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      Mavis Staples and Levon Helm’s Last Show, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Pusha T, Laura Veirs, Helado Negro 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.Mavis Staples and Levon Helm, ‘You Got to Move’Back in 2011, Mavis Staples and her band visited Woodstock, N.Y., to perform at the barn-studio-theater of the Band’s drummer Levon Helm; they had appeared together at the Band’s “The Last Waltz,” in 1976. Helm’s band joined hers, which included her sister Yvonne Staples on backup vocals, and they recorded the show. More than a decade later, an album, “Carry Me Home,” is due May 20. Staples gave “You Got to Move,” a gospel standard, her full contralto commitment; the guitarists Rick Holmstrom and Larry Campbell traded blues twang and bluegrassy runs. It was just another good-timey show in two long careers, but it would be their last together; Helm died in 2012. JON PARELESPusha T featuring Ye, ‘Dreamin of the Past’Nostalgia is not a concept often associated with Pusha T; even when he’s mining his coke-dealing past for material (and best believe, he usually is), his rhymes have the vivid immediacy of the present tense. But the classic, Old-Kanye production heard on “Dreamin of the Past” — revolving around a sped-up sample of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” — gives the song a halcyon glow that’s playfully at odds with his unrepentant flow. As ever, on this highlight from his latest solo album “It’s Almost Dry,” Push’s lyrics pop with poetic detail (“We hollowed the walls in back of bodegas”) and riotous cleverness: At one point, he boasts of keeping people “on the bikes like Amblin.” LINDSAY ZOLADZShakira and Rauw Alejandro, ‘Te Felicito’​​Robot love, funky bass lines, Rauw Alejandro’s head in a refrigerator: Welcome to Shakira and the Puerto Rican reggaeton star’s first collaboration. “Te Felicito” is a bitter send-off to a paramour whose love has been a charade that marries some of the superstars’ signature gifts: the Colombian singer’s eccentric choreography and Rauw’s penchant for funk-infused reggaeton. The Shak stamp of approval is a sought-after trophy for young artists ascending the ranks of the industry — just another sign that Alejandro is here to stay in all his freaky glory. ISABELIA HERRERAMidas the Jagaban featuring Liya, ‘420’Marijuana anthems abound on April 20. Here’s a lighter-than-smoke one from Nigeria, sung by the always-masked female songwriter Midas the Jagaban and a guest, Liya. The tapping, airborne polyrhythms of Afrobeats, topped by labyrinthine echoed vocals, provide just enough propulsion and haze as the women declare, “Whatever I do/I do it better when I smoke my marijuana.” PARELESPinkPantheress featuring Willow, ‘Where You Are’To capture the way a breakup can upend everything, PinkPantheress enlisted two beat experts — Skrillex and Mura Masa — to share production on “Where You Are,” along with Willow (Smith), who delivers full-throated hooks. They sing about the limbo between wanting to move on and longing to stay together: “I know it will never be the same,” Willow wails. The song is a vortex of obsession, with a brisk beat, a fingerpicking pattern (sampled from Paramore’s “Never Let This Go”) and vocals that diffuse into echoes and wordless syllables as PinkPantheress (breathy) and Willow (desperate and dramatic) toss around all the possibilities of separation, confrontation and wishing for a reunion. PARELESLaura Veirs, ‘Winter Windows’Laura Veirs has been a folk-rock fixture since the early aughts, but over the past few years she’s experienced a great deal of personal and professional change. Shortly before the pandemic, she divorced her longtime collaborator Tucker Martine, who had produced many of her albums — including “My Echo” from 2020, which was partially about their split. Her forthcoming album “Found Light,” due July 8, is her first album without Martine and the first she co-produced herself. Veirs sounds fittingly reinvigorated and inspired on the lead single “Winter Windows,” an antsy, guitar-driven meditation on motherhood and moving on. “I used to watch them watch you light up every room,” she sings, a gritty resilience in her voice. “Now it’s up to me, the lighting I can do.” ZOLADZSorry, ‘There’s So Many People That Want to Be Loved’On the London group Sorry’s charming “There’s So Many People That Want to Be Loved,” Asha Lorenz sings with the sort of sweet, earnest guilelessness that Mo Tucker brought to the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours.” “See them in the nightclubs, barking