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      Sky Ferreira’s Dazzling, Defiant Return, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Wynonna & Waxahatchee, Superorganism, Rico Nasty 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.Sky Ferreira, ‘Don’t Forget’The nine long years since Sky Ferreira’s 2013 cult-classic album “Night Time, My Time” vanish in the opening moments of “Don’t Forget,” a dazzling return to form that is slated to appear on Ferreira’s much-delayed second album, “Masochism.” In her near decade (mostly) away from music — due, in part, to disagreements with her record label — Ferreira’s grungy synth-pop sound has hardly changed at all. But “Night Time, My Time” still sounds singular enough that “Don’t Forget” (which she co-produced with Jorge Elbrecht and co-wrote with Tamaryn) comes as a comfort rather than a disappointment. It’s refreshing to hear the 29-year-old pick up exactly where she left off, inhabiting a song’s echoing, tarnished atmosphere with her signature breathy intensity and smeared glamour. “Keep it in mind, nobody here’s a friend of mine,” Ferreira sneers, proving her melodramatically defiant edge is still intact. LINDSAY ZOLADZAlex G, ‘Blessing’The Philadelphia-based indie artist Alex G has both an easily recognizable aesthetic sensibility and a playfully elastic sense of self. On his excellent 2019 album “House of Sugar,” Alex (last name: Giannascoli) sometimes pitch-shifted and distorted his vocals as though he were embodying different characters — and then on the very next track he’d sing a twangy and seemingly earnest acoustic-guitar ditty that could break your heart in half. His predictable unpredictability strikes again on “Blessing,” which contrasts quasi-spiritual lyrics (“Every day/Is a blessing”) with a sound that borrows from the moody, alt-rock/nu-metal sound of the late ’90s. Alex sings in a menacing whisper, and an explosion of apocalyptic synths completely transforms the song midway through. Inscrutable as it may be, the whole thing is eerie, hypnotic and, somehow, strangely moving. ZOLADZSuperorganism, ‘On & On’The London-based group Superorganism turns boredom and monotony into something almost perky in “On & On.” “No more space, hit replay/It goes on and on,” Orono sings with sullen nonchalance, then repeats “and on” another 16 times. The track is bubble gummy pop with a hint of reggae, and it’s packed with little hooks and ever-changing effects, but nothing breaks through the ennui. JON PARELESWynonna & Waxahatchee, ‘Other Side’As she’s gotten older, Wynonna Judd has been singing with an assured husk in her voice, cutting the crisp country she’s performed for decades with just a hint of the blues. Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, over the course of a career that began in DIY warehouse spaces, has found her bridge to American roots music. The two singers meet on “Other Side,” a gentle rumination on impermanence. For Judd — whose mother and longtime singing partner, Naomi, died last month — it’s a sturdy breeze, understated but invested. For Crutchfield, it’s a soft landing in a new home. JON CARAMANICASaya Gray, ‘Empathy for Bethany’“Empathy for Bethany” keeps wriggling free of expectations. Saya Gray, a Canadian songwriter who played bass in Daniel Caesar’s band, starts the song like a folky, picking triplets on an acoustic guitar. But almost immediately, the chord progression starts to wander; then her vocals warp by multitracking and shifting pitch, and soon a breathy trumpet drifts in from the jazz realm; by the time the track ends, it has become a loop of electronic aftereffects. “Honestly, if I get too close I’ll go ghost,” Gray sings, and the track bears her out. PARELESBruce Hornsby, ‘Tag’Bruce Hornsby has stayed productive and exploratory through the pandemic, doubling down on musical craftiness and structural ambition. His new album, “’Flicted,” pulls together spiky dissonances and folky warmth, chamber orchestrations and electronic illusions, puckishness and benevolence. “Fun and games in pestilence/We could use, use some kindly kindliness,” he sings in “Tag,” adding, “Still shake your fist/A kind of gritted bliss.” The music seesaws between rumbling, dissonant piano over a funky backbeat and richly chiming folk-rock, neatly juggling skepticism and hope. PARELESMaria BC, ‘April’The songs on Maria BC’s debut album, “Hyaline,” are reveries built around patiently picked guitar patterns and tranquil melodies, though they might sprout electronics, percussion or chamber-music orchestrations at any moment. In “April,” vocals overlap and multiply into cascading chords while unexpected sounds wink into earshot behind the guitar. “Listen to me/Anything you