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      8 New Songs You Should Hear Now

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      A dive into tracks by Tyler, the Creator, Feist, Bully and more recent highlights.Tyler, the Creator released a new track as part of an expanded edition of “Call Me if You Get Lost.”Luis “Panch” PerezDear listeners,I have a constantly replenishing playlist on my phone called “Thursday Nights and Friday Mornings.” It’s named for the time I do some of my most focused new-music listening, in preparation for the publication of the Playlist, a weekly feature that I compile with my colleagues Jon Pareles and Jon Caramanica.* Each Friday, we recommend a handful of songs released in the past week, a task that helps me stay on top of all (well, most) of the new music that comes out in a given week, and often the Jons’ picks point me toward what I missed.Every few weeks, I’ll be sending out an Amplifier digest of recent Playlist highlights. Today, we’ve got a mix of some possibly familiar names (Lucinda Williams; Feist; Tyler, the Creator) and hopefully some new ones, too.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Jess Williamson: “Hunter”This is one of my favorite new songs right now. It’s from the Texas-born singer-songwriter Jess Williamson, whose music I’ve been following since her haunting 2014 debut, “Native State.” Last year, she teamed up with a fellow musician from the South, Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, and formed a country duo called Plains. Williamson’s contributions to Plains’ excellent record “I Walked With You a Ways” felt like a step forward for her as a songwriter, and I hear that growth on “Hunter,” the first single from her next solo album, “Time Ain’t Accidental,” out in June. It’s a bittersweet song about the spiritually exhausting process of looking for love, but on the chorus Williamson sounds hopeful and replenished, reminding herself, “I want a mirror, not a piece of glass.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Bully: “Days Move Slow”My former colleague at Vulture Jesse David Fox once compared an early song from Alicia Bognanno’s grungy power-pop band Bully to “Sugarhigh,” the fictional alt-rock hit that Renée Zellweger’s character sings at the end of “Empire Records” — and now I will never un-hear that similarity as long as I live. (It’s definitely a compliment.) I interviewed Bognanno over video chat in August 2020, and I remember a very sweet dog named Mezzi dozing behind her. (A dog lover myself, I always ask my interview subjects about their pups. Always.) Sadly, Mezzi has since passed on, but “Days Move Slow,” from the forthcoming Bully album “Lucky for You,” is both an ode to her memory and a chronicle of Bognanno trying to propel herself out of the muck of grief. That probably makes it sound like a downer, but the song has a resilient, upbeat energy about it — sort of like an excitable canine. Rest in power, Mezzi! (Listen on YouTube)3. Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro: “Beso”Some couples announce their engagement with a ring pic on Instagram. Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, two of the brightest Spanish-language stars in the current pop firmament, hinted at theirs in a music video. Their sweet and sultry duet “Beso” is a highlight from their recently released collaborative EP, “RR” — and proof of their musical chemistry. (Listen on YouTube)4. Tyler, the Creator: “Sorry Not Sorry”Fun fact: In 2021, only two albums made appearances on all three of our critics’ Top 10 lists — Olivia Rodrigo’s head-turning debut “Sour” and Tyler, the Creator’s sprawling rap odyssey “Call Me if You Get Lost.” Last week, Tyler released an expanded edition featuring a few new tracks, including this one, the gregarious “Sorry Not Sorry.” I really like this song’s Jekyll-and-Hyde energy, as a repentant Tyler apologizes for a number of personal and professional slights and then, occasionally, a brasher version of himself takes it right back: “Sorry to the fans who say I changed — ’cause I did.” (Listen on YouTube)5. Mahalia: “Terms and Conditions”I’m a total mark for any song that mines and cleverly updates the sounds of Y2K pop or “TRL”-era R&B. (See also: The entire output of the young British girl group Flo.) “Terms and Conditions,” from the 24-year-old singer Mahalia, does just that. It’s giving me hints of Mya, Destiny’s Child and a whole lot of J. Lo’s glimmering millennial time capsule “If You Had My Love.” But it’s also got a contemporary twist, as Mahalia tells a potential suitor what she won’t tolerate (“If you look at her, consider bridges burned”), flipping the dry language of contractual agreements into something confident, fun and flirty. (Listen on YouTube)6. Lucinda Chua featuring yeule: “Something Other Than Years”Like the Mahalia song, I have my colleague Jon Pareles to thank for this next Playlist pick, from the London-based songwriter Lucinda Chua. “Something Other Than Years” is a sparse, hypnotic duet with the Singaporean musician yeule, which finds Chua pleading in a glassy voice, “Show me how to live this life,” a request that seems to be answered by yeule’s celestial melody. Jon describes the rest of Chua’s new album “Yian” as a collection of “meditations seeking serenity — often just two alternating chords, set out slowly on keyboard and sustained by orchestral strings.