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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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      A Rapper, Hitting His 30s, Reinvents Himself as a Scion of Spanish Pop

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      C. Tangana was a provocative star of trap music. Now, his songs are played in supermarkets and praised by 50- and 60-somethings on YouTube.LONDON — C. Tangana, one of Spain’s biggest rap stars, two years ago hit “a little bit of a crisis.”He was riding a wave of fame, known for provocative songs and equally provocative interviews. But he was fast approaching his 30s, he said in a recent Zoom interview, and risked becoming one of those “cringe-y, embarrassing” rappers who act a decade younger than they are.So C. Tangana — real name Antón Álvarez Alfaro — did a U-turn and decided to try his hand at other styles of music that he had loved since childhood, like flamenco and rumba, even Spanish folk.“I was opening a window I’d kept closed,” he said, adding, “I assumed it would go wrong.”Álvarez’s experiment appears to have paid off. In February, he released “El Madrileño,” an album that mixes traditional Spanish and Latin American styles, including rock, with electronic sounds and beats more familiar to his trap and reggaeton fans. It’s turned him from Spain’s biggest rapper into one of its biggest pop stars.One of the album’s early tracks, “Tú Me Dejaste De Querer” (“You Stopped Loving Me”), has over 100 million views on YouTube.“You can listen to his music anytime, in any shop” Pablo Gil, a music journalist at El Mundo, a Spanish daily newspaper, said in a telephone interview.Some of the musical styles it features were last popular in Spain in the 1970s, when the country was under Franco’s dictatorship, Gil added. Álvarez, he said, was taking old-fashioned sounds, “subverting their meaning and making them modern.”In a review for the newspaper El País, the music critic Carlos Marcos wrote, “It remains to be seen whether this is the birth of a new Spanish pop, or something that we will forget in a few years.”“But who cares?” he added. “Let’s enjoy it today, and we’ll see tomorrow.”On YouTube, C. Tangana’s videos now attract comments from older music fans who would presumably never have gone near his records before. “I thought the music my son listened to was for landfill,” wrote Felix Guinnot, who said he was in his 50s, “but this boy is changing my musical perception.”On the set for the music video of “Tú Me Dejaste De Querer” (“You Stopped Loving Me”).Javier RuizÁlvarez’s road to fame has been winding, with multiple changes of name to reflect new musical personas. Born in Madrid, he started rapping in his teens, he said, but twice gave up on music entirely. When the 2008 global financial crisis hit Spain particularly hard — its lingering effects are still felt by the country’s youth — he stopped rapping to work in a fast-food restaurant. Later, he got a job in a call center selling cellphones.He started rapping again after falling in love with a colleague. It was a toxic relationship, Álvarez said, but it inspired him to get back into the studio. “I said, ‘It must be possible for me to make money doing this rather than selling phones or cleaning,’” he recalled. “It changed my whole mentality. I started to think I had to sell myself. I started to do things to get attention.”In 2017, Álvarez had his first major hit with “Mala Mujer,” a track about his longing for a “bad woman” whose “gel nails have left scars all over my body.” But he was soon known more for his relationship with Rosalía, a Spanish pop star (he co-wrote much of “El Mal Querer,” or “Bad Love,” her breakthrough album, although they have since broken up) and for getting into political controversies.Álvarez with the team filming a video for the song “Comerte Entera.” “You can listen to his music anytime, in any shop,” one music journalist said.Javier RuizÁlvarez used a derogatory term to refer to King Felipe VI at a 2018 news conference after being asked about the fate of another rapper who had been given a jail term for insulting the royal family. He also described the monarchy as “a robbery” and called for an end to “representative democracy,” arguing that it prevented the public from being directly involved in important decisions.The next year, the northern Spanish city of Bilbao threw C. Tangana off a concert lineup, saying that his lyrics were degrading to women.More recently, he called for people to reclaim Spain’s flag from fascists, a potentially contentious endorsement in a country where some associate it with Franco’s dictatorship.Ana Iris Simón, a music journalist and author who has written about the reaction to “El Madrileño,” praised Álvarez’s outspoken nature. “He’s not afraid of getting involved or giving his opinion,” she said in an email.Some critics still accuse him of being overly macho, Simón said. They point out that only one of the new album’s 15 guests is a woman (La Húngara, a flamenco singer). But Simón said those comments were out of touch with how Spaniards viewed him. “Public opinion and published opinion have never been as far apart as they are now,” she noted.