almost inspirationally, over guitars that slash and throb in the manner of loud 1990s indie rock. Her boldness and defiance is taking on new shades — just like those she influenced, Ulven is growing up in public, too.girl in red“If I Could Make It Go Quiet”(AWAL)Chloe Moriondo“Blood Bunny”(Public Consumption Recording Co./Fueled by Ramen) More

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      We, Tina

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      Listen and follow Still ProcessingApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherShe’s simply the best. A new documentary on HBO (called, simply, “Tina”) explores Tina Turner’s tremendous triumphs, but we wanted to go deeper. We talk about how her entire career was an act of repossession: Taking back her name, her voice, her image, her vitality and her spirituality made her one of the biggest rock stars in the world, even in her 50s.Tina Turner at her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland, July 2019.Charlie Gates for The New York TimesOn Today’s EpisodeWesley’s ‘We, Tina’ playlistWesley compiled his all-time favorite Tina Turner tracks onto a playlist. Have a listen.◆ ◆ ◆The music icon’s life onscreenTina Turner in 1973, in a scene from the documentary “Tina.”Rhonda Graam/HBO, via Associated PressFor many, Jenna included, the movie “What’s Love Got to Do With It” (1993) has been their biggest reference point for Tina Turner up until this point. The biopic, which stars Angela Bassett as Turner, follows the artist’s life with her abusive first husband, Ike Turner.After watching “Tina” (2021), a documentary that recently dropped on HBO Max, Jenna realized how much of the singer’s narrative is missing from the 1993 film.“As incredible as that movie is, it’s not sufficient for her life story,” Jenna said. “It’s so painful to watch. It doesn’t lean enough into how much she shaped and changed music.”◆ ◆ ◆Her liberating live performances“Tina Turner is someone I regret never seeing live,” Jenna said. Her live performances were electric — like her 1988 concert in Rio de Janeiro. She was 48 at the time, on a tour that spanned over 200 dates. She was as fit and vibrant as ever, performing to a record-breaking crowd of over 180,000 people. Wesley remarked, “I mean, just to be one of those people screaming Tina Turner’s name. …”Hosted by: Jenna Wortham and Wesley MorrisProduced by: Elyssa Dudley and Mahima ChablaniEdited by: Sara Sarasohn and Sasha WeissEngineered by: Marion LozanoExecutive Producer, Shows: Wendy DorrExecutive Editor, Newsroom Audio: Lisa TobinAssistant Managing Editor: Sam DolnickSpecial thanks: Nora Keller, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani and Desiree IbekweWesley Morris is a critic at large. He was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his criticism while at The Boston Globe. He has also worked at Grantland, The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner. @wesley_morrisJenna Wortham is a staff writer for The Times Magazine and co-editor of the book “Black Futures” with Kimberly Drew. @jennydeluxe More

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      Second Time Lucky? Eurovision Hopefuls Try Again.

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      Eurovision acts are known for being one-hit wonders. Can this year’s contestants, most returnees from the canceled 2020 event, break the stereotype?LONDON — When the Eurovision Song Contest was canceled last March because of the coronavirus pandemic, Vasil Garvanliev, North Macedonia’s entry, was distraught.“My whole life, I’d been working my butt off to get there and my journey didn’t even take off,” Garvanliev, 36, said in a telephone interview. “I was devastated.”For Garvanliev — and the event’s hundreds of millions of fans — Eurovision is far more than a glitzy, high-camp song contest. “It’s the Olympics of singing,” Garvanliev said.Last March he sat on his bed feeling depressed, he remembered, before picking up a keyboard to try to console himself. He started picking out a gentle melody on the instrument, then lyrics popped into his head. “Wait, it won’t be long,” he sung, “trust your heart and just stay strong.”