up the walls, head in their hands in the bathroom stalls,” she notes of all the lonely people she observes. But as the song gradually builds from unassuming to epic, “There’s So Many People” becomes less a lament and more a celebration of communal human longing — a feeling to be cherished, and, ironically, shared. ZOLADZRavyn Lenae, ‘M.I.A.’It’s been four years since the Chicago R&B singer Ravyn Lenae dropped her “Crush” EP, a Steve Lacy-produced release that stitched her sky-high vocals with funky bass lines and delicious electro-soul textures. For “M.I.A.,” her first single from her debut album “Hypnos,” Lenae pairs with the producer Sango for something a little more breezy. Over a buoyant, syncopated Afrobeats production, a gleaming synth expands and contracts under Lenae’s airy falsetto, as she coos about finally making it: “I’m gonna run the town, ain’t nothing in my way.” HERRERARuth Radelet, ‘Crimes’“Is it easy to start over?” Ruth Radelet wonders on the chorus of her debut solo single, and it’s safe to assume that’s an autobiographical sentiment. For nearly two decades, Radelet was the frontwoman of the moody electro-pop group Chromatics, who disbanded last summer amid drama surrounding a mysterious (and possibly nonexistent) final album. On the glassy, synth-driven “Crimes,” though, Radelet sounds ready to wipe the slate clean. The verses have a bit of a steely bite (“I know what they’re telling me is true/I know I could never be like you”), but the lush chorus is awash in her signature, dreamy melancholy. ZOLADZHelado Negro, ‘Ya No Estoy Aquí’Helado Negro’s music may be dreamlike and crepuscular, but don’t confuse his songs for simple lullabies. “Ya No Estoy Aquí,” his latest single, revisits the celestial meanderings that have defined his work: soft, pulsing drum loops and wobbling, echoing synths. The Ecuadorean-American artist sings about isolation and melancholy alongside harmonic melodies from the Chicago singer-songwriter Kaina. “Ojalá me estoy volviendo loco/Por lo menos tengo con quien puedo hablar/alucinaciones,” he intones (“Hopefully I’m going crazy/At least I have someone to talk to/Hallucinations”). Underneath that soothing exterior, Helado Negro’s music holds a special power: the capacity to engage difficult feelings. HERRERALou Roy, ‘U.D.I.D.’The Los Angeles songwriter Lou Roy regularly juggles euphoria and disillusionment. Her debut album, “Pure Chaos,” is due April 29, and in “U.D.I.D.” — “You don’t I don’t” — she probes a relationship that seems about to fissure. “I always want you here/but I’m starting to get the deal,” she sings. The track, which she co-produced with Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties, has an upbeat 4/4 pop thump, but some sonic elements — vocals, keyboards, guitar chords — linger like contrails, hinting that the romance may already be a memory. PARELESCharles Mingus, ‘The Man Who Never Sleeps’One heavy day in 1973, Columbia Records dropped every jazz musician on its roster besides Miles Davis. The bassist and composer Charles Mingus (whose 100th birthday would have been on Friday) was among them. So were Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans. But just months before that, the label had arranged to have a performance by Mingus’s new sextet recorded at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London. The tapes were ultimately shelved. They’ll finally be released on Saturday, Record Store Day, as the triple-disc set “The Lost Album From Ronnie Scott’s.” On “The Man Who Never Sleeps,” Mingus is lit up by the antic virtuosity of the young trumpeter and Dizzy Gillespie protégé Jon Faddis, barely 19, who had just joined the band. Just before Columbia would press a final symbolic seal on an entire jazz generation, you can hear a torch being passed. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOFred Moten, Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver, ‘The Abolition of Art, the Abolition of Freedom, the Abolition of You and Me’“Freedom is too close to slavery for us to be easy with that jailed imagining,” the poet and theorist Fred Moten says in a coolly controlled voice, speaking over the rustle of Gerald Cleaver’s drums and the dark pull of Brandon López’s open bass strings. There’s a doom-metal energy here, and Sun Ra’s relationship to darkness — as a substance. López hangs on the high strings for a moment at the end of Moten’s phrase, aware that the thought needs time to settle and land, then comes home to the root of the minor key. In the past 20 years Moten has become perhaps the leading thinker on Black performance, writing volumes of poetry and theory that dance with the ways in which Diasporic expression resists definition and capture. “The Abolition of Art” is the first track from a new album, “Moten/López/Cleaver,” putting that engagement directly to music and sacrificing none of its complexity or wit. RUSSONELLO More

