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      Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan Saw a Gap in Pop, and Filled It

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      Two pure pop songs, “Espresso” and “Good Luck, Babe!,” may give the aspiring stars behind them a boost from music’s middle class to the big time.The caffeinated drink of the summer isn’t cold brew or iced matcha — it’s “me espresso,” a weird and strangely brilliant neologism coined by the pop singer Sabrina Carpenter in her ascendant hit “Espresso.” The track — sugary sweet, fiendishly catchy and meme-ready — has been out for only a month and change, but it is already one of the defining songs of 2024.It’s also one of the defining songs of Carpenter’s career so far. Last year, I described her as a member of “pop’s middle class”: a group of internet-beloved artists creating music that makes winking reference to pop history, whose celebrity vastly outmatches their commercial success. Although she is a new star in the minds of many, Carpenter, 25, is by no means a fresh arrival: “Espresso” was released almost 10 years to the day after her debut EP, “Can’t Blame a Girl for Trying.” Carpenter was 14 years old then; four more full-length albums have followed.Her career has been unusually slow-burning in the context of the well-oiled pop machine, and “Espresso” is a bullish breakthrough after a string of songs, including the Billboard-charting “Nonsense” and “Feather,” that had some radio and TikTok success but failed to permeate pop’s center. (“Espresso” reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and is still in the Top 10.)She’s not the only middle-class pop star having a brush with more tangible success. Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” has quickly become her first hit on the Billboard Hot 100. Roan, 26, loosely fits a similar mold: Her music is funny and oftentimes covertly acerbic, and on her 2023 debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” as Carpenter did with her 2022 breakthrough “Emails I Can’t Send,” Roan tried on a variety of styles that each seemed to pay tribute to a different era of pop, sometimes even a specific diva.Chappell Roan leveraged the spectacle of her live shows to make herself omnipresent on short-form video platforms over the past year. Scott Kowalchyk/CBS, via Getty ImagesRoan first signed to a major label at 17 and was dropped five years later, a setback that compelled her to move back to her Missouri hometown and work as a barista to fund her career. She has since signed to Amusement, an imprint of Universal Music Group started by the producer Daniel Nigro specifically to release Roan’s music. “Good Luck, Babe!,” a kiss-off to an ex with a queer twist, has been streamed over 106 million times on Spotify since its early April release; for context, that’s far more than any song on Beyoncé’s splashy “Cowboy Carter,” which arrived a week earlier, with the exception of its lead single, “Texas Hold ’Em.”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

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      Elvis Presley’s Granddaughter, Riley Keough, Sues to Block Graceland Sale

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      His granddaughter, the actress Riley Keough, claims that a company is fraudulently planning to auction off Elvis’s home in Memphis.Lawyers for the actress Riley Keough, the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, have sued to stop what they say is a fraudulent scheme to sell Graceland, the family’s cherished former home in Memphis.Court papers that Ms. Keough’s lawyers filed this month claim that a company planning to auction off Graceland is fraudulently claiming that her mother — Elvis’s daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, who died in 2023 — had borrowed money and put Graceland up as collateral. The papers say that the company, Naussany Investments & Private Lending LLC, “appears to be a false entity” and that the documents it presented about the loan were also fake.“There is no foreclosure sale,” Elvis Presley Enterprises, which operates Graceland, said in a statement, in which it also said that the lawsuit had been filed to “stop the fraud.”Graceland, a popular tourist attraction, is a major source of income for Elvis Presley Enterprises and the family trust.A representative for Ms. Keough, who controls her family’s trust, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. A lawyer representing Ms. Keough in the case also did not respond.Months after Lisa Marie Presley died, Naussany Investments presented documents claiming that she had borrowed $3.8 million from the company and “gave a deed of trust encumbering Graceland as security,” according to court papers filed in Shelby County, Tenn. Copies of the documents were provided to The New York Times by Elvis Presley Enterprises.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

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      Taylor Swift Beats Gunna on the Chart. Her Next Rival? Billie Eilish.