want,” the lyrics promise. PARELESKaitlyn Aurelia Smith & Emile Mosseri, ‘Amber’The experimental artist Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and the Academy Award-nominated film composer Emile Mosseri have struck gold with their collaborative album, “I Could Be Your Dog/I Could Be Your Moon.” It’s only two minutes long, but “Amber,” from the second half of the project, runs like a spaced-out symphony. Over bubbling synth tones, Smith’s airy vocalizations loop into circuitous entanglements, shapeshifting into oceans of cosmic flotsam. The effect is appropriately cinematic, like a long-lost immersive Pipilotti Rist video. ISABELIA HERRERANduduzo Makhathini featuring Omagugu, ‘Mama’The first release on the new Blue Note Africa label, “In the Spirit of Ntu” is the South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini’s homage to the universal energetic force known in Bantu cultures as “ntu.” It includes this wistful but swiftly rolling tune, “Mama,” written by Makhathini’s wife, Omagugu, in memory of her mother, who recently died. Omagugu sings in a sweeping, brushy tone, holding her syllables open, as Makhathini surrounds her in a pattern of chords that ascend and ascend. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLORico Nasty, ‘Intrusive’Falling somewhere between gritty hardcore and distorted jungle, Rico Nasty’s “Intrusive” scrapes like metal through a meat grinder. With her latest single, the Maryland rapper continues her return to music after her 2020 album “Nightmare Vacation.” On “Intrusive,” she harnesses punk verve and raps over a warped breakbeat, letting her intrusive impulses and most violent desires flow out in a stream-of-consciousness torrent. It’s bratty, turbulent and deliciously cathartic, like a childhood temper tantrum. “Mom, if you hear this I’m sorry,” she raps. Hey, at least she warned you. HERRERASleazyWorld Go featuring Lil Baby, ‘Sleazy Flow’ (remix)There’s not much to “Sleazy Flow,” by the Kansas City rapper SleazyWorld Go: a few piano tinkles, some groaning bass throbs, a sleepy, sinister tempo and crucially, some select lyrics blending street beef and sexual conquest: “How you mad she choosing me?/I like what she do to me/She say she feel safer over here, this where the shooters be.” That snippet became a TikTok breakout earlier this year, and Lil Baby picks up that taunting theme on the song’s official remix. His verse is almost chipper: “Acting like I’m chasing her or something, she be pursuing me/Can’t hold her, she be telling me all the time she wish that you was me.” CARAMANICADavid Virelles, ‘Al Compas de Mi Viejo Tres’David Virelles has no beef with the piano. A virtuoso improviser and classically trained pianist from Santiago de Cuba, he doesn’t seem intent on turning the instrument inside-out, like Thelonious Monk did; or jettisoning it entirely, like a John Cage; or turning it into an android, like some of his contemporaries. Virelles is a subtler expander. He plays the grand piano with sensitivity and deference, working with it, not against. He tucks dense harmonies inside other harmonies, shading his music with deep browns and grays — like an island sky turning dark before a storm. And on “Al Compás De Mi Viejo Tres” (“By the Compass of my Old Guitar”), from his masterly new album, “Nuna,” he celebrates the lilt of classic Cuban danzón by playing with utter elegance and clarity — stopping every so often to get in his own way with a few irruptive slashes or low, corrosive chords. RUSSONELLO More

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      ‘Look at Me: XXXTentacion’ Review: A Life Cut Short

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      A documentary about a rap sensation who was a troubled and incendiary figure.About a half-hour into this documentary, Cleopatra Bernard, the mother of the rapper XXXTentacion, lists the occasions on which her son got a beating from his father. They are numerous. “But,” Bernard concludes, the father “wasn’t abusive.”Such moments make watching “Look at Me: XXXTentacion” — directed by Sabaah Folayan and executive-produced by Bernard — both fascinating and exasperating.XXXTentacion, born Jahseh Onfroy, was a Florida rapper whose brief life and career were ended in a 2018 shooting. Before that, his emotive music, incendiary persona and criminal notoriety earned him a fan base of America’s most disaffected children — and multiplatinum record sales.He learned he had bipolar disorder in his early adolescence, and he was making rap recordings before he turned 15. One such track in the film sounds like a cry for help that went unanswered.A frenetic and sometimes proudly violent person whose brutal beatings of his girlfriend Geneva Ayala