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      Will Smith, Before the Slap

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherWill Smith’s outburst at the Oscars last month derailed the broadcast, his coronation as best actor later that night and the public good-guy image he’d carefully cultivated for several decades.But while much ink has been spilled about the slap and its meaning, far less has been devoted to what the slap truly overshadowed: the breadth and depth of Smith’s acting career. Since the late 1980s, after he transitioned from full-time rapper to sometime television actor, Smith has been building an impressive résumé onscreen, one with creative highs that have often been overshadowed by the sheer scale of his A-list success.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Smith’s long journey from rapper to television star to bankable superhero icon, how his creative choices have paralleled his personal journey and some possible options for his next steps.Guest:Soraya Nadia McDonald, senior culture critic for AndscapeConnect 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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      Chika Has Never Lost Sight of Her Dream

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      5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More

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      Saweetie Shares Her Meditation Practice

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      5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More

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      ‘Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain’ Review: Influential Rappers, Still Smokin’

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      This documentary by Estevan Oriol chronicles the rise of a group that he has been around since its inception.In 1991, just a few years after Public Enemy released the single “Bring the Noise,” Cypress Hill, a hip-hop trio out of South Gate, near Los Angeles, released a debut that followed that exhortation to astonishing effect. The rapper B-Real delivered his anti-cop, pro-weed rhymes in a taunting, nasal tone, countered by the abrupt barks of Sen Dog. DJ Muggs created beats that were inventively off-kilter and put high-pitched whistles and sirens under and around hooks that were more than earworms — these tracks got under your whole skin.Directed and narrated by Estevan Oriol, a photographer and filmmaker who’s been around the group since its inception, “Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain,” named for one of its signature songs, is an often engaging chronicle of the group (which has sold more than 20 million albums), one that is probably best appreciated by fans. B-Real has harrowing tales of his experiences in gangs as a teenager. As he and his cohorts started to make music, they imposed an impressive discipline on themselves, doing two or three years of woodshedding at DJ Muggs’s home before seeking out a recording deal.Their early music was suffused with threat. One of the group’s first hits was titled “How I Could Just Kill a Man,” and its debut album kicked off with an anti-police song titled “Pigs.” Their stance morphed to some extent as they rapped about what they were in favor of — which is prodigious marijuana use. Whatever the mode, the exhilarating abrasiveness of the Cypress Hill sound held true. And in the contemporary interview segments here the members are modest, soft-spoken, thoughtful and hardly at all burned out.Cypress Hill: Insane in the BrainNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. Watch on Showtime. More

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      DJ Kay Slay, Fiery Radio Star and Rap Mixtape Innovator, Dies at 55