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      “The Tortured Poets Department” logs a fourth week at No. 1. Next week’s competition is a battle between two stars with multiple versions of their LPs for sale.Taylor Swift stays at No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart for a fourth time, easily holding off a new release by the Atlanta rapper Gunna. But next week she may face a challenge from Billie Eilish — and its result could come down to fans’ appetites for buying multiple “versions” of the stars’ albums.“The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift’s latest studio album, holds atop the Billboard 200 with the equivalent of 260,000 sales in the United States, including 282 million streams and 41,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to Luminate, a data tracking service. Since its record-breaking opening last month, “Tortured Poets” has racked up about 3.6 million equivalent album sales.Gunna’s “One of Wun,” released only in digital form — though Gunna’s website also sold CDs and vinyl LPs that it said would be sent to fans later this year — starts at No. 2 with the equivalent of 91,000 sales, most from its 119 million streams.On Friday, Eilish released “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” her third LP, and the first since she won two Oscars and added two more Grammys to the seven she already had. The music industry is watching the album’s progress closely, in part to see if Eilish’s latest can end Swift’s dominance on the chart.Most of the 31 tracks on “Tortured Poets” have begun to trickle down the daily charts of the major streaming services, while Eilish’s new songs — there are only 10 — have opened strong. For next week’s chart, the key differentiator may be both women’s releases of multiple versions of their albums, on rainbows of vinyl or in digital editions with extra goodies to goose fans’ interest.Swift made “Tortured Poets” available in four variants across physical formats, each with an extra track; these were also sold in special editions from Swift’s website with autographs and collectibles like magnets and engraved bookmarks. Eilish, who has complained about artists’ excessive marketing of physical media — saying in a recent Billboard interview that it was “wasteful” to release “40 different vinyl packages that have a different unique thing just to get you to keep buying more” — put “Hit Me” out in eight colored vinyl variants, as well as other formats like a CD decorated with paint “splattered by Billie.” (Eilish defended her release plans by promoting an “eco-friendly” approach to manufacturing, saying her releases would use recycled materials.)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

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      The (Very Brief) Return of Gastr del Sol

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      In the ’90s, the duo of Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs made quiet, intricate music amid a loud rock underground. A new compilation brought them back together.In late January 2016, Akinobu Oda — a Japanese restaurateur and concert promoter — taped a red-and-black handbill demanding “Don’t disturb!!!” to the window of his vegan dive in Tokyo. The reason? The American art-rock band Gastr del Sol was dining inside.It had been 18 years since the duo split. During the late 1990s, David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke enjoyed an intense and prolific partnership, working together in multiple groups and running the audacious label Dexter’s Cigar. But they hadn’t seen each other since 2002, communicating only through sporadic emails. In Tokyo, they were finally face to face.“Our breakup was hard, because what had started as a very easy collaboration wasn’t easy anymore,” Grubbs, 56, said during a recent video interview from his Brooklyn apartment, where he was surrounded on one side by rows of records and on the other by decorative plates and vases. “I wasn’t sure how it would be, but we were there for hours after the restaurant closed.”That summit became the first move in a long path to “We Have Dozens of Titles,” a three-LP boxed set due Friday that includes the first previously unheard music from Gastr del Sol in a quarter-century. It is the end of the vault, and there will be no reunion shows or sessions.Still, with its out-of-print obscurities and several unreleased live recordings, the compilation reaffirms just how unusual the music that Grubbs and O’Rourke made during their five-year run still is. Though their music began with two carefully intertwined acoustic guitars, it stretched to encompass orchestral fantasias, electronic abstraction and collage sensibilities imported from the avant-garde. Grubbs’s image-rich writing felt poetic and detached. In an era of plangent indie rock, they were the studied, intricate eccentrics.Jim O’Rourke said he craved artistic freedom outside of Gastr del Sol: “I didn’t like my life being constrained by one thing.”Manfred RahsWe 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