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Feist: “Borrow Trouble”I love it when Feist — an artist often associated with calm and quietude — lets loose and makes a ruckus, as she does on this stomping tune from her upcoming album, “Multitudes.” Wait for her primal screams at the very end! (Listen on YouTube)Two Lucindas in a single playlist? Better believe it. The country-rock legend Lucinda Williams’s voice has sounded defiant since at least the 1980s, but since recovering from a 2020 stroke, her survivor’s rasp has taken on a whole new gravitas. “New York Comeback” — from the upcoming album “Stories from a Rock N Roll Heart” — has Williams’s characteristic grit and lack of sentiment (“No one’s brought the curtain down,” she sings wrly, “maybe you should stick around”) but there’s something poignant about hearing Amplifier fave Bruce Springsteen (along with his wife and bandmate Patti Scialfa) singing backing vocals to support her as if he’s just one more rock ’n’ roll lifer nodding to another. (Listen on YouTube)These are my terms and conditions,Lindsay*If the grammatically correct plural of “attorney general” is indeed “attorneys general,” maybe I should say “Jons Pareles and Caramanica.”The Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“8 New Songs You Should Hear Now” track listTrack 1: Jess Williamson, “Hunter”Track 2: Bully, “Days Move Slow”Track 3: Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, “Beso”Track 4: Tyler, the Creator, “Sorry Not Sorry”Track 5: Mahalia, “Terms and Conditions”Track 6: Lucinda Chua featuring yeule, “Something Other Than Years”Track 7: Feist, “Borrow Trouble”Track 8: Lucinda Williams, “New York Comeback”Bonus TracksA few of you have written in to ask if we archive previous Amplifier playlists on Spotify. We do! The easiest way to find them is through our account page, where we also archive all the weekly Friday Playlists, too.And speaking of reader emails: Special thanks to Sharon Smith for — after I mentioned that Bob Dylan won his first Grammy nearly two decades into his career, for his 1979 song “Gotta Serve Somebody” — directing me to this blistering performance of Dylan playing the song live at the 1980 Grammys. (Kris Kristofferson, as you’ll see, was loving it.) Apparently the producers asked him to cut the song down to three or four minutes; he played for six and a half. Classic Bob! More

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      Drake Surprises With a Kim Kardashian Sample, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Kaytraminé, Blondshell, Yaeji and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. 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, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Drake, ‘Search & Rescue’“I didn’t come this far, just to come this far and not be happy” — so said Kim Kardashian on the 2021 series finale of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” discussing why it was time to split from her husband, Kanye West. Two years later, their divorce is finalized, but the narrative persists. That line appears at a pivotal moment in Drake’s new song, “Search & Rescue.” Hovering above a morbid, anxious piano figure, Drake raps about the hollowness of being lonely, and after the chorus, uses Kardashian’s words but reframes them, making them sound like a lament about the single life. Here are two contrasting forms of despair, played off each other. Drake is pleading for connection: “Take me out the club, take me out the trap/Take me off the market, take me off the map.” Kardashian is yearning to be free. But Drake is also a sometime high-profile antagonist of West’s, and his leveraging of Kardashian’s words — an official sample, certainly approved by her — is unlikely to be understood as anything but a broadside from two seemingly unattached people, who would cause a whole lot of trouble were they to attach to each other. JON CARAMANICAKaytraminé featuring Pharrell Williams, ‘4EVA’“4EVA” is the winningly bubbly debut single from Kaytraminé, the duo of the rapper Aminé and the dance music producer Kaytranada. It pairs the irreverence of Leaders of the New School with the sumptuous physicality of A Tribe Called Quest, all delivered at a tempo that triggers a sense of freedom and release. CARAMANICAMahalia, ‘Terms and Conditions’The English R&B singer Mahalia sets out her own EULA — the page everyone clicks through on the way to a website or app — in “Terms and Conditions.” She specifies “the man you’re required to be” over a briskly ticking beat, vocal harmonies and bursts of strings; she wants honesty, attention and fidelity, which don’t seem that much to ask. Can she treat a relationship as a matter of cold internet metrics? The penalties are spelled out: “I’ll cut you off and I won’t regret it,” she sings. JON PARELESIndigo De Souza, ‘You Can Be Mean’With a proudly discordant yelp in her voice, Indigo De Souza vents every