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      The onetime graffiti artist and New York D.J. for Hot 97 was known for breaking artists and stoking beefs that gave fuel to the careers of Nas, Jay-Z, 50 Cent and more.DJ Kay Slay, who served as a crucial bridge between hip-hop generations, developing from a teenage B-boy and graffiti writer into an innovative New York radio personality known for his pugnacious mixtapes that stoked rap beefs, broke artists and helped change the music business, died on Sunday in New York. He was 55.Slay had faced “a four-month battle with Covid-19,” his family said in a statement confirming his death.Few figures in hip-hop could trace their continued presence from the genre’s earliest days to the digital present like he could. In late-1970s New York, Slay was a young street artist known as Dez, plastering his spray-painted tag on building walls and subway cars, as chronicled in the cult documentaries “Wild Style” and “Style Wars.”Then he was the Drama King, a.k.a. Slap Your Favorite DJ, hosting the late-night “Drama Hour” on the influential radio station Hot 97 (WQHT 97.1 FM) for more than two decades before his illness took him off the air.“Cats know it’s no holds barred with me,” Slay told The New York Times in 2003, when the paper dubbed him “Hip-Hop’s One-Man Ministry of Insults.” In addition to providing a ring and roaring encouragement for battles between Jay-Z and Nas, 50 Cent and Ja Rule, Slay gave an early platform to local artists and crews like the Diplomats, G-Unit, Terror Squad and the rapper Papoose, both on his show and on the mixtapes that made his name as much as theirs.As mixtapes evolved from homemade D.J. blends on actual cassettes to a semiofficial promotional tool and underground economy of CDs sold on street corners, in flea markets, record stores, bodegas and barber shops, Slay advanced with the times, eventually releasing his own compilation albums on Columbia Records. Once illicit and unsanctioned, mixtapes now represent a vital piece of the music streaming economy, with artists and major labels releasing their own album-like official showcases that top the Billboard charts.“You were really the first to bring the personality to the mixtape,” Funkmaster Flex, a fellow Hot 97 D.J., once said to Slay during a radio interview. “That was very unusual. We were just used to the music and the exclusives.”Slay, who became immersed in drugs and spent time behind bars before making it in music, responded, “I had to find an angle and run with it.”He was born Keith Grayson in New York on Aug. 14, 1966, and raised in East Harlem. As a child, he was drawn to disco, dancing the Hustle; when early hip-hop D.J.s began turning breakbeats from those songs into proto-rap music, he traveled to the Bronx to observe and participate in the rising culture.“I had to see what was going on and bring it back to my borough,” he told Spin magazine in 2003. “So I used to hop on the 6 train and go up to the Bronx River Center [projects] to see Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation rock.”He soon took up the affiliated art forms of breakdancing and graffiti, even casually rapping with his friends. “Every element of the game, I participated in,” Slay told Flex. But street art became his chief passion, first under the tag Spade 429 and later Dez TFA, which he shortened to Dez.“I wanted a nice small name that I could get up everywhere and do it quick without getting grabbed,” he said at the time. “You’re telling the world something — like, I am somebody. I’m an artist.”Amid the city’s crackdown on graffiti, Dez took on the name Kay Slay (“After a while you get tired of writing the same name,” he said of his street-art days) and developed a fascination with turntables. “Boy, you better turntable those books,” he recalled his disappointed parents saying. But in need of money and with little interest in school, he soon turned to drugs and stickups.Kay Slay at MTV Studios in 2007. “The game was boring until I came around,” he said. Brian Ach/WireImageIn 1989, Slay was arrested and served a year in jail for drug possession with intent to sell. On getting out, he told Spin, “I started noticing Brucie B, Kid Capri, Ron G. They were doing mixtapes, doing parties and getting paid lovely.” He sold T-shirts, socks and jeans to buy D.J. equipment and worked at a Bronx facility that assisted people with H.I.V. and AIDS.“I can’t count the number of people I saw die,” he told The Times of that period. “Working there really made me begin to appreciate life.”In the mid-1990s, Slay found the professional music business still unwelcoming, and he began to call out, in colorful language on his releases, those label executives he thought of as useless. “I told myself I would be so big that one day the same people I was begging for records would be begging me to play their records,” he said.It was that irascible spirit that helped endear him to rappers who had their own scores to settle. In 2001, Slay had a breakthrough when he premiered “Ether,” the blistering Nas dis of Jay-Z that revitalized headline hip-hop beef following the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. His radio slots and mixtapes became a proving ground, and he later started a magazine called Straight Stuntin’.