are here chronicled in harrowing detail, XXXTentacion used one of his mug shots as the cover for his breakthrough single “Look at Me.”The film features home video footage of a celebration of his release from jail, at which he accepts platitudes offered by family and management (“do the right thing,” “one day at a time”). After which he flat-out lies about his abusive actions. “She was bruised already,” he says of Ayala.The musician’s life — and those of many around him — became a terrifying and toxic mix of street culture, mental illness and social media. Speaking of the world outside his circle, Bass Santana, a member of XXXTentacion’s crew, observes, “All these people want to see is us destroy each other.” He seems not wholly cognizant of the larger truth of what he’s saying, and that’s heartbreaking.Look at Me: XXXTentacionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      Kendrick Lamar’s Anxiety Era

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherKendrick Lamar spends much of his fifth album, “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” in a state of anxious lament. It’s been five years since he released “DAMN.,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning album that was also his most commercially ambitious, and in that time, Lamar effectively disappeared. But he’s been reckoning — with his own relationship struggles, and with the burdens placed upon him by fans who lionize him.The No. 1 album he’s made faces those struggles head on, with Lamar detailing the ways in which he’s been shaped by his family, and openly grumbling about the weight of the crown he has only sometimes asked to wear.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Lamar’s evolution, the specificity of his songwriting and how even the most individualistic musicians can find themselves at the mercy of a narrative created by their listeners.Guests:Jeff Ihaza, senior editor at Rolling StoneCraig Jenkins, music critic at Vulture/New York magazineStephen Kearse, contributing writer at The NationConnect 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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      Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Mr. Morale’ Is No. 1 With the Year’s Biggest Opening

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      “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” Lamar’s first album in five years, may be eclipsed by Harry Styles’s LP next week.After five years, Kendrick Lamar has returned with a No. 1 album — his new “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” which notched the year’s biggest opening — though Harry Styles is on deck with what may well be an even splashier start.“Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” the much-anticipated follow-up to Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “DAMN.” (2017), has become his fourth album to reach the top spot on the chart. It had the equivalent of 295,500 sales in the United States in its first week out, including 343 million clicks on streaming services, according to Luminate, the music tracking service formerly known as MRC Data.Its total was a bit better than what Bad Bunny had for “Un Verano Sin Ti,” which opened last week with 274,000 sales. But the fine print shows a close match. Bad Bunny’s album actually had more streams: 357 million, still the best this year by that measurement. Lamar ended up with a greater overall number because “Mr. Morale” sold three times as many copies as a complete package, moving 35,500, versus about 11,500 for “Un Verano.”Still, both titles will likely be dwarfed by Styles’s “Harry’s House,” which immediately dominated streaming services upon its release last week and should also be a big hit on vinyl.“Un Verano Sin Ti” fell to No. 2 in its second week out, and “I Never Liked You” by the Atlanta rapper Future, which opened at No. 1 two weeks ago, dropped one spot to No. 3.The K-pop group Tomorrow X Together opened at No. 4 with its new release, a five-track, 15-minute EP called “Minisode 2: Thursday’s Child.” It had minimal streams but sold 65,500 copies as a complete package, mostly on CD. The physical edition of “Minisode 2” came out in eight collectible variants, including ones exclusive to Target and Barnes & Noble stores.Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 5 in its 71st week on the chart. All year long, “Dangerous” has not left Billboard’s Top 5.Also this week, Florence + the Machine’s “Dance Fever” opens at No. 7, and the Black Keys’s “Dropout Boogie” starts at No. 8. More