“This song came out of me,” Garvanliev said, “and I thought, ‘Holy smokes, I have something beautiful here.’” Of course, “I didn’t know it’d end up being for this year’s Eurovision,” Garvanliev added. “I didn’t even know I’d be asked back.”For Eurovision 2021, the arena will be at 20 percent capacity, and no dancing will be allowed. Pool photo by Niels WenstedtBut in January, after an eight-month-long agonizing wait, Garvanliev was invited to perform at this year’s competition — one of 26 returning acts from Eurovision 2020. Scheduled for May 22 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2021 is likely to be the strangest edition of the contest ever held — a high bar, given past winners have included Abba and Lordi, a Finnish heavy metal act whose members dress as monsters.The arena will be at 20 percent capacity, with just 3,500 people in the audience cheering the contestants on, while remaining seated to lessen the risk of coronavirus spreading. The event is officially part of a series of Dutch government trials to see how to run large events in a safe way. The contestants will all have made prerecorded versions of their songs in case they catch Covid-19 and are unable to perform.But perhaps the most unusual aspect is that all the returning contestants will be performing a different song from the one they had planned for the 2020 event. In a competition known for one-hit wonders, who disappear from view almost as soon as the contest ends, this year’s contestants have to prove they don’t fit that pattern.“This is our difficult second album,” Garvanliev said, referring to the phenomena of bands struggling to match their early success. He hoped his 2021 song “Here I Stand” wouldn’t fall into that trap.The entrant facing the biggest challenge in capturing last year’s magic is Dadi Freyr, Iceland’s act, with his band Gagnamagnid. Last year, Freyr was the favorite to win thanks to his song “Think About Things,” a catchy disco number about his newborn child.By the time Eurovision was canceled, the song’s video had been watched millions of times on YouTube. Soon, it was going viral on Twitter and TikTok too, after families started performing variations of the video’s dance routine while stuck at home in lockdown.“It changed my life, that song,” Freyr said in a video interview. Before the pandemic, Freyr generally only got booked for shows in Iceland, he said. Suddenly he was selling out tours across Europe.“I’ve probably had one of the best pandemics,” Freyr said.Freyr’s entry this year is another catchy disco track called “10 Years,” this time about his marriage (“How does it keep getting better?” he sings in the chorus). He felt he had to keep the track similar in style to “Think About Things,” since Icelanders had voted for a fun disco tune to represent them at the competition, he said. It still took 12 attempts to come up with a new song he liked, he added.The track’s so far not gone viral, but Freyr said that didn’t bother him. “I didn’t go to try and recreate the success, because I know it’s impossible to predict something like that,” he said. “Luck has to be part of it.”Four other Eurovision returnees said in interviews that they found the pandemic to be the biggest hurdle to writing a new hit. “For the first three or four months of the pandemic, I just didn’t do any writing at all,” said Jessica Alyssa Cerro, Australia’s entry, who performs as Montaigne.“I sort of got to November and was like, ‘Hmm, I should probably start working on that Eurovision song, huh?’” she added.Jeangu Macrooy, the Netherlands’ entry, said in a telephone interview that he similarly struggled. “I was getting no inspiration — I was just sitting inside,” he said.Then, in December when he was trying to write entries for the contest, a host of thoughts and feelings around George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement started bubbling up inside him.Soon he had conjured the lyrics to “Birth of a New Age,” an uplifting track about being “the rage that melts the chains.” Macrooy said he hoped it would speak to everyone standing up for their rights now, whether people of color, L.G.B.T.Q. people or the otherwise marginalized. The chorus of “You can’t break me” is sung in Sranan Tongo, the lingua franca of his native Suriname in South America.“It’s an ode to people claiming their space and saying, ‘I deserve respect and deserve to be accepted for who I am,’” Macrooy said. “I couldn’t have written it if I hadn’t lived through 2020,” he added.He’d recently been dreaming of people dancing to the track, he said, “so if that doesn’t happen at Eurovision, it’ll be awkward.” (The event’s current coronavirus safety rules prevent dancing.)For Montaigne, such dreams are now a thing of the past. She recently found out she would not be traveling to the Netherlands to compete, after Australian officials decided her attendance was too much of a coronavirus risk. Instead, Eurovision fans will have to watch the backup performance of “Technicolour,” which she recorded in March.Montaigne said she was fine with the decision, especially because she knew the pandemic was far from over in the Netherlands, with thousands of new cases of coronavirus currently being reported every day. “It would have been so bad if I was the person who brought coronavirus back to Australia, where we’re sitting in stadiums, having a good time dancing and touching each other,” she said.Even without attending, she still has a story to “tell my grandkids about,” she said. She’s the only Eurovision contestant ever to have missed the event twice because of a pandemic. More