“He’s like the Jerry Springer of rap,” one D.J. told The Times. “All the fights happen on his show.”Slay’s gruff manner and mid-song shouts would go on to influence his contemporaries, like DJ Clue, a onetime rival, and those who followed, like DJ Whoo Kid and DJ Drama. Alberto Martinez, the Harlem drug dealer known as Alpo, who was killed last year while in witness protection, even hosted a Slay tape from prison.“The game was boring until I came around,” Slay said.He is survived by his mother, Sheila Grayson, along with his best friend and business manager Jarrod Whitaker.In Slay’s on-air conversation with Funkmaster Flex, the other D.J. marveled at the creativity of Slay’s boasts and threats — “If you stop the bank, then I’m gonna rob the bank!” — and asked his colleague if he ever regretted the shocking things he’d bellowed.“I said some foul things, man, on some mixtapes when I was not in full touch with myself,” Slay replied. “But I’m not angry at myself for doing it, because the boy that I was made the man I am today.” More

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      Lil Durk and Morgan Wallen Return to the Top of the Album Chart

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      The country star’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” has had tremendous staying power, landing at No. 2 in its 66th week out.The Chicago rap mainstay Lil Durk returns to No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, with his latest LP, “7220,” beating out new releases by Jack White and Fivio Foreign after its debut a month ago.But the greater accomplishment this week may be the continued staying power of Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” which is No. 2 in its 66th week out.Released in January 2021, “Dangerous” held the No. 1 spot for its first 10 weeks, and has remained in the Top 10 every week but one, last December, when it was pushed out by holiday albums. Incredibly, 49 of its 66 weeks have been in the Top 5; quite a few of those were spent while Wallen was in a form of industry purgatory — removed from many radio playlists, ignored by the Grammy Awards — after he was caught on video using a racial slur. He apologized (more than once), though Wallen’s fans never gave up on him, and he has largely returned to the mainstream with a major tour.For its latest week, “Dangerous” had the equivalent of 46,500 sales in the United States, according to Luminate, the tracking service behind the Billboard charts. That means Wallen came within about 500 copies of retaking No. 1: Lil Durk’s “7220” was credited with 47,000. (Luminate’s publicly reported numbers are rounded.) Wallen may even have contributed to holding himself at second place: he is featured on “Broadway Girls,” the most popular cut on “7220.”In a slow sales week, however, neither total is impressive. The 47,000 equivalent sales figure for “7220” — which incorporates its 69 million streams and about 1,000 copies sold as a complete package — is the lowest for a No. 1 album in more than three years, since “Hoodie SZN” by the rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie notched its third time at the top in February 2019 with similar numbers.Also this week, White’s “Fear of the Dawn” opens at No. 4 with 42,000 equivalents, including 24,000 copies sold on vinyl.The “Encanto” soundtrack is No. 3 and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” is No. 5. Two hip-hop albums open in the lower half of the Top 10: 42 Dugg and EST Gee’s “Last Ones Left” is No. 7, and Fivio Foreign’s debut studio album, “B.I.B.L.E.,” starts at No. 9. More

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      Lizzo’s Disco Dance Party, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Phoebe Bridgers, KeiyaA, Wild Pink 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.Lizzo, ‘About Damn Time’The disco revival continues on Lizzo’s “About Damn Time,” which features a rubbery, “Get Lucky” bass line and a bridge overflowing with Diana Ross glitter (“I’m comin’ out tonight, I’m comin’ out tonight”). More of a crowd-pleaser than last year’s Cardi B duet “Rumors,” “About Damn Time” is the first official single from Lizzo’s long-awaited album “Special,” which will be out July 15. If this track is an indication, she hasn’t switched up the formula too much, and at times — the Instagram-caption one-liners; the obligatory flute solo — it can feel a little paint-by-numbers Lizzo. But the song is best when