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      Rina Sawayama Flips Damnation Into a Dance Party, and 15 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Burna Boy, Metric, Sudan Archives 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.Rina Sawayama, ‘This Hell’Ever the pop maximalist, Rina Sawayama’s first single from her upcoming album, “Hold the Girl,” has it all: a fiery chorus, cheeky humor, devil puns for days and even a gloriously cheesy hair-metal guitar solo. “This hell is better with you, we’re burning up together/Baby that makes two,” she sings on the towering hook, making eternal damnation sound like an exclusive VIP party. Both the glammy intensity and be-yourself messaging feel like a throwback to “Born This Way”-era Lady Gaga, but it’s all remixed through Rina’s signature, neo-Y2K-pop sensibility. LINDSAY ZOLADZmxmtoon, ‘Frown’If the California singer-songwriter mxmtoon has a mission statement, it’s something like catchy, smiley self-help. “Frown” is from her new album, “Rising,” and it presents itself as an antidote to being “stuck in a loop overthinking all our pain.” She musters four-chord pop optimism, multitracked vocals and a pop-reggae backbeat to insist, “It’s OK to frown/smile upside-down.” JON PARELESDiana Ross and Tame Impala, ‘Turn Up the Sunshine’Nothing screams “Minions” like a collaboration between … Tame Impala and Diana Ross? Yet their styles blend surprisingly well on “Turn Up the Sunshine,” the first single from the Jack Antonoff-produced soundtrack for the animated summer movie “Minions: The Rise of Gru.” (Yes, the man is so ubiquitous, he’s even producing for the Minions now.) A sleek, seamless and lovingly conjured disco throwback, “Turn Up the Sunshine” allows Kevin Parker an opportunity to go fully retro in his arrangement and saves Ross ample space for ecstatic vocals and some groovy spoken-word vamping. ZOLADZCarrie Underwood, ‘She Don’t Know’Infidelity gets a fierce retaliation in “She Don’t Know,” a canny country revenge song from Carrie Underwood and her collaborators, David Garcia and Hillary Lindsay. A foot-tapping beat and country instruments like mandolin and fiddle back her as she sings, with the vindictive glee of someone escaping a very bad situation, “What she don’t know is she can have him.” PARELESKatzù Oso, ‘Conchitas’A good dream-pop song sparkles, like sunlight refracting through water. On the lustrous “Conchitas,” from Katzù Oso’s debut album, “Tmí,” the Los Angeles-based artist Paul Hernandez bathes in ’90s nostalgia, soaking in shimmering synths, buzzing guitar riffs and a breathy falsetto. The result harnesses Cocteau Twins’ most tender, romantic qualities, but Hernandez glazes the track in his own special gloss, too: Much of “Tmí” was written in Boyle Heights, and as sweet as the pan dulce treats of its namesake, “Conchitas” embraces the spirit of that neighborhood, casting it into the soundtrack for a saccharine, lovesick daydream. ISABELIA HERRERASudan Archives, ‘Selfish Soul’It might not seem like the impish charm of a playground rhyme and a jagged violin hook would seamlessly coalesce, but Sudan Archives has always taken risks. On her new single “Selfish Soul,” the artist born Brittney Parks reprises her irreverent boho whimsy, crashing together reverbed vocals, a rapped verse and wild visuals with a razor-sharp message: a promise to love and embrace every kind of Black hair texture. “If I wear it straight will they like me more?/Like those girls on front covers,” Parks sings. The video oozes euphoria, too; Parks climbs a chrome stripper pole, plays the violin upside down and twerks in a mud pit with her girlfriends. What did you ever do? HERRERAMetric, ‘Doomscroller’Over 10 minutes long, Metric’s “Doomscroller” is a minisuite that proceeds from electronic dystopia to a plea for empathy to an offer of reassurance that’s cradled by physical instruments. The dystopia is convincing: a tireless mechanical thump and throbbing, blipping tones — racing like a gathering troll mob — behind Emily Haines’s calmly caustic observations about internet rabbit holes and entrenched inequality. “Salt of the earth underpaid to serve you,” she notes, and, “Scum of the earth overpaid to rob you.” The reassurance, though it builds up to a full-bodied rock-band march, is shakier; as the song ends, electronic blips reappear. PARELESSylvan Esso, ‘Sunburn’Sylvan Esso celebrates self-indulgence and rues its aftermath in “Sunburn”: “Sunburn blistering, the heat under your skin,” Amelia Meath sings. “Oh, but it felt so good.” The electronic backup is bouncy and pointillistic — nearly all staccato single notes, rarely a chord — and punctuated with the cheeriest of samples: a bicycle bell. PARELESBurna Boy, ‘Last Last’Burna Boy juggles heartache, accusations, self-medication and reminders of his success in “Last Last,” a post-breakup song about a roller