bit of her annoyance at her latest hookup in “You Can Be Mean,” a grungy stomp topped by a mock synthesizer. “I can’t believe I let you touch my body,” she snarls. “It makes me sick to think about that night.” She briefly considers extenuating factors, like a bad parent, but not for long. “I don’t see you trying that hard to be better than he was,” she notes. PARELESBlondshell, ‘Salad’The brooding “Salad” is a rock-song revenge fantasy cut through with the Blondshell singer-songwriter Sabrina Teitelbaum’s wry humor: “Look what you did,” she sings, “you’ll make a killer of a Jewish girl.” Still, a genuine sense of menace lurks just out of frame, in a crime Teitelbaum alludes to but can’t name outright when she wails, “God, tell me why did he hurt my girl.” Here, as on the rest of her self-titled debut album as Blondshell, which is out on Friday, Teitelbaum offers candid dispatches from the darker, often unsung corners of a young woman’s experiences. LINDSAY ZOLADZLucinda Williams, ‘New York Comeback’A characteristic grit and defiance courses through “New York Comeback,” a new single from the country-rock legend Lucinda Williams, which features Bruce Springsteen and his wife and bandmate, Patti Scialfa, on backing vocals. The song comes from “Stories from a Rock N Roll Heart,” Williams’s forthcoming album and her first release since suffering a stroke in 2020. That context adds a bit of weight to the song, but as ever, Williams is gimlet-eyed and unsentimental, singing in her signature growl, “No one’s brought the curtain down, maybe you should stick around.” ZOLADZYaeji, ‘Passed Me By’The D.J. and producer Yaeji, whose debut album “With a Hammer” comes out on Friday, pens a letter to her younger self on the booming but introspective “Passed Me By.” The song — on which Yaeji oscillates between English and Korean — begins as a kind of free-form incantation, but all at once a slow, echoing drum beat drops and gives it a loose pop structure. “Do you know that the person is still inside of you, waiting for you to notice?” she sings in the song’s final moments, a question that both lingers and haunts. ZOLADZUncle Waffles, ‘Asylum’Lungelihle Zwane, the D.J. and producer who calls herself Uncle Waffles, distills her new album, “Asylum,” into a five-minute megamix and dance extravaganza for her “Asylum” video. Uncle Waffle was born in Swaziland (now Eswatini) and is now based in South Africa. With a quick-changing array of singers and rappers — men, women, soloists, groups — she works countless variations on the midtempo beat, shaker percussion and gaping open spaces of South African amapiano. It’s still only a small sampling of what she concocts in the course of the album. PARELESArthur Moon, ‘7 O’Clock Clap’Lora-Faye Ashuvud, the songwriter, singer and producer behind Arthur Moon, finds joy in disorientation in “7 O’Clock Clap.” As speedy staccato blips and skittering percussion race above a languid bass line, the song has advice what to do when “you’re a foreigner in your own production/in your own bed, in your own body.” There’s a big grin in the vocal as Ashuvud sings, “Take your shoes off, get a move on/Pray to someone, break your cover!” PARELESLabrinth, ‘Never Felt So Alone’“Never Felt So Alone” first surfaced as part of Labrinth’s soundtrack for “Euphoria,” and snippets thrived on TikTok for years. The full-fledged version — a collaboration by Labrinth, Billie Eilish and Finneas — luxuriates in heartache. Labrinth intones the title as a falsetto plaint above hollow, puffing organ chords that hark back to Brian Wilson; the beat is slow, sporadic, almost stumbling. Midway through, the track stages a near-collapse, with fragmented lyrics and bits of dead air, then grandly reassembles itself. Eilish takes over to deliver her side of the story — “Who knew you were just out to get me?” — before each moves on, resigned to loneliness. PARELESPeter Gabriel, ‘I/O’The title of Peter Gabriel’s first new album in 21 years, “I/O,” stands for input/output, a metaphor he earnestly spells out in its title track, preaching the oneness of humanity and nature over solemn keyboards; “Stuff coming out, and stuff going in/I’m just a part of everything.” But the song takes off in the nonverbal moments of the chorus, when electric guitars surge and the Soweto Gospel Choir backs him in the exultant vowel sounds of “i, o, i, o.” PARELESThis Is the Kit, ‘Inside/Outside’Calm on the outside but bustling within, “Inside Outside” ponders fate, physics and free will. “All the molecules were focused on your next move,” Kate Stables sings, as complex counterpoint gathers around her. The sparse acoustic guitar at the beginning is deceptive; soon she’s in a polytonal tangle of horns, guitars and cross-rhythms, living up to her admonishment: “Bite off as much as you can chew.” PARELES More

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      Myke Towers Is Seizing His Moment