she leans more earnestly into its emotional center, belting, “I’ve been so down and under pressure, I’m way too fine to be this stressed.” LINDSAY ZOLADZAmelia Moore, ‘Crybaby’In “Crybaby,” Amelia Moore moans, “Do you like to make me cry, baby, because you do it all the time.” The production heaves and twitches with up-to-the-minute electronics: reversed tones, programmed drums, little keyboard loops, computer-tuned vocals. But the song’s masochistic drama stays rooted in the blues, and in the ways a human voice can break and leap. JON PARELESCisco Swank and Luke Titus featuring Phoelix, ‘Some Things Take Time’The multi-instrumentalist bedroom beat-makers of Instagram, who live by the loop and have lately turned overdubbing into a visual art form — or, at least, into visuals — are a mini-movement by now: Jacob Collier, DOMi and JD Beck, Julius Rodriguez. The list continues, and it’s bound to grow. If they’re all different, most are united in their worship of Stevie Wonder, more for his solo-studio mastery than for the extended-form genius of his compositions. The moment is understandably more interested in texture and groove than in duration or arc. Then it tracks that “Some Things Take Time” — the fun-loving debut album from Cisco Swank and Luke Titus, a duo of young polymaths — is barely the size of a mixtape: just 24 minutes across 11 tracks. And wisely, the tracks themselves aren’t overstuffed. The album’s title tune is a breezy blend of Titus’s sizzling snare patter; Swank’s rich piano harmony, no-notes-wasted bass line and synthesizer strings; and the falsetto flurries of Phoelix, the Noname accomplice who contributes a guest spot. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOKay Flock featuring Cardi B, Dougie B and Bory300, ‘Shake It’A deeply strategic song that sounds deliciously happenstance, “Shake It” solves a few conundrums at once. First, for more than a year, sample drill has been the prevailing sound of New York rap, primarily from Brooklyn and the Bronx. But even though artists like Kay Flock and B-Lovee have had minor radio breakthroughs, the sound could still benefit from an ambassador. Enter Cardi B, who is due for a re-emergence, and is almost certainly the only mainstream rap star currently working who could hop on this rowdy of a drill song so seamlessly. Which isn’t to say without effort: This is a return to adaptable form for Cardi, reminiscent of the way she adopted Kodak Black’s flow on her breakout single “Bodak Yellow.” Her verse here is punchy and clipped — she’s morphing to the sound, not imposing herself onto it.Inside Lizzo’s WorldThe Grammy-winning singer is known for her fierce lyrics, fashion and personality.‘Big Grrrls’: The singer wanted a new kind of backup dancer. In her pursuit of proper representation, she created a TV show.‘Feel-Good Music’: Lizzo says her music is as much about building yourself up as it is about accepting where you are.Why ‘Truth Hurts’ Matters: In 2020, The New York Times Magazine put her No. 1 hit on its list of songs that define the moment.Diary of a Song: Watch how Lizzo made “Juice,” a party song that packs all of her joy and charm into three danceable minutes.Technically, this song belongs to Kay Flock, who is currently in jail: He was arrested in December and charged with murder. It also features Bory300 and Dougie B, another promising Bronx rapper who has the most limber verse here. Unlike the sublimated anxiety of the recent Fivio Foreign hit “City of Gods,” which strains to mold his brusque style into something soft-edged and arena-scaled, “Shake It” is nothing but abandon. It’s true to sample drill heritage, with bits of Akon’s “Bananza (Belly Dancer)” and Sean Paul’s “Temperature” woven throughout. But it has its eyes on bigger targets. An early snippet was made available as part of the highly viral New York video show “Sidetalk,” a favorite of insiders and voyeurs alike, giving “Shake It” a running start toward the kind of online ubiquity that makes for a contemporary pop hit without forsaking the essence of drill. JON CARAMANICAEdoheart, ‘Pandemonium’“Pandemonium” is the explosive title track of a new EP by Edoheart, a singer and producer who was born in Nigeria and is based in New York. It’s four minutes of brisk, skewed, constantly shifting African funk with rhythmic double vision: staggered guitar arpeggios, sputtering drumbeats, distant horns and overlapping voices proclaiming, “Change must come!” and, believably, “I’m free!” PARELESKeiyaA, ‘Camille’s Daughter’KeiyaA — the songwriter, instrumentalist and producer Chakeiya Camille Richmond — liquefies everything around