coaster of feelings: “I put my life into my job and I know I’m in trouble/She manipulate my love,” he sulks. “Why you say I did nothing for you/When I for do anything you want me to do.” The video shows him surrounded by friends, possessions and awards, smoking and drinking. The title of the sample that provides the track’s nervous strummed rhythm and vocal hook suggests a very different scenario: It’s from Toni Braxton’s 2009 single “He Wasn’t Man Enough.” PARELESMeridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento, ‘Metamorfosis’Meridian Brothers, a high-concept Colombian band formed in 1998 by Eblis Álvarez, delights in twisting and time-warping the roots of salsa and other Latin American styles. “Metamorfosis” — from an album due Aug. 5 — borrows Kafka’s title for a song about a man waking up transformed into a robot, facing a futuristic world of drones and screens; he summons Yoruba deities to battle transhumanism. Blending brisk guaracha and montuno rhythms with eruptions of psychedelic reverb and jazzy piano, it’s a percussive romp. PARELESCalypso Rose featuring Carlos Santana and the Garifuna Collective, ‘Watina’The Garifuna people, an Afro-Caribbean culture that has maintained its own language and traditions primarily in Belize and Honduras, are descendants of Indigenous Arawaks and of West Africans who survived a 17th-century shipwreck to escape slavery. The Garifuna Collective, founded by Andy Palacio, revived and updated old Garifuna songs and “Watina” (“I Called Out”) was the title song of its 2007 album. This remake adds a horn section — pushing the arrangement a bit closer to ska — and has lead vocals from the Trinidadian icon Calypso Rose, 82, who has been an honorary citizen of Belize since 1982, along with stinging guitar from Carlos Santana and some lyrics translated into English: “Lord please help me, even if I’m alone.” PARELESOneida, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Electric Hand’The long-running Brooklyn band Oneida loves repetition, layering and noise, and its catalog includes plenty of arty, elaborate structures. But “I Wanna Hold Your Electric Hand,” previewing an album due in August, recalls foundational punk-rock songs like “Roadrunner” by the Modern Lovers. It uses just two chords nearly all the way through (with one more for a bridge), a hurtling beat and terse lyrics: “So sure of ourselves/Who needs a plan?” But those two chords support a welter of guitar parts and drum salvos that just keeps getting more euphoric. PARELESFKJ featuring Toro y Moi, ‘A Moment of Mystery’Vincent Fenton, the French producer who bills himself as FKJ (for French Kiwi Juice), collaborated with Chaz Bundick, who records as Toro y Moi, and Toro’s keyboardist, Anthony Ferraro, on a track from FKJ’s album due in June, “Vincent.” It’s three minutes of lush, wistful uncertainty: serenely blurred vocals, hovering keyboard tones, ambiguous chords that stay unresolved. “I love the drama because I never know what the ending’s like,” Bundick sings, matching the music. PARELESEsperanza Spalding, ‘Formwela 12’“Our bodies are Music/You cannot play/Music/Without the body/Dancing.” The 91-year-old dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, a former Alvin Ailey star, opens Esperanza Spalding’s latest with those lines of poetry; in the ensuing 13 minutes, she brings them to life. She glides and tilts across the floor of an open studio, surrounded by four dancers and four musicians — including Spalding, who uses her upright bass and a quiet, cooing voice to coax and support de Lavallade. Early in the performance, de Lavallade sits down beside her, laying an ear and a hand on the bass while Spalding plays. As the piece carries on, the band’s lush flourishes and pointillism are clearly coming in response to the dancers, as much as their steps are responding to the music. Mostly, everyone is focused on the guidance and the unhurried elegance of de Lavallade. The audio of this piece is a bonus track on the newly released vinyl version of Spalding’s “Songwrights Apothecary Lab.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOShabaka, ‘Explore Inner Space’Shabaka Hutchings begins this track improvising on a lone wood flute, against a backdrop of silence. Soon analog synthesizers and loops are pooling around him, and an electric guitar adds dewy, flickering plucks. The music never fully crescendos, but its mysterious serenity might invite to take up the charge of the track’s title. The tune comes from “Afrikan Culture,” the first solo EP released by this famed U.K.