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      In just a few years, the rapper has become one of the most sought-after collaborators in Latin music. His new album, “La Vida Es Una,” surveys his many aesthetics.Myke Towers could tell you that he never knew he would make it big, but that wouldn’t be true. Because back in 2014, six years before the rapper would put out his debut, he was preparing for a make-or-break show in his hometown, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and breaking wasn’t an option.“Puerto Rico is the most difficult crowd to please,” he said this month, video-chatting from a Miami hotel room a few weeks before the release of his new album, “La Vida Es Una” (“Life Is One,” a reminder that we only live once). “They don’t just give out approval, you have to show that you are good enough. If you make it in P.R., you’re going to make it anywhere.”Over the course of two back-to-back albums, he did just that. “Easy Money Baby” from 2020 went triple platinum, building off the success of his 2016 mixtape, “El Final del Principio” (“The End of the Beginning”), while incorporating reggaeton, Brazilian funk and Colombian melodies. “Lyke Mike,” released in 2021, was a firm statement of purpose that strung together harder trap bangers. It peaked at No. 3 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart and cracked the Top 50 on the all-genre Top 200. With his new album, out Thursday, Towers aimed to marry the two approaches, striking a balance that illustrates his creative flexibility.“In this album, I want to make music to perform live,” he said, speaking animatedly in a casual white tee and a gold chain. “I want to give energy to people so they can go out and forget about their problems, forget about what’s stressing them.”Almost a decade ago, Towers, now 29, was still waiting for his shot. Raised in the barrio of Caimito in south San Juan, he grew up surrounded by music, mainly his grandmother’s: salsa, merengue, old school boleros — if it was classic Latin music, she was playing it. But Towers wanted to cut his own path in rap, and by the time he graduated from high school, he’d started releasing music on SoundCloud, initially fairly anonymously. “At the beginning, I didn’t even want to show my face,” he said with a laugh. “I just wanted to show my skills. I knew that I had to put in a lot of work to be in the mix.”“Wherever I go, I make music from Puerto Rico,” Towers said. “When I’m making music, I’m listening to the people who came before me.”Ysa Pérez for The New York TimesHe didn’t just practice music, he analyzed it, dissecting every move idols like Daddy Yankee and Jay-Z made, and seeing how he could apply them to his own life. “I studied the game,” he explained. “I have my own identity, but I started with them, and the respect that I had for them.”As his SoundCloud releases gained more traction, he began putting his name on the tracks — styling “Mike” as “Myke” — and performing around the city. He viewed his first shows as tests, and by 2014 he was ready for graduation: that important hometown performance, in La Perla.For artists who grew up in the area, performing in La Perla, the island’s famous slum — located on a stretch of rocky coastline in Old San Juan — is a rite of passage. In video of Towers’s set posted to YouTube, the rapper is dressed in all black, standing under a white beach canopy as he confidently delivers the verses of the aspirational “Dinero En Mano.” (He later released the track, filled with ominous strings, on “El Final del Principio.”) By the end of the song, the crowd is singing along with him.“It was one of my most important shows,” he recalled. He shook his head and grinned, almost as if he was still in disbelief that he had pulled it off. “A lot of people, they didn’t even know my songs, but they were like, ‘Who’s that? Why is he confident performing like that?’”Even before he released his first full-length album, Towers had already teamed up with Bad Bunny and Becky G, laying the groundwork that would make him one of Latin music’s most in-demand collaborators. Since then, the rapper’s features with Rauw Alejandro, Luis Fonsi and Farruko have all been certified platinum.With “La Vida Es Una,” Towers agonized over the track list, sifting between more than 50 songs to select the set that could demonstrate his transition from a vanguard of Puerto Rico’s grass-roots trap scene to a self-assured hitmaker. His versatility is what first grabbed the attention of Orlando Cepeda, known as Jova, one of Towers’s frequent co-writers and the co-founder of the Puerto Rican label that first signed him in 2018. After hearing his rap music, Cepeda asked if Towers had anything more commercial. He was impressed.“He’s an artist without limits,” Cepeda said in a phone interview. “He’s a writer, he’s a composer, he’s a lyricist. I think that hearing someone who comes from the hood like he does, when you listen to his music, it inspires, it excites, it makes people want to work with him.”By the time Towers graduated from high school, he’d started releasing music on SoundCloud.Ysa Pérez for The New York TimesIn addition to tapping some of his past collaborators, including Ozuna and J Balvin, for “La Vida Es Una,” Towers also enlisted producers from across the Latin music diaspora, including Sky Rompiendo (from Colombia) and Tainy (Puerto Rico). “I want to show my fans the difference between ‘Mike’ and ‘Myke,’” he said, explaining his efforts to blend his grittier rap roots with his mainstream ambitions. “In the beginning, my fans would say things like, ‘Oh, you went commercial. What are you doing?’ Those comments would get in my head, and I felt like I was losing who I am, but I like to challenge myself. I took a lot of risks on this album, but I feel confident that when people listen to it, they’ll hear something they needed from me before.”The new album includes songs for his more pop-minded fans: “Sábado” and the Daddy Yankee collaboration “Ulala (Ooh La La),” two dance-floor-ready tracks produced by the Texas duo Play-N-Skillz. Towers heats things up on “El Calentón,” a sparse track that begins as a reggaeton jam before building to a display of his lyrical dexterity. And as its title might suggest, “Flow Jamaican,” produced by Di Genius, dives into reggae rhythms, with Towers switching up his flow in the lead-up to the song’s earworm of a hook.The album was primarily recorded in Puerto Rico, a place with such a long, diverse musical history, Towers said, that anyone who taps into it comes away overflowing with ideas, influences and potential: “Wherever I go, I make music from Puerto Rico. When I’m making music, I’m listening to the people who came before me.” He lit up, a wide smile spreading across his face as he described his usual routine of returning home from tour to his wife and son, and then heading to the studio.“My family is my home base,” Towers said. “Going back to them is spiritual to me. Before I had my son, I would be in the studio until 7 a.m., every day. I’ll always have that hustler spirit, but when I found out I was going to have a kid, it was about working smarter, not harder.”Towers ends the album with a triumphant celebration, “Lo Logré” (“I Made It”). “It’s an anthem that a lot of people are going to relate to,” he said.“People think I made it and it was easy, they forget the process, everything that it took to make it happen. I value every moment in my career because years ago I was even crying trying to make it come true. There are trials you go through, but when you come out on the other side, people just see that you made it. And I have, but I haven’t. I have more dreams to achieve.” More

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      The Inevitability of Ice Spice

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicIt was only last August — seven months ago! — that Ice Spice became seemingly ubiquitous with “Munch (Feelin’ U),” a casually devastating burn of a would-be suitor. Then an emerging rapper from, or more accurately adjacent to, the Bronx drill scene, she’s had a rapid ascent to a contemporary version of pop stardom. She’s now in the Top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100 with “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2,” a collaboration with the equally TikTok-friendly PinkPantheress. And she recently released her debut EP, “Like..?”It seems like Ice Spice demand is outstripping supply — thanks to the omnipresence of her music on TikTok in recent weeks, she’s become eminently consumed even as she has released just a limited amount of music. But modern celebrity is built on this kind of shareability, and her ease in these spaces is a primary driver of her success, in addition to a writing style that’s highly conversational and accessible.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the rise of Ice Spice, how her music-making moves in lock step with the TikTok and Instagram meme universe, and the bottom-up approach to stardom that’s likely to define the future of pop.Guest:Jeff Ihaza, a senior editor at Rolling StoneConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Three Convicted in 2018 Murder of Rapper XXXTentacion

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      After more than 27 hours of deliberation, a Florida jury found three men guilty of killing the rising rapper during a robbery in the parking lot of a motorcycle shop.Nearly five years after the killing of the rising rap star XXXTentacion, who was fatally shot in broad daylight during a 2018 robbery just as his polarizing career was exploding, a jury in Florida on Monday ended more than a week of deliberations when it found three men guilty of first-degree murder in the case.Prosecutors said that Michael Boatwright, 28, and Trayvon Newsome, 24, were the gunmen that June afternoon, with Boatwright firing the fatal shot during a struggle over money. The third man convicted, Dedrick Williams, 26, was said to be the getaway driver and mastermind behind the robbery.All three face mandatory life sentences; prosecutors did not seek the death penalty in the case, which was tried at the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.Surveillance video played in court showed the rapper’s BMW being blocked by an S.U.V. as he tried to leave a motor sports store in Deerfield Beach, Fla., leading to a confrontation with two masked assailants, who escaped with $50,000 in cash.The trial turned largely on the jury’s interpretation of testimony from a fourth man present that day, Robert Allen, who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder last year and testified against his alleged co-conspirators. The Broward County prosecutors also relied on surveillance video from the store that showed two of the men inside, seemingly observing XXXTentacion (born Jahseh Onfroy), as well as cellphone and Bluetooth data tying the men to the location and the S.U.V.XXXTentacion onstage in 2017. The rising rapper was shot and killed during a robbery in 2018.Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald, via Tribune News Service and Getty ImagesThe evidence also included videos that prosecutors said showed the defendants dancing and posing with cash hours after the killing.During more than 27 hours of deliberations across eight days, jurors had asked to review more than 1,000 text messages, along with photos and videos, seized from the cellphones of two of the defendants, including a picture of a news story about the shooting.Defense lawyers for Boatwright, Newsome and Williams, who were tried together, argued that DNA evidence failed to link them to the shooting. (The jury was asked to decide separately on each man’s guilt or innocence, and could have convicted just one or two of those accused.)The defense pointed vaguely to other theories of the crime — including behind-the-scenes wrangling that attempted to include information about XXXTentacion’s online beef with the megastar Drake, who fought successfully to avoid being deposed in the case. They also said that Allen, who had previous felony convictions, was an unreliable witness.“Plans hatched in hell do not have angels for witnesses,” Pascale Achille, the lead prosecutor, said in her rebuttal after closing arguments.The foursome had been planning to commit robberies that day, prosecutors argued, when they happened upon XXXTentacion at the motorcycle shop, where they had hoped to buy a mask. After confirming the musician’s identity inside, the men then waited for him in the parking lot and pulled in front of his car, allowing the two gunmen to attack, their faces covered. A passenger riding with XXXTentacion fled, and a scuffle over the rapper’s Louis Vuitton bag containing the $50,000 ended when Boatwright shot the rapper, prosecutors said.XXXTentacion, 20, a singer, songwriter and rapper who blended genres and first took off on the streaming platform SoundCloud, was high up on the roller coaster of viral fame when he was killed.In the 18 months before the shooting, he had gone from a little-known, troubled teenager making music in his bedroom to the top of the Billboard chart thanks to the success of his anarchic breakout single, “Look at Me!,” and a follow-up album, “?,” which debuted at No. 1.At the same time, he was awaiting trial on charges of battery, false imprisonment and witness tampering stemming from the alleged violent assault of a former girlfriend.“If I’m going to die or ever be a sacrifice, I want to make sure that my life made at least five million kids happy, or they found some sort of answers or resolve in my life, regardless of the negative around my name, regardless of the bad things people say to me,” the rapper said in a video posted to social media before his death.Since his killing, XXXTentacion — whose striking visage has been absorbed into modern hip-hop’s iconography — has been the subject of a documentary, “Look at Me,” and been featured on albums by Kanye West and Lil Wayne, in addition to the posthumous music released in his name. More

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      Miley Cyrus and Brandi Carlile’s Raw Duet, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Bartees Strange, Nicki Nicole, Caroline Rose 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.Miley Cyrus featuring Brandi Carlile, ‘Thousand Miles’From Miley Cyrus’s new album, “Endless Summer Vacation,” comes this rugged, low-to-the-ground duet with the polished roots-rock yowler Brandi Carlile. Both are capable of broad vocal theatrics, but it should be said, Carlile is holding back here, in order to allow Cyrus the space to ruminate in this song about failure: “I’m not always right/but still I ain’t got time for what went wrong.” In her post-Disney career, Cyrus has flirted with various forms of adulthood in terms of performance — sexual defiance, hippie experimentalism and so on. But she’s perhaps at her most appealing when applying restraint. JON CARAMANICANicki Nicole, ‘No Voy a Llorar’Latin R&B enjoys a whiff of hyperpop helium in “No Voy a Llorar” (“I’m Not Going to Cry”), a preemptively defensive breakup song. The 22-year-old Argentine songwriter Nicki Nicole insists she’s fully prepared if things go wrong. “When you leave, I’m not going to suffer,” she predicts. The song’s chord progression could have come from the 1950s, but its production is as contemporary as its brittle attitude. Her pop soprano gets pitched further upward as the track begins; elusive background vocals and synthesizers puff their syncopations around the beat. Even the exposed voice-and-piano coda, the sincere payoff, gets computer-tweaked. JON PARELESBaaba Maal featuring the Very Best, ‘Freak Out’The Senegalese songwriter Baaba Maal, with