Álvarez’s with the director Santos Bacana in Cuba, where they recorded a song with the guitarist Eliades Ochoa.Javier RuizThe new album also plays to Spain’s class divides, Simón said. It involves artists and musical styles “reviled by the cool cultural scene for years for being music typical of the common people,” she said. Álvarez uses those styles without irony, Iris added, instead embracing them as would an heir.Álvarez said his choice of collaborators — who include the Gypsy Kings, the flamenco band that was hugely popular in the 1980s; Ed Maverick, a “Mexican folk romantic”; and Jorge Drexler, a Uruguayan singer-songwriter — was driven by his love of artists who’ve taken their own distinct musical paths. But he also hoped the collaborations with Latin American musicians might change some Spaniards’ view of the region.“In Spain, we have this problem that a lot of people still have this colonial mentality,” Álvarez said. “They think that our culture is better than their culture, and that’s so stupid.”During the interview, Álvarez said he was overjoyed that his experiment had paid off. He talked a lot about the joy of being seen as a good songwriter. But he seemed happiest when asked about the album’s impact on one specific person. His mother had “always been super proud” of him, he said, “but now she can sing my songs.”Comments on his YouTube tracks suggest that is mother is not the only member of another generation doing that. Antonio Remacha, in Madrid, wrote a long message beneath one track saying that his daughter had forced him to listen to the record against his better judgment, but that he had loved it.“I have to admit that at 62 years of age, he’s managed to impress me,” Remacha wrote of Álvarez, before politely and formally signing off: “Congratulations and all of my praise.” More

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      Itchy to Perform Again, Musicians Eye Return to Touring

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      For now, there may be just a trickle of events (a Dinosaur Jr. tour, the lineup for Bonnaroo in September), but many artists are said to be planning live announcements soon.Like many musicians, J Mascis, the leader of the stalwart alt-rock band Dinosaur Jr., has struggled through a year without touring.“I’ve never been home this long since, like, high school,” Mascis said in a phone interview from his home in western Massachusetts. “To have no idea when or if you can do anything again, just sitting around,” he added, trailing off. “My mental health has definitely suffered.”But a few weeks ago, Dinosaur Jr. took a step toward normalcy by announcing an extensive fall tour, with a handful of warm-up dates booked for as early as May.“We’re not naïve; we know we might have to reschedule,” Mascis said. “But just to have something on the books somehow makes things a bit more hopeful.”After a grueling year, blocked from what is often their most vital income stream, musicians are impatient to get back on the road, and fans are eager to experience live music again. While large-scale shows at arenas and stadiums may not come back full-throttle until 2022, promoters and talent agents, encouraged by the speed of vaccinations, have begun laying the groundwork for what may be a surprisingly busy summer and fall of concerts at clubs, theaters and outdoor spaces.Rhett Miller performing at the City Winery in Manhattan in 2019. He is set to play there again this weekend.Al Pereira/WireImage, via Getty ImagesCity Winery moved its tables in accordance with New York State’s rule that will allow entertainment venues to reopen with limited capacity starting Friday.Emon Hassan for The New York TimesFor now, there may be just a trickle of events. Starting Friday, New York State will allow entertainment venues to reopen at 33 percent of their regular capacity, up to 100 people for indoor spaces. Throughout the country, rules from local governments have kept many clubs and theaters closed, or allowed them to operate at reduced capacities — which for many of those places does not allow enough business to cover the basic costs of operating and of paying artists and employees, said Audrey Fix Schaefer of the 9:30 Club in Washington.“The only thing worse than being totally shuttered is being partially reopened,” said Fix Schaefer, who is also the communications director for the National Independent Venue Association.But many artists are said to be planning tour announcements soon, and hungry venue owners — buoyed by the prospect of $16 billion in federal relief through the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant fund, which they can apply for starting April 8 — are eager for the business.The relative handful of clubs and theaters set to reopen in the spring are doing so with altered seating plans, temperature checks and adjusted financial deals with performers. A recent rock concert in Spain, with extensive Covid-19 protections, drew 5,000 fans. These events are being watched closely by the concert industry, which went into 2020 anticipating its biggest year ever but ended up losing nearly $10 billion in box office revenue, according to data collected by Pollstar, a trade publication.Lizzo performing in Miami early last year. She’s among the artists on the bill for Bonnaroo, in rural Tennessee, now planned for September.Scott Roth/Invision, via Associated PressCity Winery, a restaurant and concert venue on Pier 57, on the West Side of Manhattan, is reopening Saturday with a performance by the singer-songwriter Rhett Miller; it has been gradually filling out a calendar of socially distanced shows, confirming some just days ago. (Rufus Wainwright, Steve Earle, Patti Smith and Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields are among those on the calendar.) Tables have been arranged to allow space between parties, and patrons, who must wear masks when not seated, will get their temperatures checked upon entry.