-based saxophonist, who has begun performing simply under the name Shabaka. RUSSONELLOMary Lattimore and Paul Sukeena, ‘Hundred Dollar Hoagie’The harpist Mary Lattimore and the guitarist Paul Sukeena, two experimental musicians and Philly-area expats who occasionally collaborate, have teamed up to release the stirring ambient album “West Kensington,” out Friday on the indie label Three Lobed recordings. The opener “Hundred Dollar Hoagie” announces itself humbly, with its playful title nodding to the all-time greatest regional slang word for a submarine sandwich, which does not quite prepare you for the seven-and-a-half minutes of otherworldly sublimity that it contains. Lattimore’s synthesizer chords and Sukeena’s warping, weeping guitar lines layer to create an almost lunar soundscape, pleasantly reminiscent of Brian Eno’s awe-struck 1983 masterwork “Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks.” ZOLADZ More

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      How Gossip Is Remaking Online Hip-Hop Media

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherIn the latest iteration of online hip-hop media, actual music can often seem like an afterthought. The current wave is full of gossip-focused websites, Instagram accounts and podcasts that have lent the online conversation about rap stars (and even more often, those who are proximate to them) the air of tabloidism.This phenomenon isn’t solely happening in hip-hop media — it’s true across music media, and in other fields as well — but the scale and rate of growth of these platforms might be unmatched in this space. The changes have been rapid, the product of an ever thirstier internet and a genre that is broader and more successful than ever and has more eyeballs on it than before, too.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the seismic shifts that the internet has brought to the coverage of rap stars, how online clutter rewards sensationalism and the possible paths forward.Guests:Jerry Barrow, head of content at HipHopDXAndre Gee, staff writer at ComplexRob Markman, vice president of content strategy at GeniusConnect 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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      Lil Keed, Up-and-Coming Atlanta Rapper, Dies at 24

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      The musician, a protégé of Young Thug, died on Friday in Los Angeles, his label said.Lil Keed, a budding, melodic rapper from Atlanta with a delicate voice that he often stretched into a helium-high, Auto-Tuned falsetto, died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 24.His death was confirmed on Saturday by a representative of his record label, 300 Entertainment, who did not specify a cause. Keed had been scheduled to perform at a music festival in Charlotte, N.C., on Saturday night.Born Raqhid Jevon Render on March 16, 1998, he hailed from the neighborhood known as Cleveland Avenue, for its main thoroughfare, where southwest Atlanta meets the suburb of East Point in Fulton County. He chronicled his turbulent upbringing there, surrounded by poverty, drugs and violence, in the three-part mixtape series “Trapped on Cleveland.” Its final installment was released in 2020.“I dig deep into my story and let everybody see what I went through, how I came up, and give them an insight on my life,” he said in an interview with Complex at the time.Lil Keed signed to 300 and Young Stoner Life Records, or YSL, in 2018, under the tutelage of his mentor, the melodic rapper Young Thug. Earlier this week, Young Thug and 27 others, including numerous rappers from the label, were charged in a major RICO indictment handed up by a grand jury in Fulton County. The indictment portrays YSL as a criminal street gang responsible for murders, robberies, drug dealing and more.Keed, who was not charged, responded in a graphic posted to social media that read: “YSL is a family, YSL is a label, YSL is a way of life, YSL is a lifestyle, YSL is not a gang.”In 2020, he was named to XXL magazine’s annual Freshman Class issue, a prominent launchpad for rappers, appearing on the cover alongside acts like Jack Harlow and Fivio Foreign. The year before, his breakout single, “Nameless,” a raunchy number with a singsong stickiness that became a regional radio hit and a streaming success, was certified gold.Keed, who released seven full-length projects in two years, worked widely with artists from his city and beyond, including Lil Yachty, Gunna, Future, Lil Uzi Vert and Roddy Ricch.His brother and frequent collaborator, the rapper Lil Gotit, reacted to his death Friday night on Instagram. “I did all my cries,” he wrote. “I know what u want me to do and that’s go hard for Mama Daddy Our Brothers.”Keed is also survived by his daughter, Naychur, and his girlfriend, known as Quana Bandz. “What am I supposed to tell Naychur?” she