an extensive catalog behind him, has lately been heard worldwide with vocals on the soundtracks of the Black Panther films. He collaborated with the African-tinged English group the Very Best on “Freak Out,” from his coming album, “Being.” Ignore the song’s psychedelic title. The lyrics draw on an old proverb from Maal’s culture, the Fulani, instructing that someone who has deep knowledge should say neither too little nor too much. Its music merges programmed and hand percussion with a desert drone, an electric-guitar lick and the backup vocals of the Very Best’s Malawian singer, Esau Mwamwaya. It’s both up-to-the-minute and resolutely grounded in traditional wisdom. PARELESEladio Carrión featuring Future, ‘Mbappe’ (Remix)Last year, the Puerto Rican rapper Eladio Carrión had a hit with “Mbappe” a drowsy and delirious Migos-esque boast. Future appears on this remix with a pair of verses that are somehow both utterly rote and also grossly charming, rapping about the place where carnality and expensive jewelry intersect, and the elation of toxic love. CARAMANICANF, ‘Motto’NF has always rapped as if full of anxiety, and on a core level, that hasn’t changed on “Motto,” a clever narrative about unshackling oneself from the stressors of pop music success. But over classicist boom-bap production amplified with a whimsical swing and some of the howling dynamics of rock groups like Imagine Dragons, “Motto” feels somehow lighter. In his early career, NF sounded as if he was internalizing all the pressures of the world, but now he sounds free and calm, dismissing those same pressures with a shrug. CARAMANICABartees Strange, ‘Daily News’“Daily News” was tucked away on the vinyl version of the album Bartees Strange released in 2022, “Farm to Table.” Now it’s streaming, and it sums up and expands the album’s moods and dynamics. Strange sings about alienation, numbness and anxiety — “I can feel the weight/Crashing over me again” — as electric-guitar lines coil and intertwine around him. A bridge finds him even more alone — reduced to nervous, isolated vocals — but someone rescues him. Perhaps it’s a partner; perhaps it’s an audience. “I’ve found you,” he exults, in a full-band onrush of drums, saxophone and tremolo-strummed guitars, and the connection sounds rapturous. PARELESCaroline Rose, ‘Tell Me What You Want’A breakup could hardly be messier or more noisy than the one Caroline Rose depicts in “Tell Me What You Want.” “I am just pretending not to lose my mind,” she explains, in a track that swerves between acoustic-guitar strumming and full grunge blare. She blurts both “I can’t bear to lose you” and “Boy you’re going to hate this song!” She wonders if she should hold on; she wants to smash everything and move along. The video clip, a drunken trek through Austin, Texas, spells out all of her conflicting impulses. PARELESAngel Olsen, ‘Nothing’s Free’The steadfastness of vintage soul carries Angel Olsen through “Nothing’s Free,” as she sings about an unspecific but primal revelation. Slow gospel organ and piano chords, bluesy saxophone and patiently hand-played drumming sustain her amid — and in a long closing instrumental, beyond — something that sounds both life-changing and inevitable, as she sings, “Nothin’s free like breaking free/out of the past.” PARELESNoia, ‘Verano Adentro’Noia is Gisela Fullà-Silvestre, a songwriter from Barcelona who’s now based in Brooklyn. In “Verano Adentro” (“Summer Inside”), she wafts her voice over an amorphous, ever-shifting electronic backdrop. At first it’s tentative — chords and pauses, the clatter of a rainstick — but other, more ominous sounds crowd in: distorted guitar, insistent drums, rumbly low arpeggios. Nothing ruffles her as she basks in bliss: “All I need is an ocean, all I need is time,” she coos. PARELESSarah Pagé, ‘Premiers Pas Au Marécage’“Premiers Pas Au Marécage” translates as “First Steps in the Swamp,” and it’s a meditation on evolution — formlessness into forms — by Sarah Page, a harpist and composer from Montreal. She mingles electronics and plucked strings in this piece, which opens with yawning, amorphous sounds and recordings of Hungarian frogs, then deploys a quintet of Japanese kotos to join her in a measured, echoey waltz and march, a tentative climb toward order. PARELES More

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      Nicki Minaj Returns Ready to Rumble, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Kali Uchis and Summer Walker, Arlo Parks, 6lack 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.Nicki Minaj, ‘Red Ruby Da Sleeze’Calm arrogance is Nicki Minaj’s gift. There’s no need to decipher all her allusions because her delivery and production say it all. The track of “Red Ruby Da Sleeze,” based on Lumidee’s “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh),” juggles near-flamenco handclaps, trap drums and choral vocals going “Uh-oh.” Her percussive rhymes are competitive in every realm — linguistic, sexual, financial, culinary (“guacamole with the taco”) — and their utter confidence is still convincing. JON PARELESKali Uchis and Summer Walker, ‘Deserve Me’“Red Moon in Venus,” the third studio album by