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      The Ragged Glory of Neil Young and Crazy Horse Live

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      Hear 11 songs from an electrifying New York set this week.Neil Young, seen here onstage in 2019, brought Crazy Horse to Forest Hills Stadium in Queens this week.Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,On Tuesday night, at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, I checked a major box on my musical bucket list: I got to see Neil Young live for the first time. And not just Young, but also Crazy Horse, his longtime, magnificently shambolic backing band who more or less helped invent both grunge and the modern jam band. Young’s first New York concert in over a decade was a magical, rain-dappled night, and I have tried to preserve the memory by creating a playlist of highlights from the set.There has always been something outside-of-time about the ironically named Young, a man who has in some sense sung and written like an old man since he was a teenager. (I mean that in the most affectionate way possible.) Perhaps for that reason, it is less jarring to see him onstage at age 78 than it is some other rock legends, and it helps that he has preserved that distinct, one-of-a-kind vocal tone along with his dexterity as a guitarist. The crowd was noticeably intergenerational, like the band onstage: Replacing Crazy Horse’s now-retired rhythm guitarist Poncho Sampedro was Willie Nelson’s 33-year-old son, Micah, who beautifully and steadily supported Young’s incandescent soloing.Fitting for a band that embraces improvisational spontaneity, Tuesday night’s stop on the Love Earth tour was actually more memorable for its technical difficulties and the way Young handled them. The trouble began at the end of a three-song stretch where Young played solo, accompanied by just his acoustic guitar and harmonica. During a rousing rendition of the 1978 ballad “Human Highway,” a P.A. seemed to blow out, cutting off Young’s amplification entirely. His vocal mic was still wonky when a tech handed him an electric guitar, so he proceeded to do one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen a 78-year-old do at a rock concert: raise his guitar to his mouth and communicate with the crowd through its pickup. “We’d like to thank everyone for being here tonight,” he said in a muffled warble. Rock ’n’ roll can never die, indeed.Relive Tuesday night’s show along with me — and celebrate Young’s recent return to Spotify — by listening to this playlist, culled entirely from songs played that night. I’ve mixed in some live tracks along with album versions, to better capture the ragged glory of Neil and the Horse. Come down from the misty mountain and press play.Shelter me from the powder and the finger,LindsayListen along while you read.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

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      Esperanza Spalding’s Latest Surprise, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear the jazz musician’s team-up with the Brazilian songwriter Milton Nascimento, plus tracks from Saweetie, Omar Apollo and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Milton Nascimento and Esperanza Spalding, ‘Outubro’The ever-surprising bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding persuaded the mystical and ingeniously tuneful Brazilian songwriter Milton Nascimento, 81, to collaborate on a full album that was recorded in 2023 and is due in August. Its preview single is “Outubro” (“October”), a song that Nascimento originally wrote and recorded in the 1960s. Its asymmetrical melody carries lyrics that reflect on solitude, mortality and the possibility of joy. Nascimento no longer has the pure, otherworldly vocal tone of his youth, but Spalding bolsters him, singing in Portuguese alongside him and probing the harmonies with springy bass lines. Near the end, she comes up with a leaping, scat-singing line that he eventually joins, still enjoying what his composition can inspire. JON PARELESCassandra Jenkins, ‘Delphinium Blue’The Brooklyn singer-songwriter Cassandra Jenkins delivers “Delphinium Blue,” the second single from her upcoming third album, “My Light, My Destroyer,” with a slow, cleareyed poise. Among glacially paced synthesizers and gentle percussion, she describes the sensory overload of working in a flower shop, and daydreaming about someone special when business is light. “I see your eyes in the delphinium, too,” she sings, as beauty blooms all around her. “I’ve become a servant to their blue.” LINDSAY ZOLADZOmar Apollo, ‘Dispose of Me’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

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      Billie Eilish Dares to Write (Twisted) Love Songs on ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’

