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      6 (Up-tempo) New Songs You Should Hear Now

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      Get your blood pumping with the latest tracks from Chappell Roan, J Noa, Illuminati Hotties and more.Chappell RoanMario Anzuoni/ReutersDear listeners,It’s Lindsay’s editor, Caryn, here to kick off a round of guest newsletters with around 19 minutes of upbeat music from March. (If you missed Friday’s newsletter celebrating The Amplifier’s second birthday, a reminder that Lindsay will be taking a few months away to work on a book. The Amp will still arrive every Tuesday.)I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I sequence the Friday Playlists that provide the raw material for these monthly entries spotlighting new music, and one of my big challenges is tempo: With the critics Jon Pareles and Lindsay picking so many different types of tracks, folding them into a coherent mix is not always a cinch.So I’m cheating a little today, choosing a selection of songs at what I’ll call “walking in Manhattan” pace. (Whatever the Google Maps estimate is, I can beat it.) This rundown could provide some rapid strolling music, or maybe soundtrack a cycle on the treadmill accompanied by some spirited air guitar-ing. Either way, trust that this six-pack of songs is a worthy addition to your 2025 collection.Work it,CarynListen along while you read.1. J Noa and Lowlight: “Traficando Rap”The Dominican rapper J Noa spits at breakneck speed in Spanish, and it’s a lot of fun trying to keep up with her. This track, on which she pairs with her producer Lowlight, contains boasts comparing her rhymes to other addictive substances over horn blasts that, as Jon Pareles wrote, “hark back to Sugar Hill Gang’s ‘Apache’ and its source, the Incredible Bongo Band’s version of ‘Apache.’” The 19-year-old sounds bold and gleeful, “la-la-la”ing along to a head-spinner of a beat.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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      Japanese Breakfast’s Shimmering Sadness, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Marianne Faithfull, the Waterboys featuring Fiona Apple, Debby Friday and more.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.Japanese Breakfast, ‘Here Is Someone’Plucked string tones from all directions create a magical, shimmering cascade around Michelle Zauner’s voice in “Here Is Someone” from the new album by Japanese Breakfast, “For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women).” The lyrics hint at tensions and anxieties, but the track radiates anticipation: “Life is sad, but here is someone,” Zauner concludes. Jon ParelesMarianne Faithfull, ‘Burning Moonlight’Marianne Faithfull, who died in January at 78, kept recording almost to the end. She brought every bit of her scratchy, ravaged, tenacious voice to “Burning Moonlight,” a song she co-wrote that holds one of her last manifestoes: “Burning moonlight to survive / Walking in fire is my life.” Acoustic guitars and tambourine connect the music to the 1960s, when she got her start; her singing holds all the decades of experience that followed. Jon ParelesThe Waterboys featuring Fiona Apple, ‘Letter From an Unknown Girlfriend’“Letter From an Unknown Girlfriend” is from the Waterboys album due April 4, “Life, Death and Dennis Hopper,” and was written by Mike Scott. But it is sung and played by Fiona Apple, alone at the piano, delivering a remembrance of an abusive boyfriend: “I used to say no man would ever strike me,” it begins, “And no man ever did ’til I met you.” She admits to the charm of the “satyr running wild in you,” but her voice rises to a bitter, primal rasp as she recalls the worst. It’s a stark, harrowing performance.Jon ParelesTamino featuring Mitski, ‘Sanctuary’Diffidence turns into resolve in the course of “Sanctuary,” a waltzing duet from “Every Dawn’s a Mountain,” the new album by the Belgian songwriter Tamino-Amir Moharam Fouad. In separate verses, Tamino and Mitski sound fragile, contemplating uncertainty and loss; “I reside in the ruins of the sanctuary,” Mitski sings. But when they connect — asking “Is it late where you are?” — and harmonize, an orchestra rises behind them to offer hope. Jon ParelesMorgan Wallen, ‘I’m a Little Crazy’“I’m a little crazy, but the world’s insane,” the disturbed narrator of Morgan Wallen’s new single contends. His character is a drug dealer who keeps a loaded gun nearby. He’s sustaining himself “on antidepressants and lukewarm beers” and yelling at his TV, “but the news don’t change.” Over steadfast acoustic guitar picking and lightly brushed drums, Wallen sings with chilling, sociopathic calm. 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