“Even if it’s for 100 people, it takes on such a significance to be putting on a show,” said Michael Dorf, the venue’s founder. “It feels like a sacred job, putting on culture.”Miller, a regular performer at the dozen City Winery spots around the country, said that he had struggled with the forced grounding from Covid-19, though he also noted the silver lining of spending more time with his family. The idea of playing live again, he said, both excites and terrifies him.“I’ve been dreaming about it night after night, climbing up on a stage in front of people,” Miller said. “The dreams are fraught and weird. Half the time I’m trying to sing through a mask, or I’m in trouble for not wearing a mask.”Major tours, which typically require months of planning and the hiring of a large crew of workers, have largely punted to next year or even 2023. That should make the next couple of years an extraordinary time for live music, with dozens of superstar acts planning to reschedule postponed tours and make up for lost time. But it may also be a test of touring infrastructure and of fans’ willingness to buy tickets to multiple high-profile shows.“The amount of stadium activity in 2022 is something I’ve never experienced,” said Jay Marciano, the chairman of AEG Presents, one of the industry’s biggest promoters and venue operators. “Over a dozen major artists are actively holding real estate for next year.”Josh Lloyd-Watson, left, and Tom McFarland of the British electronic duo Jungle. They’ve announced fall tour dates.Anna Victoria BestThe fate of summer festivals, an important bellwether, is still uncertain. Some, like the Newport jazz and folk festivals, in Rhode Island, are planning to go on this year, with reduced capacities. Bonnaroo, in rural Tennessee, is planned for September, with Megan Thee Stallion, Lizzo, Foo Fighters and others; Summerfest in Milwaukee, a major urban concert series, is also planned for September. But whether Lollapalooza in Chicago will go forward is unclear.In New York, a smattering of clubs are also planning shows, like Bowery Electric and the Bitter End. But the majority are holding out for when they can reopen at full capacity, or close to it, many proprietors said. The industry has been placing its bets on summer or fall for that.Still, many artists and promoters report watching every news blip about infection spikes and virus variants with trepidation.The British electronic duo Jungle has announced a fall tour at large clubs like Avant Gardner in New York and the Anthem in Washington. Sam Denniston, the group’s manager, said that all signs have pointed toward that being feasible, as millions more people get vaccinated and more venues fully reopen. Yet uncertainty about the pandemic means that anything could happen.“It’s kind of like penguins sitting on the edge of a cliff, and they push one in to see if there’s a killer whale in the water,” Denniston said. “I kind of feel like we’re that first penguin. But someone’s got to take the risk.”While stadium-sized artists are counting on the pandemic coming under control and the full revival of a mothballed industry by the time they hit the road, for many others below the superstar level, a year without shows has simply been long enough.“I don’t know if I can wait another six months to a year,” Miller said, “to do my job again.” More

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      Kevin Shields on My Bloody Valentine’s Return: Time Is ‘More Precious’

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      Eight years after the shoegaze pioneers’ last album, the band is bringing its catalog to streaming services, reissuing records on vinyl and recording two new albums.For nearly four decades, Kevin Shields, the leader of the very loud, very fuzzy rock band My Bloody Valentine, has been described using synonyms for “eccentric” and “reclusive.” But the truth is more … what’s another word for mundane? He cooks with his wife, Anna, and they have two dogs. He listens to music on Spotify, and loves Frank Ocean. He practices Wing Chun. He likes to go for walks on his sprawling property in Ireland, where he’s learned a few things about the local deer population.“The more overconfident ones have this thing where they like to stand within 10 feet of the dogs, and make these kind of high-pitched noises like, ‘What are you going to do about it?’” he said in a recent interview.Shields didn’t appear on camera, and the band hasn’t taken new photos since the 1990s, but he was having this conversation to make a conventional announcement: My Bloody Valentine is making the majority of its catalog available for streaming, and reissuing it on vinyl. The group has signed with the influential independent label Domino, and plans to release two new records.