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      “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” her third album, is both concise and far-reaching.“Twenty-one took a lifetime,” Billie Eilish, 22, sings in “Skinny,” the song that opens her third album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft.”Any woman her age could say that; it’s just math. But even before she was old enough to vote, Eilish had packed a lifetime of accomplishments into a career that she began in 2015 as a teenager uploading songs to SoundCloud. Since then, Eilish has racked up billions of streams, an armload of Grammy Awards, two Oscars and a full-length documentary. On “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” she deliberately tamps down some pop expectations while she warily embraces others.Eilish has both the time-honored musicianship that awards shows admire and the metanarrative savvy of her digital-era generation. Countless imitators have learned from — and been emboldened by — her blend of raw revelations, graceful melodies and wily productions, abetted by her brother and songwriting partner, Finneas.Their historically grounded pop recombines musical theater, parlor songs, punk, folk, electronica, soundtracks, bossa nova, industrial rock and more. Eilish brings to all of them the poise of a vintage crooner: the capacity to float above beats and jolts, to treat a microphone as a confidant. Her voice can be breathy and intimate or eye-rolling and sardonic; at very strategic moments, she reveals her power to belt.Eilish’s 2019 debut album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?,” mapped gothic nightmares, adolescent obsessions and lingering traumas along with an occasional giggle. Her second, “Happier Than Ever” in 2021, reacted directly to the attention, shock, exploitation, stalking, exhaustion and newfound power that success brought her.“Skinny” is a hushed update on Eilish’s superstardom. “Am I acting my age now?/Am I already on the way out?,” she sings, along with thoughts on her body shape, finding nontoxic love, her sense of isolation and a resigned reaction to social media: “The internet is hungry for the meanest kind of funny/and somebody’s gotta feed it.”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

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      Are We in a New Golden Age for the Movie Soundtrack?

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      Between “Barbie,” “Across the Spider-Verse” and now “I Saw the TV Glow,” directors are making the case for the film album experience.After watching “I Saw the TV Glow,” the new film from the director Jane Schoenbrun, I felt a sensation I hadn’t felt in a while: I need this soundtrack.The genre-defying movie is a surreal story about two high schoolers in the 1990s who become obsessed with a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-like show called “The Pink Opaque.” It’s a rich film that draws on horror, ’90s television and Schoenbrun’s experience coming out as transgender. But it also boasts some incredible tunes, like a hypnotic cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” by the artist yeule and performances from King Woman, Sloppy Jane and Phoebe Bridgers, who appear onscreen as musicians at a club the characters visit.The full soundtrack has more to love: The swelling emotion of Caroline Polachek’s “Starburned and Unkissed” and the throwback rock of Proper’s “The 90s,” with lyrics about the TV show “Xena: Warrior Princess.” Listening, I felt like a kid again.That was just Schoenbrun’s intention. The director thought the film needed a “great teen angst soundtrack.” But they were also nostalgic for the idea of soundtracks in general. They remembered thinking, “‘Wait, where did those go?’ You know, because the soundtracks of my youth were such a huge part of what brought me to movies,’” they said in a video call.Citing soundtrack “canon picks” like “Donnie Darko,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Garden State,” which turns 20 this year, they admit these are “pretty obvious slash perhaps a little embarrassing” choices. I relate. I also had an iPod in the early 2000s filled with soundtracks, and one of the most frequently played was “Garden State.” The accompaniment to Zach Braff’s indie breakout — about a man in the midst of a quarter-life crisis who goes home for his mother’s funeral — was as much a cultural moment as the actual film, going platinum and elevating bands like Frou Frou and the Shins.Indeed, the beginning of the aughts felt like the last great heyday for the soundtrack. Think of the indie vibes of “Garden State,” the bluegrass foot-stompers of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” or even the pop rock of “Shrek.” (If you want embarrassment, just ask me how much I loved that soundtrack.)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