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      J.B. Moore, Producer of Seminal Hip-Hop Records, Dies at 81

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      He was a magazine ad salesman when he and a colleague, Robert Ford, teamed with Kurtis Blow and helped break rap music into the mainstream.J.B. Moore, an advertising man from suburban Long Island who wrote the lyrics to one of rap’s first hits — Kurtis Blow’s 1979 novelty song, “Christmas Rappin’” — and with a partner, Robert Ford, produced that rapper’s albums as he became a breakout star in the early 1980s, died on March 13 in Manhattan. He was 81.His friend Seth Glassman said the cause of his death, in a nursing home, was pancreatic cancer.Mr. Moore and Mr. Ford, known as Rocky, were unlikely music impresarios. They met at Billboard magazine in the 1970s, where Mr. Moore was an advertising salesman who wrote occasional jazz reviews, and where Mr. Ford was a reporter and critic and one of the first journalists at a mainstream publication to expose the musical fusion created by DJs and MCs that was then emerging from New York City block parties and Black discos.Mr. Ford “was a Black guy from the middle of Hollis, Queens,” Mr. Moore recalled in a 2001 oral history for the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. “I was a white guy from the North Shore of Long Island.” Still, he said, “our record collections were virtually identical.”The two friends’ careers took a turn in the late summer of 1979, when Mr. Ford, who had a child on the way, told Mr. Moore of his idea to try to scrape up money with a Christmas song. He was inspired by a Billboard colleague who had written a holiday tune for Perry Como decades earlier and was still getting paid for it.Mr. Moore and Mr. Ford came up with the idea for “Christmas Rappin’” in 1979, inspired by a colleague who had written a holiday tune for Perry Como decades earlier and was still getting paid for it.Mercury RecordsMr. Moore liked the idea. “Christmas records are perennials, and therefore you get royalties ad infinitum on them,” he said in the oral history.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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      Jensen McRae and 10 More Artists to Watch

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      Every week, our critics spotlight notable new songs on the Playlist. Here’s more about 11 artists behind them, selected by the pop music critics Jon Pareles, Jon Caramanica and Lindsay Zoladz; a culture reporter, Joe Coscarelli; and Caryn Ganz, the pop music editor for The New York Times. (Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.)an interview withJensen McRaeJensen McRae writes constantly: journals, poems, fiction, screenplays and, most publicly, songs. “I’ve always wanted to do a million things with regard to writing and telling stories,” she said. “But music was always the first choice.”Born in Santa Monica, Calif., and still based in Los Angeles, McRae, 27, joins a long history of California folk-pop songwriters — the legacy of the Laurel Canyon era — who draw on the diaristic specifics of their lives for songs that listeners take to heart. Her second album, “I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!,” is due April 25, with a tour that starts in May.As a child, “I was usually one of the only Black kids in a class,” McRae recalled in a video interview. “When you’re put into the observer, outsider position early on, it makes it pretty easy to figure out who you really are and what you really want, because conformity isn’t a choice. I started to develop this identity of being a narrator and a collector of details about my life, about other people’s lives.”McRae has old-school inclinations. Her music relies on hand-played, organic instruments and the power of her unadorned voice. Her 2022 debut album, “Are You Happy Now?,” included stark songs like “Wolves,” about sexual predators, accompanied only by her guitar.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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      11 Songs to Keep St. Patrick’s Day Going