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      Johnny Crawford, a Western Hero’s Son on ‘The Rifleman,’ Dies at 75

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      For five TV seasons he was at the side of Chuck Connors’s widowed sharpshooter. He also had some success as a pop singer, film actor and bandleader.Johnny Crawford in 1997 with a photo of himself as a boy and Chuck Connors, who played his father on the TV show “The Rifleman.” As a teenager, Mr. Crawford received piles of fan mail.Steve KaganJohnny Crawford, the soulful young actor who became a child star on the western “The Rifleman” in the late 1950s and had some success as a pop singer, died on April 29 in Los Angeles. He was 75.The death, at an assisted-living home, was announced on the website johnnycrawfordlegacy.com by his wife, Charlotte McKenna-Crawford. It was revealed in 2019 that he had Alzheimer’s disease, and he had been in failing health since his hospitalization last year with Covid-19 and pneumonia.“The Rifleman,” which ran from 1958 to 1963, was a low-key half-hour series on ABC about Luke McCain (Chuck Connors), a widowed Civil War veteran and sharpshooter raising his son on their ranch in the New Mexico territory. The boy, Mark, was always identifiable by his Stetson hat and always had an intense expression — usually one of earnest concern or unabashed hero worship. When he asked his father why people are cruel to others who look or dress differently from them, his father explained simply: It’s fear.John Ernest Crawford was born on March 26, 1946, in Los Angeles, the son of Robert Lawrence Crawford Sr., a film editor, and Betty (Megerlin) Crawford, a concert pianist. His maternal grandfather was Alfred Eugene Megerlin, the Belgian violinist who became concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.On Emmy Awards night in 1959, three contemporary Crawfords were nominees: Johnny, 13, for “The Rifleman”; his older brother, Robert Jr., for a role as a child in wartime Europe on “Playhouse 90”; and their father for editing the comedy series “The Bob Cummings Show.”Decades later, Mr. Crawford liked to tell interviewers that he was “a has-been at 9.”He’d been on television twice — singing on “The Pinky Lee Show” and “The Steve Allen Show” — when he was hired in 1955 as one of the original 24 Mouseketeers on Walt Disney’s “The Mickey Mouse Club.” The Mouseketeers, perky children in matching white mock-turtle short-sleeve shirts, sang, danced, appeared in serials like “Spin and Marty” and opened and closed the show with a paean to M-i-c-k-e-y M-o-u-s-e. But after one season, producers decided to feature only 12 Mouseketeers, and Johnny was cut.“The Rifleman” came along two years later.Johnny was 17 and receiving piles of fan mail when the series ended. He became something of a teenage pop-music idol as well, with four Top 40 hits. The most successful, “Cindy’s Birthday,” reached No. 8 on the Billboard pop singles chart in 1962.Between the 1960s and the ’80s Mr. Crawford made more than a half-dozen feature films, including the western “El Dorado” (1966), starring John Wayne, and appeared in other television westerns. He spent two years in the Army, appeared at rodeos (the “Rifleman” crew had taught him rope tricks) and began doing live theater across the country.“I think I’m most happy when I’m doing a play somewhere and having the opportunity of doing the same play over and over again and getting to really develop the character,” he told TV Collector magazine in 1982, after he had finished a run in “I Love My Wife” in Canada.But he found an even more satisfying career later in life. He had loved early-20th-century popular music since childhood and was reminded of that when his friend Hugh Hefner — who had been an executive producer of “The Naked Ape,” a 1973 film starring Mr. Crawford and Victoria Principal — played a Bing Crosby album for him.In 1992 he formed the Johnny Crawford Dance Orchestra. Sometimes wearing top hat and tails, he conducted the band and sang, period style in a high baritone, hits of the 1920s and ’30s like “After You’re Gone” and “Happy Feet.”Mr. Crawford and Charlotte Samco McKenna, who were high school sweethearts in the 1960s, reconnected years later and married in 1995. In addition to his wife, his survivors include his brother Robert; a sister, Nance Crawford; and two stepdaughters, Brenda Westenhaver and Jamie Pierce.Mr. Crawford’s final screen appearance was in “Bill Tilghman and the Outlaws” (2019), also known as “The Marshal.” But, as he told The Wall Street Journal in 2000, he considered his orchestra “the best acting assignment” he’d ever had.“These songs have wonderful dialogue,” he said. “It’s like getting to do Shakespeare.” More

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      From Claire Rousay, Field Recordings for a Modern World