“Our original plan was we would record both the albums back-to-back and then go tour on that,” he said. “And that would have been this year, you know, but everything really did slow down.”The news, however, is still remarkable, because My Bloody Valentine has truly always done things its own way. Sometimes, that has meant calling up vinyl factories in different countries to see which manufactures the best and most specific sound. Other times, it has meant letting its label sue Shields rather than release music it didn’t like. (That happened in 2001, after My Bloody Valentine had been signed with Island Records for nearly a decade without turning out a new album.)My Bloody Valentine is most famous for elevating “shoegaze,” a dreamy style of guitar music named for the activity of manipulating the technology — literally, gazing at the pedals next to your shoes — required to conjure such a swirling sound. The band is also famous for disappearing: After releasing its second album, “Loveless,” in 1991, it was mostly inactive for nearly 20 years, as rumors of a follow-up swelled and dispersed. After reuniting to perform live, the band surprised everyone in 2013 with “m b v,” a new record that appeared online in the middle of the night with no advance notice, instantly crashing the band’s website as fans swarmed to download it.As the music industry transitioned to a streaming model over the last decade, “m b v” — along with much of the band’s earlier catalog — was not digitally available, affording it a new kind of mystery in an era when recorded music is expected to be accessible at a button’s click. “My nieces and nephews — they would complain to me, because when they would try and show their friends, they can’t find it anywhere,” Shields said. “They’re like, ‘Why are you so purposely obscure? You know, it seems stupid.’ That kind of stuff that made me think, ‘Yeah, I guess my perception of the world isn’t the world.’ There’s a whole world out there I know nothing about.”My Bloody Valentine was formed by Shields and the drummer Colm O’Ciosoig in the early ’80s. Initially, it sounded like any number of spiky, moody guitar bands, but a few years later, Shields recruited the guitarist-vocalist Bilinda Butcher and the bassist Debbie Googe, and reconfigured the band’s sound entirely. The group became notorious for the volume of its physically overwhelming live performances, and learned how to harness that noise across a series of increasingly acclaimed releases exploring the ambient and textural potential of the guitar.“For me, it’s very difficult to relate to sound but not feel it,” Shields said. “It’s kind of the fundamental thing of my association with music.”Steve Gullick“Patience is a virtue in this band,” Butcher wrote in an email, when asked how she managed the experience of waiting to record the sequel to “Loveless.” “I had two more children and did a lot of flamenco dancing.”My Bloody Valentine’s back catalog was previously managed by Sony, which inherited the rights after purchasing Creation Records in the ’90s. While the Sony relationship wasn’t unfriendly, the band wanted to own the rights to future releases. “We definitely wanted to work with an independent label, opposed to a major,” Shields said. The decision to sign with Domino was preceded by his friendship with its founder, Laurence Bell, whom he met in the mid-90s: “Domino was the ultimate kind of independent setup — they have as many facilities as most majors, but they’re owned by one person.”Bell said he first wanted to sign Shields in the early days of their friendship, but settled for finalizing the deal in 2020, right as the Covid-19 lockdown started in the United Kingdom. “He had a very, very clear idea of what he wanted to do,” he said of Shields’ plans. “He can hear things and see things in a way few people can.”In addition to “m b v,” the band will reissue a series of EPs recorded between 1988 and 1991 as a compilation, along with “Loveless” and the 1988 album “Isn’t Anything,” all on vinyl. And “m b v” will join “Loveless” and “Isn’t Anything” on streaming services and online stores worldwide; the EPs won’t be digitally available in North America, as those rights are held by Warner. Shields said he’d also like to reissue the band’s earliest releases, recorded with the singer David Conway, once they can be properly remastered.Right now, the band’s members are waiting to see when they can get together in person at Shields’s home studio — O’Ciosoig also lives in Ireland, while Butcher and Googe are in England — to begin recording. If that can’t happen, they’ll explore remote options. Shields said the first of the two albums will be “warm and melodic,” while the second will be more experimental — a stark evolution from what he called his otherwise “very traditional” writing process to date.