the cheerfully bilingual Colombian American songwriter Kali Uchis, moves between sensual romance and fierce recriminations. “Deserve Me” is blunt: “I like it better when you’re gone/I feel a little less alone.” Uchis and Summer Walker take turns bad-mouthing the thoughtless lover who’s getting dumped, and harmonize sweetly to remind him, “You don’t deserve me.” The track starts out light and tinkly but keeps adding bassy layers, literally showing the depth of their contempt. PARELESboygenius, ‘Not Strong Enough’The indie-rock trio boygenius — Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker — formed in 2018, under a cheeky moniker that, Dacus said in an interview, was meant to harness some macho overconfidence: “We were just talking about boys and men we know who’ve been told that they are geniuses since they could hear, basically, and what type of creative work comes out of that upbringing.” The group’s stirring, acoustic-guitar-driven new single “Not Strong Enough” once again finds the women in provocative but poetic drag, as they harmonize on a chorus that answers Sheryl Crow: “I don’t know why I am the way I am, not strong enough to be your man.” On a steadily galloping bridge, Dacus leads the trio in a chant that expresses frustration at being “always an angel, never a god.” But by the end of the candid “Not Strong Enough,” boygenius has generated its own kind of strength in vulnerability — and in numbers. LINDSAY ZOLADZArlo Parks, ‘Impurities’The English songwriter Arlo Parks has absorbed Joni Mitchell, hip-hop and much more; it’s no wonder she is willing to enjoy her “Impurities.” Her new track revolves around echoey loops and samples, but she has a paradoxical lesson to impart: “When you embrace all my impurities, then I feel clean again.” PARELESMandy, Indiana, ‘Pinking Shears’On the echoey, percussion-forward “Pinking Shears,” the Manchester art-rockers Mandy, Indiana forcefully and exhaustedly reject an increasingly mechanized world: “J’suis fatiguée” (“I’m tired”) becomes a kind of mantra when chanted by the band’s vocalist Valentine Caulfield. But there’s catharsis and resistance in the industrial abrasion of the sound they create, like a rogue machine created from cobbled-together parts suddenly learning how to talk back. ZOLADZWater From Your Eyes, ‘Barley’The hypnotic “Barley,” from the Brooklyn duo Water From Your Eyes, sounds a bit like a playground chant reimagined by Sonic Youth: “One, two, three, counter, you’re a cool thing, count mountains,” Rachel Brown drones in a charismatic deadpan. The song — and first single from the forthcoming album “Everyone’s Crushed,” which comes out on May 26 — is full of loopy left-turns and unexpected riffs that jut out at odd angles, but Brown and bandmate Nate Amos are, at all times, utterly in command of their strange and alluring sonic universe. ZOLADZ6lack, ‘Since I Have a Lover’6lack positions himself between singer and rapper on “Since I Have a Lover,” which has a looped feeling. He barely projects his voice, but he rides the rhythm of a loping, two-chord guitar track as he promises more than a passing attraction. Will it last? The song suggests a woozy maybe. PARELESPrincess Nokia, ‘Lo Siento’Steady, wistful piano chords carry Princess Nokia through “Lo Siento” (“I’m Sorry”) from her EP due March 14, “I Love You But This Is Goodbye.” It’s not really an apology; as the production blooms into lush, pillowy harmonies, she switches from singing in English to calmly rapping in Spanish, cursing her lover for betrayal and noting, “Thanks for the pain, the pain in my song.” PARELESyMusic, ‘Zebras’A seven-beat rhythm percolates through “Zebras,” a minimalistic but eventful romp by the chamber sextet yMusic. The rhythm hops from key clicks on a bass clarinet to pizzicato strings; it’s juxtaposed with sighing melody lines and hints of a circus band, making the most of its three-and-a-half minutes. PARELES More

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      Pharrell and Luxury Fashion’s Hip-Hop Obsession

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThe appointment of the storied hip-hop and pop producer Pharrell Williams to the creative director of men’s wear at Louis Vuitton marks a new phase of the union of hip-hop style and luxury clothing, two worlds that have been hurtling toward each other for more than two decades, but have lately become close kin.Williams steps into a role that had been fundamentally remade by Virgil Abloh, a protégé of Kanye West, who made Louis Vuitton a must-see and, for many, a must-wear during the years he was in charge (until his death in 2020). Williams comes to the role with a long history of pushing the boundaries of hip-hop style, a series of big brand collaborations and the mystique of global celebrity.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how hip-hop style has become a key part of men’s wear, how Williams has been central to connecting the dots between streetwear and luxury, and the potential directions Louis Vuitton might take under his direction.Guest:Aria Hughes, editorial creative director of ComplexConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More