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      With her new album, the emo ambient musician has learned to embrace everyday pleasures.One spring evening, the San Antonio-based experimental musician Claire Rousay was in the driver’s seat of her parked car, smoking cigarettes and sipping a well-concealed beverage, when she picked up the Zoom H5 field recorder that is never far from her reach. “I track my whole day every day,” Rousay says. “If I’m home, I’ll have a pair of stereo microphones in my living room, and a field recorder in my bedroom. I’ll probably have 18 hours of field recordings … I basically record my whole life.”She turns these found sounds into musique concrète that locates grains of emotion in the mundane — a car door slamming, a lighter igniting, the plink of an Apple keyboard mid-text. What a songwriter might convey in poetry, Rousay evokes with raw audio. You could call it sound art, but it’s viscerally vulnerable. More appropriately to Rousay — who declines to confirm her exact age but identifies as “a millennial sun, zoomer rising” — her work has been tagged as “emo ambient.”Last fall, Rousay released the 20-minute composition “It Was Always Worth It,” for which she spun the contents of real love letters she’d received over a six-year relationship through a robotic text-to-voice program. In a year widely lacking in new, intimate conversations of the unguarded 3 a.m. caliber, it was a heartbreaking revelation. In a world of endless distraction, Rousay’s is an art of paying attention. Her immersive new album, “A Softer Focus,” is her first to draw in melody and harmony (“the pleasure of making music,” as it’s been called), and though she’s posted 22 releases to Bandcamp since 2019, it feels like an arrival.In her art as in her life, Rousay seems intent on breaking through the perceived super-seriousness that her work might portend. She calls karaoke “an intimate soul endeavor” (her go-tos are Taking Back Sunday and Lil Peep) and lights up when discussing, with equal reverence, the composer Pauline Oliveros’s book “Deep Listening” (2005) or her longtime favorite band, Bright Eyes. “Being a real person is what I care about most,” Rousay says. “Being present and open.” Evidence of this abiding commitment to honesty can be found in last spring’s “Im Not a Bad Person But …,” another text-to-voice piece that ends on a bold admission: “I think Avril Lavigne’s album ‘Let Go’ is better than Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps.’”Building on her unconventional style, Rousay produced “A Softer Focus” as an equal collaboration with the San Antonio artist Dani Toral. The pair met in middle school there — after Toral had relocated from Mexico City, and Rousay from Canada — but were soon in constant motion, with various tours and residencies, until the pandemic forced them to stay put. In addition to the floral cover art, Toral made a video, took photos, designed a T-shirt, named the record and several songs and created 30 ceramic whistles to accompany the release. The common thread, Toral said, is a “glowy” sense of comfort. The whistles, inspired by Mexican folk art and a 2006 book about the history of ceramic instruments called “From Mud to Music,” were an especially fitting addition. “I love clay because it holds a lot of memory,” Toral says. “It holds every touch that you put into it.”Rousay’s pieces function similarly, and for “A Softer Focus” she even recorded Toral in her backyard ceramics studio sculpting one of the whistles, playing it and reflecting on the process — putting their conversation into the music. On the album, that snatch of dialogue also finds Rousay and Toral contemplating the stresses of Instagram for visual artists — the anxiety of being expected to post not just your work but your life. “It was us smoking joints and talking,” Rousay says, “and I think the recording is like six joints deep.” It’s a detail that speaks to the whole project’s ethos of presence and growth: Toral had never made digital art before and, as Rousay puts it, “I had never really made a listenable record. The only thing that was familiar was the feeling of being in the zone. We were learning together.”Rousay records the minutiae of her life to magnify the joy of simple moments.Liz MoskowitzThe artist Dani Toral made ceramic whistles, inspired by Mexican folk art, to accompany Rousay’s new album.Liz MoskowitzROUSAY GREW UP in a strict evangelical Christian household in Winnipeg, Manitoba — secular music was forbidden — and was 10 when her family moved to San Antonio. She drummed during church services before untethering herself from Christianity and searching for meaning around her instead. After dropping out of high school at 15, she toured with an indie rock band and, after discovering jazz, turned to free improvisation. She traveled as a solo percussionist, doing 200 gigs in 