“I’m not describing it properly on purpose,” he said, after a somewhat vague explanation. “I don’t want to give too much away because I could lay it out verbally, and then someone’s going to go, ‘That’s a really good idea.’” As for a timeline for release, he didn’t say. (“I think once I can get over to Ireland it will get done very quickly as my vocals are often the last thing to be recorded,” Butcher wrote. “They’ll probably be finished by the end of the year.”)Despite the band’s scant digital presence, new generations have continued to find My Bloody Valentine; its live audiences skew younger, which Shields counted as a nice surprise in a world where artists are encouraged to overwhelm their fans with content. “There’s always going to be a certain kind of music fan that discovers things and checks it out,” he said. “When I meet young people, I’m like, ‘Oh, I have hope for the future.’ They seem bright, and they seem alive.”(Of the younger generation’s emergent nostalgia for his ’90s era, he remarked, “It’s kind of amusing because I’m literally incapable of grasping it.”)Not long after “m b v” came out, Shields worried his hearing was beginning to permanently decline, a consequence of the band’s deafening performances. (They pass out earplugs at shows — highly recommended.) Luckily, that deterioration has stopped, and the band has found subtle ways to mitigate the lasting effect of their loudness without sacrificing it altogether.“For me, it’s very difficult to relate to sound but not feel it,” he said. “It’s kind of the fundamental thing of my association with music. And it seemed really strange to me that you would play live and the audience don’t get to experience the same thing that you experience.”For years, the idea of My Bloody Valentine releasing music was treated like a distant possibility. Bell did acknowledge the inherent uncertainty of signing a band known for taking its time. But Shields has no intention of going another 22 years between releases. He mentioned artists like Paul McCartney, who’ve continued regularly recording decades after their careers began, and said working with Brian Eno on a pair of 2018 singles had encouraged him to take a more agile approach to making music.When he was young, Shields said, he thought he needed to peak before he turned 25; after My Bloody Valentine achieved some success, he stopped thinking about time altogether, hence the long layover. Those days have passed. “Time is a bit more precious,” he said. “I don’t want to be 70-something wanting to make the next record after ‘m b v.’ I think it’d be cooler to make one now.” More

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      How Flock of Dimes Found Herself (With a Little Help From Her Friends)

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      Jenn Wasner has tended to let thoughts rather than feelings guide her songwriting. For her second solo album, “Head of Roses,” she did the opposite.In 2016, when the wildly prolific multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Jenn Wasner released her first solo album as Flock of Dimes, she felt she had something to prove.“I had internalized a lot of the assumptions that people make about women in music,” said Wasner, then best known as one-half of the indie-rock duo Wye Oak. “I felt a lot of resentment about not getting the benefit of the doubt of my own artistry.” So she doubled down on that time-tested indie ethos of Do It Yourself — writing, producing and playing just about every instrument on “If You See Me, Say Yes.”“As it turns out,” Wasner, 34, recalled in a recent video chat from her home near Durham, N.C., “that’s not always what makes the best record.”“If You See Me” is full of dazzling sounds and bright melodic ideas, but it stimulates the mind more frequently than it pierces the heart. “As someone who is very obsessed with language, I think sometimes it can actually be a barrier to feeling,” Wasner added, lounging on a sage-green sofa that — she suddenly realized, catching a glimpse of her digital reflection in the Zoom screen — was the same color as the cozy sweatshirt she was wearing. “I think that record, and pretty much any record you could point to would be better with some form of collaborative expression.”“Head of Roses,” the second Flock of Dimes full-length, out Friday, is that better record — one of the highlights of Wasner’s long, winding career. It’s also the project that revealed a creative paradox: Sometimes what an artist needs to become even more of herself is a little help from her friends.“I got the impression she was trying to get out of her head,” said Nick Sanborn, half of the electro-pop band Sylvan Esso, who co-produced “Head of Roses” with Wasner. “Being her friend, it’s obvious that her range is so broad and encompasses so many different things.”A respected veteran of the underground music scene, Wasner is multifaceted almost to a fault, in a music industry obsessed with elevator pitches and genre-based pigeonholing. “Because I’m drawn to experimenting with so many different kinds of aesthetic choices,” she said, “people are often like, ‘I don’t really know what you do. We don’t know where to put you.’”“But that’s just a big part of who I am, and not something I want to change about myself,” she added. “It’s a source of joy.”Even in Wye Oak, formed in 2006, Wasner and her bandmate, Andy Stack, seem allergic to repeating themselves. After garnering acclaim for “Civilian,” a breakout 2011 album full of off-kilter rhythms and Wasner’s inventive guitar playing, they followed it with a record centered around synthesizers, “Shriek,” in 2014. Their most recent EP, “No Horizon” from 2020, prominently featured choral arrangements sung by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.Wasner and Stack are both Baltimore natives who met in high school. They were in “one of those bands where everybody writes songs,” Stack recalled over the phone, though when the 16-year-old Wasner brought hers to practice, it was clear her compositions were a cut above the standard battle-of-the-bands fare. “She was a real good songwriter from the beginning,” he said.