Pop and Rock Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Con ‘Houdini’, Eminem pierde la magia y otras 10 canciones nuevas

      by

      Nuestros críticos de música pop tienen una lista con los temas más destacados de las últimas semanas: Clairo, Nathy Peluso, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds y más para escuchar.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Todos los viernes, los críticos de música pop de The New York Times comentan las nuevas canciones más destacadas de la semana. Escucha la playlist en Spotify aquí (o encuentra nuestro perfil: nytimes) y en Apple Music aquí, y suscríbete a The Amplifier, una guía quincenal de canciones nuevas y antiguas.Eminem, ‘Houdini’Eminem intenta recuperar glorias pasadas en su agotadora nueva canción “Houdini”, el primer sencillo de su próximo 12º álbum, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce). Sobre un ritmo estridente y carnavalesco que interpola una muestra de “Abracadabra” de la Steve Miller Band, el craso alter ego del MC Slim Shady analiza el momento cultural actual y encadena algunos chistes en su rapeo de forma rebuscada, desesperado por ofender a cada paso. El truco más viejo de la historia. LINDSAY ZOLADZTwenty One Pilots, ‘Navigating’Clancy, el nuevo álbum de la banda Twenty One Pilots, es la cuarta entrega de una serie de álbumes conceptuales. Pero “Navigating” no necesita necesariamente una historia de fondo. Es una crisis psicológica, como canta Tyler Joseph, que se siente aturdido y disociado, incapaz de hablar pero desesperado por conectar: “Perdón por el retraso, estoy navegando por mi cabeza” es la mayor explicación que consigue dar. El tema es una fusión animada, galopante y vibrante de punk-pop y electrónica, que se abre con un “Hey-oh” que suena al coro de una tribuna en un estadio y trata de atravesar el punto crítico con puro ímpetu. JON PARELESWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      The Ultimate Charli XCX Primer

      by

      Prep for the arrival of her new album, “Brat,” with 11 songs from her catalog (and 10 bonus tracks!).Charli XCXHarley WeirDear listeners,I don’t think there’s a single song I’ve listened to more over the past few weeks than “360,” the endlessly quotable, deliriously catchy synth-pop song by one of my favorite working pop stars, Charli XCX.I believe that most great pop music strikes a precise equilibrium between the smart and the stupid, and few artists working today understand that balance more intuitively than the 31-year-old English singer-songwriter born Charlotte Aitchison, whose rich and prolific career I’m celebrating with today’s playlist. Charli’s back catalog is deep and some of her songs can be as self-referential as an episode of “Arrested Development,” so ahead of the release of her highly anticipated album “Brat” on Friday, here’s a chance to catch up.I first heard Charli’s music in 2011, when I was hypnotized by her early single “Stay Away,” a dark and immersive ballad that sounded like a photo negative of T’Pau’s 1987 bubble gum jam “Heart and Soul.” (I sequenced those two tracks back-to-back on an iPod playlist I listened to incessantly that summer.) Two years later, “Stay Away” appeared on Charli’s debut full-length, “True Romance,” a brilliant pop album that should have been as big as, say, Katy Perry’s “Prism” or Miley Cyrus’s “Bangerz” (to name two giants of 2013) but failed to break through beyond a small but fervent cult fan base that came to be known as (what else?) Charli’s Angels.Over the past decade, that fan base has grown, and Charli has come to occupy her own unique space somewhere between the A-list and the underground. She’s had flirtations with mainstream success, usually as a featured artist (her brash hook was the best part of Iggy Azalea’s 2014 smash “Fancy”) or a songwriter (you can hear her voice in the mix of Icona Pop’s 2012 anthem “I Love It,” which she helped write). But Charli has ultimately remained a little too adventurous and uncompromising for superstardom. As she put it in a recent profile for British GQ with characteristic shrugging candor, “I know that if I suffered in silence, pushed through it and didn’t say what was on my mind, and maybe got like a brow lift or whatever, I could probably operate in a more commercial world.” The singles from “Brat” find her sounding more comfortable and creatively fulfilled than ever in that middle ground. As she puts it on the kinetic “Von Dutch,” “Cult classic but I still pop.”This playlist is a chronological tour through Charli XCX’s many eras, from her time as a precocious club kid to her more recent reign as a forward-thinking pop experimentalist. Her discography is loads of fun but it can also be overwhelming, so if you’ve previously been intimidated by it, consider this a road map. I had such a hard time whittling this playlist down to 11 tracks, though, that I’ve included 10 more recommendations in the Bonus Tracks, if you’re wondering where to go next.In the meantime, grab the keys to your lavender Lamborghini, fill it up with a thousand pink balloons and get ready to party, Charli-style.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Cyndi Lauper Could Only Ever Be Herself