2017 alone.The awe-inspiring swarm of “A Softer Focus” can feel like an amalgam of this all. On the highlight track “Peak Chroma” — named by Toral to evoke “the highest saturation of a color” — Rousay adds a pitch-shifted vocal line about listening to “the newest Blackbear song,” a reference to the Florida emo rapper and Justin Bieber co-writer Matthew Tyler Musto. It’s a conscious nod to a realm of contemporary pop that Rousay finds “infinitely more experimental” than many artists would allow. “I don’t want to be pigeon-holed,” she says. “Experimental music is so limited as it is. There are so many fake rules that the whole thing is not really that experimental anymore. What can I do to change that?”It was around the time that she embraced emo ambient as a descriptor that she decided to stop avoiding her unique confluence of interests. “I couldn’t do it anymore, just being like, ‘Oh, yeah, I really love Stockhausen’ — are you kidding me?” she jokes. “I don’t know how you can go through life being so selective about parts of your personality.” Ultimately, though — and in another nod to Oliveros — Rousay says her greatest influences are likely in the sounds of her own environment.“Sitting on the back porch, listening to the sounds of my backyard — that’s what should matter,” Rousay says. “But if I listen to Fall Out Boy every Friday night after 11 p.m. when I’m blackout drunk, that’s the way it is. Some people have the cicadas in their backyard. And some people have Fall Out Boy.”Rousay has both. And this duality of an almost meditative stillness and earnest emotion runs through “A Softer Focus,” as well as “It Was Always Worth It.” “I know things have been rough lately,” a dispassionate automated voice announces on the latter, “but I want to remind you that I love you, and I’m working hard to be with you. You’ve got a great heart. You are so loved. Even if you weren’t, all you’d have to remember is to love yourself above everything else. That’s the most important love you can experience.”I ask Rousay when she began to feel that self-love was the most important kind. She says it was two years ago, when she came out as trans. “I have a really strenuous relationship with my immediate family,” she says. But she speaks with conviction about where she does find contentment: “Enjoying simple pleasures is a huge part of my work,” she continues. “I love lying in my backyard and having a picnic with me, myself and I. It’s so fun to make a cute meal for yourself and get the sun on your face. I don’t understand why that’s always left out of things.” Capturing the delicate rustle of these small moments is Rousay’s way of magnifying the inherent joy in them.Recently, Rousay took a walk along the San Antonio River with her dog, Banana. She had brought her recording gear — headphones, a couple of mics — and at some point, she and Banana sat down for a drink of water. In the audio, there’s the sound of the river, the jingle of Banana’s collar, birdsong and the hum of traffic in the distance. There are also traces of Rousay texting, sniffling, taking deep breaths. “I’m crying because I’m so invested in that moment,” she says. “To have a dog that loves me, to be able-bodied and walking in a park when the weather’s perfect, to own a field-recording device that I was too poor to own for a while … ”“There were so many points in my life where I would not have been satisfied by simple pleasures,” Rousay says. “But sitting with headphones on, listening to what the microphone’s picking up — that’s the closest to any kind of internal peace I’ve ever experienced. Even if I’m recording essentially nothing. Because I’m in the moment. When you slow down and actually think about what’s happening — it’s beautiful.” More

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      Billie Eilish’s Portrait of Power Abuse, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Willow featuring Travis Barker, girl in red, DJ Khaled featuring Cardi B, 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.Billie Eilish, ‘Your Power’Cozy, pristine, Laurel Canyon-style acoustic guitars accompany Billie Eilish as she whisper-sings “Try not to abuse your power.” Then she proceeds to sketch a creepy, controlling, exploitative and possibly illegal relationship. The quietly damning accusations pile up: “You said she thought she was your age/How dare you?” Meanwhile, in the video that she directed, an anaconda slowly tightens around her. JON PARELESWillow featuring Travis Barker, ‘Transparentsoul’The return of Willow — daughter of Will and Jada — is brisk, breezy pop-punk throbbing with a very particular sort of famous-child agonizing. She lashes out at deceptive former friends (and maybe some current ones, too) who “smile in my face then put your cig out on my back.” JON CARAMANICAgirl in red, ‘Serotonin’Whatever slams, girl in red — the Norwegian songwriter Marie