“Everything I’ve learned this year about trauma and healing supports the idea that music is important,” Wasner said.Jeremy M. Lange for The New York TimesWasner and Stack have now been playing music together for more than half their lives. The key to Wye Oak’s longevity, Stack said, has been allowing each other to pursue other musical projects in their spare time. (They have also been writing new material in quarantine.)Over the past decade, Wasner has formed multiple side projects and played in the touring bands of artists like Sylvan Esso and Dirty Projectors; in 2019, she joined Justin Vernon’s Bon Iver. “I think the way the industry is set up, in order to release as much music as I would like, I have to kind of trick people into letting me do it by inventing different names for myself,” she said.But, she reflected, “I had created this world of constant busyness and work that pretty much prevented me from spending any time sitting with myself and examining my inner world.” So “Head of Roses” is the answer to a particular riddle: What happens when one of the hardest-working musicians in indie rock suddenly has to sit still for a year?Wasner’s most recent romantic relationship ended just before the pandemic began. (When I mention that not every musician was able to stay creatively inspired over the past year, she laughed: “I would recommend to those people to try being completely eviscerated by heartbreak!”) For the first time in her adult life, Wasner found herself without her usual distractions — no tour to embark upon, no new band to join. “There was nothing to do but sit with my pain and myself,” she said. “I was so grateful to be able to turn to making music, because it was one of the last remaining things available, as a source of comfort for me.”Or, as she sings on a spacious, twangy new song, “Walking,” sounding more contented than aggrieved, “Alone again, alone again, my time it is my own again.”Over the past year Wasner wrote songs constantly, deepened her yoga practice and taught herself how to cook — something she’d never taken the time to do, in half a life spent on tour. (“No one’s going to be thrilled at a home-cooked meal from me, but it’s certainly better than it was before this whole thing started.”)Wasner’s “Head of Roses” is the answer to a particular riddle: What happens when one of the hardest-working musicians in indie rock suddenly has to sit still for a year?Jeremy M. Lange for The New York TimesIn July, she assembled a small pod of trusted collaborators in a nearby studio. Sanborn sometimes joked that she should call the album “The Many Faces of Was.” More than anything she’s released before, “Head of Roses” makes room for the multiplicity of Wasner’s artistic voice. None of the singles sound anything alike — not the springy, off-kilter pop of “Two” nor the slow-burning, psych-rock of “Price of Blue” — and none of them quite prepare the listener for the gorgeously subdued second half of the album, which features several of the most stirring ballads Wasner has ever recorded. The common element holding all of these disparate parts together is her luminous, jewel-toned voice.“I feel a lot more secure in myself than I ever have before, which makes it easier to make choices without worrying so much about what I’m trying to prove,” Wasner said. Delegating some technical tasks to Sanborn or the engineer Bella Blasko helped her focus on her larger vision. That all her collaborators were also friends made it easier to tap into her vulnerability in the studio, too: “It was such a joy to feel really held by all the people in my musical community at a time when I was at my most gutted, personally.”This was a relatively new experience. “For a lot of the music I’ve written in the past, I would reverse-engineer a feeling — I would think about a concept or idea I wanted to expound upon, then I would create that,” Wasner said. “All of a sudden, with this record, it came up from this other place.”Which is not to say that Wasner has abandoned her avowed penchant for challenging arrangements or nontraditional time signatures. “Watching her do some of these songs solo,” said Wasner’s friend Meg Duffy, a guitarist who played on the album and records as Hand Habits, “I’m like, how do you even do that? It seems like doing algebra while doing ballet.”’But now, Wasner wants the more cerebral elements of her music to work, first and foremost, in service of a feeling.“Everything I’ve learned this year about trauma and healing supports the idea that music is important,” Wasner said. “It can subvert a lot of the defenses we enact around the softer parts of ourselves — the parts that may need to be seen and healed the most. Those defenses are very hard to get past. But music might be the art form that is best able to get around those barriers and reach us where we need to be healed.” More