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      Extend the holiday with tracks from Sinead O’Connor, the Pogues, Kneecap and more.Sinead O’ConnorPaul Bergen/Redferns, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,This year St. Patrick’s Day was on a Monday, a particularly cursed fate for a holiday associated with merriment. I propose extending the celebration all throughout the week — a feat of endurance that will require the proper soundtrack. Today, I offer you just that.This playlist contains tracks from 11 very different artists from Ireland.* It features some interpretations of traditional Irish tunes from legends like the Pogues (I’ll get to their origins in a moment) and the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem; a few superstars who put Irish rock on the global map in the 1980s and ’90s (U2 and the Cranberries); and some younger upstarts refreshing Irish sounds for a new generation (the imaginative post-punk group Fontaines D.C. and the raucous rap trio Kneecap, whose 2024 biopic I highly recommend).Whether you’re playing this while sipping a pint of Guinness or trying to conjure that pub atmosphere within the secrecy of your headphones, I hope this playlist keeps you in the St. Patrick’s Day spirit all week (and maybe even all year) long.Lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake,Lindsay*Before you email me about their exclusion, a friendly reminder that the Dropkick Murphys are from Massachusetts. As for Hozier, well … something tells me that there are at least a few other playlists out there where you can hear his music.Listen 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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      Universal Music Calls Drake’s ‘Not Like Us’ Lawsuit ‘Misguided’

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      The label behind Drake and Kendrick Lamar filed a motion on Monday to dismiss Drake’s lawsuit, which accused it of defamation and harassment over the diss song.With the Drake takedown “Not Like Us,” by Kendrick Lamar, now officially the most celebrated rap diss ever, the record label behind both artists is seeking to dismiss Drake’s defamation lawsuit, arguing that its lyrics are merely “a series of hyperbolic insults,” the lingua franca of any hip-hop feud.In a filing on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the company, known as UMG, provided its first substantial response to the lawsuit brought in January on behalf of Drake, the artist born Aubrey Drake Graham. He accused the label of defamation and harassment, claiming that Lamar’s track “intended to convey the specific, unmistakable, and false factual allegation that Drake is a criminal pedophile, and to suggest that the public should resort to vigilante justice in response.”Last month, “Not Like Us,” which accuses Drake of liking young girls, among other personal attacks, won five Grammy Awards, including song and record of the year, and provided the centerpiece for Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance.According to UMG, Drake “lost a rap battle that he provoked and in which he willingly participated” and then “sued his own record label in a misguided attempt to salve his wounds.” The label, citing in its filing lyrics by both artists tied to last year’s heavyweight fight, added that Drake had leveled “similarly incendiary attacks at Lamar” and that the tone and context of the back-and-forth made the defamation claim impossible to prove.The lawsuit, UMG said in its filing, “disregards the other Drake and Lamar diss tracks that surrounded ‘Not Like Us’ as well as the conventions of the diss track genre,” adding: “diss tracks are a popular and celebrated artform centered around outrageous insults, and they would be severely chilled if Drake’s suit were permitted to proceed.”In the suit, lawyers for Drake had argued that “Not Like Us” was beyond the pale of a typical rap beef because the song’s accusations were framed as fact — for instance, using as its cover art a map of Drake’s home with sex offender markers superimposed on top — and that it led to real world violence, citing a shooting at the residence days after the song’s release that injured a security guard, calling it “the 2024 equivalent of ‘Pizzagate.’” The claim also cited two other attempted trespassers in the days that followed.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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      Chappell Roan’s Bro-Country Tweak and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Playboi Carti, Haim, Bon Iver, Willie Nelson 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.Chappell Roan, ‘The Giver’Chappell Roan provocatively but persuasively dons country-queen drag on “The Giver,” her first single in nearly a year, which she previewed on a November episode of “Saturday Night Live.” Driven by a boot-stomping beat and heavily embroidered with fiddles and banjos, the track is a vividly rendered throwback to country’s ’90s pop crossover moment — think Shania Twain and the Chicks — though its cheeky lyrics (full of queer innuendo) frame 21st-century bro-country in its cross hairs. “Ain’t no country boy quitter,” Roan winks at a love interest on a rollicking, shout-along chorus that centers female pleasure. “I get the job done.” “The Giver” feels like the beginning of the self-assured second chapter of Roan’s stardom, since her previous smashes were all sleeper hits that crawled up the charts long after their initial release. But here she’s stepping confidently into an expectant spotlight, unbowed by the pressure and ready to fulfill the song’s promise: “Baby, I deliver.” LINDSAY ZOLADZHaim, ‘Relationships’The Haim sisters, who haven’t released an album since 2020, juggle cynicism and connection in a new single, “Relationships.” The backup is steady-chugging midtempo R&B, with cushy piano chords and a firm backbeat; the lyrics pile on the ambivalence. The sisters ask, “Don’t they end up all the same? When there’s no one left to blame?” Seconds later they admit, “I think I’m in love but I can’t stand [expletive] relationships.” Consider it an update of Samuel Johnson’s line about a second marriage: “a triumph of hope over experience.” JON PARELESPlayboy Carti featuring Kendrick Lamar, ‘Good Credit’Playboi Carti has optimized hip-hop for the splintered-attention era of streaming and TikTok. He releases a barrage of one-off singles and features, slinging high-impact sounds and percussive, seconds-long phrases in unpredictable voices. Meanwhile, he’s been working on “I Am Music,” his first full-length album — a 30-track marathon — since “Whole Lotta Red” in 2020. Among the guests is Kendrick Lamar, who shows up on “Good Credit” to anoint “Carti my evil twin.” Lamar raps about his own un-gimmicky integrity and success: “The numbers is nothing, the money is nothing / I really been him, I promise.” Carti’s boasts are more scattershot — women, dangerous associates, drugs — and one is undeniable: “I got too many flows.” PARELESBon Iver featuring Danielle Haim, ‘If Only I Could Wait’Doubts and yearning — and electronics and distortion — threaten to overcome Justin Vernon, who performs as Bon Iver, in “If Only I Could Wait” from his coming album, “Sable, Fable.” He wonders, “Can I incur the weight? / Am I really this afraid now?” in one of his majestically hymn-like melodies — a melody that’s set atop edgy electronic drums and interrupted by stray guitar lines. Danielle Haim arrives with companionship and sympathy: “I know that it’s hard to keep holding, keep holding strong.” But their verses and vocal lines collide. By the time they find harmony, they conclude they’re “best alone,” more bereft than before. PARELESWillie Nelson featuring Rodney Crowell, ‘Oh What a Beautiful World’Willie Nelson’s next album, due April 25, is filled with songs from the catalog of Rodney Crowell, who joins him for a duet on the title track: “Oh What a Beautiful World.” It’s an easygoing, well-traveled reflection on life’s ups and downs — “It’s a walk in the park, or a shot in the dark” — delivered with Nelson’s grizzled, kindly mixture of acceptance and tenacity. 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