      by

      One Friday afternoon in May, Cyndi Lauper stepped out of her Upper West Side apartment building and into the streets of New York City. She wore glitter-encrusted glasses, sneakers with rainbow soles and a stack of beaded bracelets on each arm. A rice-paper parasol swung in her hand. As she walked, she examined the crowds and remarked when glints of interest caught her eye.“Of course, up here it’s fashion hell,” she allowed of her tony neighborhood. And yet, every few blocks she rubbernecked at another woman’s look, her famous New Yawk accent lifting and tumbling in pleasure at what she saw:“Look at these dames, how cute are they?”“Did you love those pants? I kind of loved those pants.”“Look at this lady,” she said, stepping off the curb and clocking a passerby. The woman moved nimbly, tomato-red streak in her silver hair, body draped in shades of fuchsia and cherry as she pushed the gleaming metal frame of a walker. “Fabulous,” Lauper exclaimed. “Come on!”At 70, the pop icon and social justice activist isn’t just charging back into the streets. On Monday, Lauper announced her final tour, the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour, which will have her headlining arenas across North America from late October to early December. And “Let the Canary Sing,” a documentary about her life and career that premiered at the Tribeca Festival last year, is streaming on Paramount+.Lauper has not staged a major tour — “a proper tour, that’s mine” — in over a decade. But now her window of opportunity is closing, so she’s leaping through it. “I don’t think I can perform the way I want to in a couple of years,” she said. “I want to be strong.”Lauper photographed at the Scarlet Lounge on the Upper West Side, the Manhattan neighborhood where she lives with her husband and two pugs.Thea Traff for The New York TimesAnd until recently, when she finally agreed to sit for the director Alison Ellwood, she could not envision committing her life story to film. “I wasn’t going to do a documentary because I’m not dead,” she said. More to the point, she did not feel particularly misunderstood. From the moment she danced across the city in the 1983 video for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” she felt that she had articulated precisely what she wanted to say.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Margo Guryan Died in 2021. Her Music Keeps Getting Rediscovered.

      by

      “Words and Music,” a new anthology, shines light on a little-known but increasingly beloved master of pop and jazz songwriting.In the late summer of 1970, Elton John arrived at Los Angeles International Airport for his debut U.S. shows and was greeted by another wildly talented piano-playing singer-songwriter: Margo Guryan. Her husband, David Rosner, worked for the company that signed John, and together they helped him get sorted in the run-up to his legendary performances at the Troubadour, kicking off a long, spectacular career.Guryan’s career proved less of a spectacle. After modest success as a jazz-pop songwriter, she recorded one album of her own, with Rosner’s encouragement. “Take a Picture” was alive with dazzling melodies, lyrical wit, strikingly intimate vocals and marvelously florid arrangements — a small masterpiece of the microgenre known as sunshine pop. But Guryan was reluctant performer who refused to tour, and her album, released in 1968, was a commercial flop, after her label barely promoted it.And yet, in a unique twist on a familiar story, the 11 songs of “Take a Picture” became a shared secret around the world; pirate pressings overseas earned her the sobriquet “The Soft Pop Queen of Japan.” In 2000 the LP was officially reissued, followed by others collecting her demo recordings — lean performances that could pass for 21st-century indie-pop. Her work caught the ears of music supervisors in TV (“Minx,” “I Think You Should Leave”), film (“Sam & Kate”) and advertising (Tag Heuer). Her demo of “Why Do I Cry” became a TikTok meme, spurring thousands of video clips by (presumably) nostalgia-loving sad girls and sad boys; at last check, the song had 23 million streams on Spotify.Guryan’s 1968 album, “Take a Picture,” was her only studio LP. via Jonathan RosnerThe apotheosis of this snowballing rediscovery — or “discovery,” as Guryan, who died in 2021, preferred to say — arrives this week with “Words and Music,” a lavish collection of recordings, many previously unreleased, from the boutique label Numero Group. The archival flush, illuminated with a historical essay by the music critic Jenn Pelly, shows the scope of Guryan’s talent to be even wider than fans have known.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Angélica Garcia Adds Her First Language, Spanish, For Her Album Gemelo