Ulven — can use it. In “Serotonin,” from her new album “If I Could Make It Go Quiet,” she sings about trying to stabilize her wildly whipsawing, self-destructive emotions with therapy and medications: “Can’t hide from the corners of my mind/I’m terrified of what’s inside,” she announces. The music veers from punk-pop guitars to EDM crescendos and bass drops, from distorted rapping to ringing choruses, only to crumble as it ends. PARELESDJ Khaled featuring Cardi B, ‘Big Paper’It is perhaps the strongest testament to the A&R savvy of DJ Khaled that on an album filled with glossy cameos from Megan Thee Stallion and Lil Baby, and contemplative elder moments from Nas and Jay-Z, he opts to include the endlessly charismatic and exceedingly famous Cardi B on “Big Paper,” a song that sounds like she’s rapping on an old D.I.T.C. beat. It’s relentless, sharp-tongued and slick: “House with the palm trees for all the times I was shaded.” CARAMANICAQ, ‘If You Care’The power of “If You Care” isn’t in the conventional come-on of lyrics like “If you care you’ll come a little closer.” It’s in the persistent rhythmic displacement, top to bottom: the way beat, bass line, vocals and rhythm guitar each suggest a different downbeat, enforcing disorientation from the bottom up. They only align when the vocals turn to rapping at the end; it had to finish somewhere. PARELESPriscilla Block, ‘Sad Girls Do Sad Things’If you didn’t know better, you’d think the young country singer Priscilla Block was perennially gloomy, the sum of one bad decision after the next. That’s the mood on her impressive debut EP, which is sturdy, shamelessly pop-minded and full of songs about regret like “Sad Girls Do Sad Things”:Don’t get me wrong, I love a beer on a FridayBut lately I’ve been at the bar more than my placeAnother round of shutting it downTwo-for-ones ’til too far goneBlock has a crisp and expressive voice, and she telegraphs anguish well. But this EP skips over the rowdy cheer and randy winks of her breakthrough single, “Thick Thighs.” Which is to say, there’s more to Block’s story than heartbreak. CARAMANICABrye, ‘I’d Rather Be Alone’The teenage pop songwriter and producer Brye Sebring lilts through the wreckage of an overlong relationship in “I’d Rather Be Alone.” Everything is crisp: her diction, her rhymes and the pinging syncopations of an arrangement that builds from single keyboard tones through percussion and handclaps to teasing back-and-forth harmonies. “I doubt you’ll even bother listening to this song,” she notes, one more good reason to break free. PARELESHalf Waif, ‘Swimmer’The drama never stops building in “Swimmer,” from the coming album “Mythopoetics” by Half Waif: the electronics-driven songwriter Nandi Rose Plunkett. It’s a song about everlasting love — “they can’t take this away from me,” she vows — that evolves from an anxious rhythmic pulse to a chordal anthem, all larger than life. PARELESChristian McBride, ‘Brouhaha’The eminent bassist Christian McBride has just released “The Q Sessions,” a three-song collection that he recorded in high-definition for Qobuz, an audiophile streaming platform. The EP features three top-flight improvising musicians who, like McBride, tend to play their instruments in hi-def already: the saxophonist Marcus Strickland, the guitarist Mike Stern and the drummer Eric Harland. The group chases McBride’s syncopated bass line through the ever-shifting funk of “Brouhaha,” which he clearly wrote with Stern — and his roots on the frisky 1980s fusion scene — in mind. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOJen Shyu and Jade Tongue, ‘Living’s a Gift — Part 2: Everything for Granted’The singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Jen Shyu draws on jazz, Asian music and much more. Her new album, “Zero Grasses: Ritual for the Losses,” reflects on loss, memory and perseverance. It opens with “Living’s a Gift,” a suite of songs using lyrics written by middle schoolers during the pandemic: “We’ve lost our minds, lost our time to shine.” The music is ingenious and resilient; leading her jazzy quintet, Jade Tongue, Shyu multitracks her voice into a frisky, intricately contrapuntal choir, folding together angular phrases as neatly as origami. PARELESBurial, ‘Space Cadet’The elusive English electronic producer Burial has re-emerged yet again, splitting a four-track EP, “Shock Power of Love,” with the producer Blackdown. “Space Cadet” hints at post-pandemic optimism — a brisk club beat, arpeggiators pumping out major chords, voices urging “take me higher” — but Burial shrouds it all in static and echoey murk, letting the beat collapse repeatedly, until the track falls back into emptiness. PARELESSofía Rei, ‘La Otra’As she prepared to make her forthcoming album, “Umbral,” Sofía Rei embarked upon a trek through Chile’s mountainous Elqui Province. She brought a charango and two backpacks full of recording gear; on the trip, she recorded herself playing and singing, as well as the babbling sounds of the natural world around her. The album begins with “La Otra,” out Friday as a single, on which Rei sets a poem by the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral to music. Flutes flutter over ricocheting synth bass, a stop-and-start beat and strummed charango, as Rei’s overdubbed voice harmonizes with itself in fierce exclamations, lapping at the sky like a flame. RUSSONELLO More