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      Party Like It’s 2009: The Playlist

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      Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem” inspired a look back at a time when indie-rock and Auto-Tuned pop mingled, and the lines between the underground and mainstream blurredGrizzly Bear performing at SXSW in 2009.Josh Haner/The New York TimesDear listeners,I spent the weekend reviewing Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem” and thinking a lot about 2009, a recent moment the album explicitly references. When I was trying to put my finger on exactly what 2009 sounded like, there was only one thing to do: make a playlist.I graduated from college in the fabled year of “Bad Romance” and “Paparazzi” — and of the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Got a Feeling” and Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” — so I attach a lot of emotions and memories to that musical moment. My favorite 2009 albums at the time were a trifecta of stellar and ambitious indie releases that would come to define their era, too: Animal Collective’s “Merriweather Post Pavilion,” Grizzly Bear’s “Veckatimest” and Dirty Projectors’ “Bitte Orca.” The line between underground and mainstream music was becoming provocatively blurred, in a way that seems a little quaint today. The writer Andrew Unterberger recently devoted an entire episode of his Billboard podcast to an event that somehow made headlines in 2009: Beyoncé and Jay-Z attending a Grizzly Bear concert in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (Naturally, her cool younger sister, Solange, took them.)You’ll hear Grizzly Bear on this brief tour through 2009, along with higher-profile artists like Miley Cyrus, Jason Derulo and Mariah Carey. This is hardly meant to be a definitive look at the year’s releases, but a quick refresher on what it sounded like to, as I put it in my “Mayhem” review, party like it’s 2009.All up in the blogs,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Phoenix: “Lisztomania”Let’s kick things off with this irresistibly upbeat opening track from the French pop band Phoenix’s 2009 LP, “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.” This song prompted one of the more wholesome memes of 2009, when a YouTube creator used it to soundtrack a montage of Brat Pack movie dance scenes. That video became such a sensation that it inspired countless copycat clips — including one featuring a future member of Congress.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe 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