posted. “What am I gone tell our new baby?”Confident and winning, with a wide smile and an open-minded eagerness, Keed was frank about his ambition to grow beyond the often grim Southern street rap tales that first got him noticed. “I wanna be a megastar,” he said to XXL. “I don’t wanna be no superstar. I wanna be a megastar.”Through his unlikely friendship with the advertising executive and motivational guru Gary Vaynerchuk, whom Keed name-dropped in song, he nearly appeared in a 2019 Super Bowl commercial for Planters with Mr. Peanut and Alex Rodriguez. However, the role fell through. At a studio summit later that year, Mr. Vaynerchuk encouraged Keed to expand his presence on TikTok to reach new audiences.“I’mma do this,” Keed said, energized by the advice. “And I’ll be like, he told me.”His new music was starting to reflect that, Keed said. “Back then, I was talking about stuff like typical rappers: shooting, killing,” he told Complex of his beginnings, “because that’s what everybody wanted to hear.”He continued: “I was just talking about the stuff that happened in the streets and stuff around me. Now that I done grew from all that and I done moved myself out of that situation, I’m letting folks know why I was so trapped on Cleveland, as far as me going to the hood every day and all the shootouts. I just had to move myself out of the situation to better myself and my family.” More

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      Kendrick Lamar Is a Mortal Icon on ‘Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers'

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      The Pulitzer Prize-winning social commentator rapper returns after five years with “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” an album about what’s broken on the inside.Kendrick Lamar has long extracted maximum power from his blend of the interior and the global, making him a particular kind of generational superstar — one who shoulders the weight of others. In a few places on “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” the rapper’s fifth studio album, he laments from the top of the mountain he’s spent the last decade climbing. These are depleted, lonely incantations: “I can’t please everybody,” “I choose me, I’m sorry.”Lamar, 34, is an astonishing technician, a keen observer of Black life, a proletarian superhero, an artist who reckons with moral weight in his work. But judging by “Mr. Morale,” which was released on Friday, he is also anguished, ravaged by his past and grappling with how to make tomorrow better, besieged by a collision of self-doubt and obstinacy. And fallible, too.Five years have passed since Lamar’s last album, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “DAMN.,” and even that gap has the air of the moral to it — Lamar as pop culture refusenik, a thinker who discourses at no one’s pace but his own.But maybe five years is just how long it takes to shake free of the long echoes of other people’s perceptions and expectations. The Lamar of “Mr. Morale” sounds lonely and tense, increasingly aware of the burdens placed upon him by his upbringing and potentially unsure about his capacities for overcoming them. He does these calculations over some of the most desolate production of his career. He is withdrawing in more ways than one.If “To Pimp a Butterfly” from 2015 was Lamar’s social polemical peak, and “DAMN.” from 2017 was his anxiety album — the product of realizing how his very private thoughts were becoming very public and scrutinized — then “Mr. Morale” is about retreating within and pondering your accountability to the person in the mirror, and to the handful of people you keep closest. (A recurrent voice on the album is that of Whitney Alford, Lamar’s longtime romantic partner, though perhaps no longer, depending how you read “Mother I Sober.”)The Return of Kendrick LamarThe five-year wait for a new album by the Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper is finally over.New Album: Kendrick Lamar’s fifth studio LP, “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” is one of the most ardently anticipated albums in years.Review: “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers” is an album about what’s broken on the inside, our music critic writes.Pulitzer Prize: In 2017, Lamar became the first rapper to receive the Pulitzer Prize for music, winning the award for his album “DAMN.”2014 Profile: Eight years ago, a young M.C. from Los Angeles was on a quest to become the best rapper in the world.This begins with family, and two of the most moving songs on the album deal with Lamar’s parents. On “Father Time” he details how his father raised him to be unforgiving of himself, and to bury his uncertainties: “Men should never show feelings, being sensitive never helped/His mama died, I asked him why he goin’ back to work so soon?