      by

      “Gemelo” is a largely electronic exploration of all kinds of dualities: “With any music I make from now on, I’m going to be writing in both languages.”“My blood speaks Spanish to me,” Angélica Garcia sang in “Red Moon Rising,” a track on her 2016 debut album, “Medicine for Birds.” Garcia, who was born in California, was living in Virginia; the album leaned toward indie-rock and Americana. But the lyric turned out to be prophetic.She was already thinking about the legacy of her maternal grandparents, who are from Mexico and El Salvador, and the musical heritage her parents maintained. Garcia’s second album, “Cha Cha Palace,” delved further into what it meant to be a Chicana growing up bicultural in the San Gabriel Valley — a quintessentially American experience, yet a very individual one. “Been wearing my roots and flying this flag,” she sang in “Jícama,” which former President Barack Obama listed among his favorite songs of 2019.“One day I showed my grandmother ‘Cha Cha Palace,’” Garcia, 30, said in a video interview from the kitchen of her apartment in Los Angeles. “And I realized I’d made this whole record about growing up in El Monte, and she didn’t even understand it. It just hit me that I’m missing a whole side of my culture and people because of the language I’m choosing to write in.”Garcia’s new album, “Gemelo” (“Twin”), out Friday, expands on both her bloodlines and her ambitions, and features lyrics in Spanish. True to its title, its songs are full of dualities: angels and demons, grief and healing, dreams and realities, mirror images. The album opens with a somber chorale titled “Reflexiones” (“Reflections”), while in “Gemini,” Garcia sings, “I see double everywhere I go.”The music is largely electronic, unleashing the directness of Garcia’s voice — sometimes ghostly and airborne, sometimes a near-scream — amid programming, loops and layering. There are moments that hint at Kate Bush, Bjork, M.I.A. and Santigold.Garcia grew up speaking Spanish at home with her grandparents, but said she lost it “once I got into the public school system.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Taylor Swift Is No. 1 Again, With Little Competition on the Way

      by

      “The Tortured Poets Department” earns a sixth week atop the Billboard 200, while the latest from Twenty One Pilots opens at No. 3 with big numbers for a rock album.How much longer can Taylor Swift hold at No. 1 with “The Tortured Poets Department”?This week she is atop the Billboard 200 album chart for a sixth consecutive time, after a monster debut in April and a series of challenges — each handily fended off — from Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa and the rapper Gunna. The numbers for “Tortured Poets” are now cooling slightly, but don’t count on it slipping down the chart anytime soon. Swift’s momentum remains strong, she has plenty of tricks up her sleeve and doesn’t face much superstar competition in the near future, pending any surprise drops. (On next week’s chart, Swift will compete with the K-pop group Ateez, whose last album, opened at No. 1.)The last album to spend at least its first six weeks at No. 1 was Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time,” which held the top for its first 12 weeks last year, then returned to notch a total of 19. Before that, it was Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” with 10 in 2021. Can Swift reach those same heights with “Tortured Poets”? (Back in 2020, her “Folklore” was No. 1 for its first six weeks, before logging two further times at the top.)In its latest week out, “Tortured Poets” had the equivalent of 175,000 sales in the United States, which included 174 million streams and 41,000 sales as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. That total is down 54 percent from the week before, when Swift went head-to-head with Eilish’s new “Hit Me Hard and Soft.” But it is still performing well at a time when most other new albums aren’t; so far this year, average opening-week sales for a non-Taylor Swift No. 1 album are about 131,000.Swift has also demonstrated a highly effective strategy in releasing successive “versions” of her albums. In the days before last week’s chart, when she was competing with Eilish, Swift released six limited digital editions with bonus tracks. Over the weekend, she announced two CDs, each with an exclusive acoustic track. Week after week, fans keep buying them, helping Swift stay strong on the chart.Also this week, Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” holds at No. 2 for a second week, while the alternative duo Twenty One Pilots’ new “Clancy” opens at No. 3 with what Billboard said are the biggest numbers for any rock album so far this year: the equivalent of 143,000 sales, including 113,000 copies sold as a complete package.Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 4, and his three-and-a-half-year-old “Dangerous” is No. 6. RM, from the K-pop supergroup BTS, opens at No. 5 with his second studio album, “Right Place, Wrong Person.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Doug Ingle, the Voice of Iron Butterfly, Is Dead at 78