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      Britney Spears Asks to Address Court Overseeing Her Conservatorship

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      A lawyer for the singer told the judge presiding in her case that Spears was seeking to speak to the court on an “expedited basis.”Britney Spears has something to say.After years of relative silence regarding the court-approved conservatorship that has controlled much of her life since 2008, a lawyer for the pop singer requested on Tuesday that Spears be allowed to speak at a hearing soon.“The conservatee has requested that I seek from the court a status hearing at which she can address the court directly,” Samuel D. Ingham III, the court-appointed lawyer who represents Spears in her conservatorship, asked the judge overseeing the case. He proposed that the hearing be scheduled on an “expedited basis,” preferably within 30 days.The judge, Brenda Penny, agreed, and she set the hearing regarding the status of the conservatorship for June 23. An additional hearing in the case was scheduled for July.The request on behalf of Spears came during a remote virtual meeting in the case that mostly amounted to housekeeping between lawyers. But the possibility that the typically shrouded pop star would address the court represented a shift for Spears, who has rarely commented on the case for more than a decade.It would mark the first time Spears has done so in court since seeking substantial changes to the conservatorship, including the removal of her father, Jamie Spears, from what had been a leading role in the arrangement.For years, fans and observers have questioned why the singer was in a conservatorship, sometimes known as a guardianship, at all, with some arguing that she was being held against her will or taken advantage of. Conservatorships are typically reserved for the very ill, old or infirm, but Spears continued to perform and bring in millions of dollars.Conversation around Spears’s situation — fueled in part by the fans calling themselves the #FreeBritney movement — picked up earlier this year following the release of “Framing Britney Spears,” a TV documentary by The New York Times.Spears has been in a conservatorship for 13 years, following a prolonged public breakdown that required multiple hospitalizations. Her exact medical diagnosis is not known.Outside of the courtroom, Spears has referred only obliquely to her legal situation, assuring fans concerned about her well-being that she was “totally fine.”“I’m extremely happy, I have a beautiful home, beautiful children,” Spears said on Instagram this month. “I’m taking a break right now because I’m enjoying myself.”Things have been more contentious in court filings, where Ingham has said that Spears was “strongly opposed” to her father returning as her personal conservator.Jamie Spears currently serves as a co-conservator of his daughter’s estate, helping to oversee her finances alongside Bessemer Trust, a corporate fiduciary. Previously, Jamie had also served as Britney’s personal conservator, helping to arrange her medical and mental health care, security and more. He stepped down from that role in September 2019, citing health problems.The singer had requested that Jodi Montgomery, a licensed professional conservator, remain in the role that she has held temporarily since 2019. Ingham has said that Spears was “afraid of her father,” and would not perform if he remained in charge.Spears’s mother, Lynne, has also raised questions regarding $890,000 in legal fees for Jamie Spears, which her lawyers have called “procedurally improper” and “utterly excessive.” (Lawyers for Jamie Spears responded: “She has not been involved in her daughter’s conservatorship until very recently, and she is now raising objections to fees related to matters that she has no knowledge of.”)Vivian Lee Thoreen, a lawyer for Jamie Spears, has said that the singer’s father “diligently and professionally carried out his duties,” and that his daughter’s safety was his top priority.Jamie Spears “would love nothing more than to see Britney not need a conservatorship,” Thoreen said in March.“Whether or not there is an end to the conservatorship really depends on Britney,” she added. “If she wants to end her conservatorship, she can file a petition to end it.”Louis Keene and Samantha Stark contributed reporting. More