/His first reply was, ‘Son, that’s life, the bills got no silver spoon.’”“Mother I Sober” — which features sagging vocals from Beth Gibbons of Portishead, a missed opportunity — traverses domestic abuse and Lamar’s frustration at his own childhood inaction, but then telescopes out to his own failings, in the form of infidelity. Hearing Lamar apparently confess to this kind of intimate disloyalty is part of an immolation of the ethical persona he’s cultivated for years (or perhaps had thrust upon him — “Like it when they pro-Black, but I’m more Kodak Black,” he raps on “Savior”).He goes even further on “We Cry Together,” an outlandish tit-for-tat about a profoundly broken relationship, with the role of his partner vividly speak-rapped by the actress Taylour Paige. The song pulses with a startlingly raw toxicity, even if construed as character work. It is also, perhaps perversely, one of the most musically successful songs on the album, a shuddering alignment of rhythm and sentiment.The opposite is true of “Auntie Diaries,” in which Lamar raps about two people close to him who came out as transgender. He does this in an earnest but clunky way — there is misgendering, and there is deadnaming. And in his retelling of his childhood ignorance, he invokes, and repeats, a homophobic slur several times. These are faux pas, and so is the airless, joyless production — it is as sonically uncommitted as it is apathetic.Lamar is the rare popular musician who receives almost universal acclaim, not only artistically, but often as a kind of paragon of virtue. But there are all sorts of complexities and heterodoxies that are suffocated by uncomplicated embrace. “Mr. Morale” appears to be a corrective for that — it is an album that aims to repel, or if not quite that, then at least is at peace with alienating some of its audience.It is also a reminder of how rare it is these days to encounter popular music with unstable politics, and a gut punch to the presumption that progressive art and ideas always go hand in hand.On two different songs, Lamar expresses a kind of sympathy for R. Kelly, who has been convicted of sex trafficking and racketeering. And one of the voices that appears throughout the album is that of the Florida rapper Kodak Black, who has in the past faced sexual assault charges. (He later pleaded guilty to lesser assault charges.) Opting to work with Kodak is both creative and political provocation — it suggests Lamar believes in redemption (or perhaps that everyone is flawed, some more publicly than others), but also feels like an implicit rebuke to those who don’t see poetry, pain or progress in the work of Kodak or his peers. (Indeed, it has plenty of all of that.)These are dares of a kind — in a way, they are the most public-minded decisions on this album, which often feels insular, lyrically and musically. “Mr. Morale” is probably Lamar’s least tonally consistent work. Unlike on “DAMN.,” where Lamar tried to smooth the edges of his songs and arrived at his most commercially appealing album, “Mr. Morale” — on which Lamar works with his frequent collaborators Sounwave and DJ Dahi, Beach Noise, Duval Timothy, and others — is rangy and structurally erratic, full of mid-song beat switches, sorrowful piano and a few moments of dead air.At his best, Lamar embodies the deep creative promise of the art form of rapping — he provides hope that there are ways of agglomerating syllables that haven’t yet been thought of, that word and cadence and meaning can still collide in unanticipated ways. His voice is squeaky and malleable, and it’s often most riveting when untethered from simple rhythms. But there is a difference between effort and achievement. And when Lamar is under-delivering — say, on “Crown” — the air fills with expectancy: Surely more is just around the corner?That said, one gift of the Lamar aura is the way he frees those around him to reach for transcendence. Ghostface Killah, a veteran so accepted as a lyrical hulk as to be taken for granted, appears on “Purple Hearts” with an astonishing, floating verse. Lamar’s cousin Baby Keem also shines on “Savior (Interlude),” as does Kodak Black on “Silent Hill.”Such is the enviable house Lamar has built over the last decade, one that demands more of everyone who visits. But “Mr. Morale” reveals him to be a titan who is a victim of idolatry. Lamar knows that in truth, no one is a hero, and maybe no one should be. He is just a man. Allow him that.Kendrick Lamar“Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers”(pgLang/Top Dawg Entertainment/Aftermath/Interscope) More