      by

      His biggest hit, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” was a 17-minute psychedelic journey that epitomized 1960s rock indulgence. But after just a few years in the limelight, he walked away.Doug Ingle, the lead singer and organist of Iron Butterfly, the band that turned a purportedly misheard lyric into “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” the 17-minute magnum opus that propelled acid rock into the outer reaches of excess in the late 1960s, died on May 24. He was 78.His death was confirmed in a social media post by his son Doug Ingle Jr. The post did not say where he died or specify a cause.Mr. Ingle was the last surviving member of the classic lineup of Iron Butterfly, the pioneering hard rock act he helped found in 1966. The band released its first three albums within a year, starting with “Heavy” in early 1968, and, after a lineup shuffle, cemented its place in rock lore with its second album, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” released that July.“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” spent 140 weeks on the Billboard album chart, peaking at No. 4, and was said to have sold some 30 million copies worldwide. A radio version of the title song, whittled to under three minutes, made it to No. 30 on the Billboard Hot 100.But it was the full-length album version — taking up the entire second side of the LP in all of its messy glory — that became a signature song of the tie-dye era. With its truncheonlike guitar riff and haunting aura that called to mind a rock ’n’ roll “Dies Irae,” the song is considered a progenitor of heavy metal and encapsulated Mr. Ingle’s ambition at the time:“I want us to become known as leaders of hard rock music,” Mr. Ingle, then 22, said in a 1968 interview with The Globe and Mail newspaper of Canada. “Trend setters and creators, rather than imitators.”A psychedelic dirge but also a love song, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” captured a 1960s spirit of yin-yang duality — much like the band’s name itself. There have been varying origin stories regarding its mysterious title, with its overtones of Eastern mysticism; the band’s drummer, Ron Bushy, said in a 2020 interview with the magazine It’s Psychedelic Baby that it grew out of an inebriated garble.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Revisiting the Women Who Defined Lilith Fair’s Sound

      by

      Hear songs by Sarah McLachlan, Tracy Chapman, Meredith Brooks and more.Sarah McLachlan onstage at Lilith Fair.Susan Farley for The New York TimesDear listeners,Every once in a while, it’s good to be reminded that Sarah McLachlan is more than just the voice behind that depressing pet commercial that makes me look away from my TV. (You know the one, for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. I’m getting a lump in my throat just thinking about it.) The writer Grayson Haver Currin provided just such a reminder, in an incisive profile of McLachlan published by The New York Times this week.McLachlan is also, among other things, the leader of a school that provides free musical education to children, an avid surfer (which I learned from the article!) and, of course, one of the founders of Lilith Fair, a highly successful if unjustly stereotyped late-90s concert tour that celebrated female artists.Lilith Fair came during a period of critical and commercial prosperity for female artists in a number of traditionally male-dominated genres like rock, folk and that wide-ranging radio format called “alternative.” But as often happens when women gain power and visibility in a certain space, it also provoked a backlash. Even as it was raking in millions, Lilith Fair was the butt of many a late-night TV joke. As the critic Rob Sheffield put it in a 2019 oral history of Lilith Fair for Vanity Fair, “Certainly nobody on late-night TV comedy in 1997 felt obligated or encouraged to make jokes about Ozzfest or the Horde tour.”Lilith Fair wasn’t perfect and is not beyond scrutiny. Most of the performers booked in its first year were white, though the bills in its second and third years became more diverse. And I’m not here to argue that every act who played Lilith Fair has stood the test of time.Still, many have: Fiona Apple, Tracy Chapman, Sheryl Crow, Indigo Girls, Emmylou Harris … I could go on and on. But instead, I made a playlist.For brevity’s sake, I limited myself to artists who played on Lilith Fair’s inaugural 1997 tour. That still gave me plenty of great songs to choose from, as you’ll hear. I’ve included some obvious choices (did you really think I would leave off a certain karaoke classic by Meredith Brooks?) and some deeper cuts you may have forgotten about (that Tracy Bonham song still rips). Although an attempt to revive the tour in 2010 didn’t quite work, I do hear the influence of Lilith Fair artists in this current generation of pop stars like Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Haim and, yes, even Taylor Swift, which means it’s an especially interesting time to look back at the artists who defined the so-called Lilith Fair sound.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More