her in “Camille’s Daughter.” Keyboard chords melt into wah-wah and echo, the beat drifts in late and haltingly, and KeiyaA starts and ends verses where she pleases, trailed by ever-shifting clouds of her own backup vocals. “Never will you replicate me,” she taunts, utterly secure in every self-made fluctuation. PARELESNaima Bock, ‘Giant Palm’Weightless and unpredictable (“I float high, high above it all”), the Glastonbury-born artist Naima Bock’s “Giant Palm” sounds a song you’d hear in a pleasant dream. Bock used to be in the British art-rock group Goat Girl, but her solo material leans more into the traditions of European folk and the off-kilter pop she heard during a childhood spent in Brazil. There’s a bit of ’70s Brian Eno in her vocal delivery and an echo of John Cale in her arrangements, but the fusion of her disparate cultural influences makes for an enchanting sound entirely Bock’s own. ZOLADZPhoebe Bridgers, ‘Sidelines’In Phoebe Bridgers’s world, even the most wholehearted love song is usually bittersweet: “Had nothing to prove, ’til you came into my life, gave me something to lose,” she sings on “Sidelines,” her first new song since her breakout 2020 album “Punisher”; it will be featured in the forthcoming Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s “Conversations With Friends.” “I’m not afraid of anything at all,” Bridgers insists at the beginning of the song, before listing off a series of potential fears (earthquakes, plane crashes, growing up) in the sort of granular detail that makes her previous statement sound a little ironic. “Sidelines” features what has by now become Bridgers’s signature multi-tracked vocals — here, they glimmer with an almost Vocoder-like iridescence — which make her sound at once numb and, quite poignantly, wrestling with something ghostly right under the surface. ZOLADZWild Pink, ‘Q. DeGraw’Wild Pink hails from Brooklyn, but the group specializes in the sort of open-air, stargazing indie rock that usually gets associated with the Pacific Northwest. Like its acclaimed 2021 album “A Billion Little Lights,” its towering new single “Q. Degraw” shows Wild Pink’s flair for the epic, but it’s less an anthemic rocker than a slow-smoldering mood piece. The frontman John Ross’s muffled vocals are buried under distortion that obscures them as diffusely as a moon behind clouds, though the moments they become legible are especially affecting. “I’ve been to hell and back again,” he murmurs, before adding tenderly, “I know you’ve been to hell too.” ZOLADZKisskadee, ‘Black Hole Era’Kisskadee pulls together progressive-rock (the Canterbury school to be precise), astronomy, chamber-pop, computer sound manipulation and faith in resurrection in “Black Hole Era.” The music is rooted in a lurching piano more-or-less waltz — the meters shift — and it grows ever more programmed, overdubbed, manipulated and elastic. A lot of transformations happen within five minutes. PARELESFKA twigs, ‘Playscape’FKA twigs keeps working her art and fashion connections. “Playscape,” with a diversely cast video that she directed, is a showcase for wool clothing and Isamu Noguchi sculptures. After a sustained intro — isolated syllables and vocal harmonies — that hints at both Meredith Monk and Take 5, she goes full late-1970s punk, channeling the wail and saxophone of X-Ray Spex to remake a song with terminology that survived into the 21st century: “Identity.” With a mostly one-note melody, FKA twigs wails, “Identity! When you look in the mirror do you see yourself?” It’s not a new song, but it’s still pointed. PARELESJoel Ross, ‘Benediction’With his octet, Parables, the vibraphonist Joel Ross plays what could be called chorales, though they involve no vocals. The group’s repertoire grew out of a series of casual improvisations that Ross played and recorded years ago with the saxophonist Sergio Tabanico. Ross went back and pulled small curves and dashes of melody out of those recordings, then taught them to the octet by ear. They developed into entire pieces over time, through a process of collective weaving, until each tune had taken on an illusion of contained endlessness, like Maya Lin’s land sculptures or an old song of praise. Indeed, Ross built the octet’s new album, “The Parable of the Poet,” around the structure of a church service. But these seven tracks don’t seek to raise the rafters so much as waft slowly up toward them. “Benediction,” the final track, begins with a sublimely peaceful intro from the young pianist Sean Mason; at the end, the track fades with the band still savoring the melody in harmonized communion. RUSSONELLO More