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      ‘All the Streets Are Silent’ Review: Hip-Hop and Skateboarding Collide

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      This documentary is a portrait of downtown New York in the late 1980s and early ’90s that revels in nostalgia.In the late 1980s and early ’90s, long before hypebeasts spent hours waiting for coveted drops outside the Supreme store in SoHo, skaters assembled at a smaller shop on Lafayette Street. There, they would smoke and watch skate videos, listen to music and crack jokes with friends.“All the Streets Are Silent,” a documentary from the director, Jeremy Elkin, is a portrait of that time, capturing the transformative moment when hip-hop and skateboarding culture converged in New York. It draws on archival footage of influential figures like Justin Pierce and Harold Hunter, among dozens of others, and incorporates new interviews with major players like Fab 5 Freddy and Darryl McDaniels, of Run-DMC. Throughout, Elkin explores how racial associations with both subcultures crumbled as their worlds collided.The film revels in fuzzy, intimate home videos from the period, courtesy of the narrator, Eli Gesner, who spent much of his youth filming the scene on his camcorder. There are shots of skaters dodging traffic at Astor Place or partying at the now defunct hip-hop nexus Club Mars. At one point, a young Jay-Z appears, rapping at lightning speed over a breakbeat. The film immerses us in this world, rendering a loving, tender homage to the city’s street culture before it went global.Ultimately, “All the Streets Are Silent” has little more to give than nostalgia. An ending that considers the mainstream explosion of these subcultures is ambiguous and offers surface-level analysis. The film excels when it harnesses the wistful thrill of a bygone era, reminding us of a rich, creative past that deserves ample recognition.All the Streets Are SilentNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour and 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      When Pop Music Trolls Grow Up

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      Over the past month, the Top 5 of the Billboard 200 featured debuts by Tyler, the Creator and Doja Cat, two artists who, early in their careers, sometimes functioned as trolls. They are children of the internet with a taste for friction — Tyler as the leader of the raucous, parent-unsettling Odd Future crew, and Doja as an absurdist with a reckless streak.Now they’re at the center of pop, and their new albums represent different ways of maturing in the spotlight. Doja is a musical centrist, but imbues her songs with sexual friskiness and light camp. Tyler, eager to show off his gift for straight-ahead hip-hop (a world he’s still somewhat excluded from), has moved on from trolling outsiders to trolling insiders.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how these two musicians have navigated paths from the margins to the center, and about whether, in order to be an effective 2020s pop star, you need to have a little bit of troll in you after all.Guest:Justin Charity, staff writer at The Ringer and co-host of the “Sound Only” podcast More

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      Pop Smoke’s Memory Lives On, and 14 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Xenia Rubinos, Swedish House Mafia, Soccer Mommy 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.Pop Smoke, ‘More Time’“Faith,” the second posthumous album from Pop Smoke, includes collaborations with Kanye West, Dua Lipa, 42 Dugg, Future and others. But this track, early in the album, is jarring and stark. Not simply because it’s still eerie to hear Pop Smoke rapping with a blend of menace and joy, but because of its chilling beat — produced in part by the rapper’s longtime collaborator Rico Beats, but also in part by Nicholas Britell, who has scored “Moonlight” and “Succession.” It is a familiar trick, these reverberating keys that stand stern sentry, but no less effective for it. Here is a splash of theater more visceral than any radio hit, any pop crossover. JON CARAMANICAXenia Rubinos, ‘Working All the Time’Xenia Rubinos’s “Working All the Time” is only two minutes long, but it’s as intricate as an arduous jigsaw puzzle. There are waves of skittish synths, air horns straight out of a Funk Flex set on Hot 97, a bridge that sounds like the glitchy maximalism of hyperpop, and last but not least, an interpolation of the traditional rumba “Ave María Morena.” Somehow, Rubinos makes sense of all these disparate pieces using her brassy, featherlight voice. Blink and you’ll miss that it’s a workers’ anthem, too: In one verse, Rubinos sings, “You better keep me poor and busy or I’d be a danger.” It’s a warning for those who try to crush the power of the people. ISABELIA HERRERASwedish House Mafia, ‘It Gets Better’I suppose you can absorb this song on the internet, where it is currently available. But the slick return of Swedish House Mafia — the Brobdingnagian kings of mainstream EDM, the clout champions of biggest-room house music — cries out for an open field, a dizzying laser show, a loss of sense of time and place. Hug a friend; the soundtrack of shared mayhem is upon us. CARAMANICAMahalia, ‘Whenever You’re Ready’A brisk, ratcheting, evolving ska-meets-trap beat carries “Whenever You’re Ready” by Mahalia, a British singer whose mother is Jamaican. It’s a semi-breakup song that flaunts confidence instead of pain. The singer is letting him go because he’s angry at her now, but she’s sure he’ll be back: “You won’t be gone for good,” she sings. “No, I’m not worried.” JON PARELESCaroline Polachek, ‘Bunny Is a Rider’Singing about a woman so elusive that a “satellite can’t find her,” Caroline Polachek makes staccato syllables and short phrases bounce all around the beat, working equally as percussion and melody. They’re just a few of the syncopated layers in a playful yet strategic production — by Polachek and her frequent collaborator, Danny L. Harle from the PC Music circle — that juggles whistling, triangle, birdsong and the giggles and gurgles of Harle’s baby daughter. “I’m so nonphysical,” Polachek exults, over the sustained bass tone that cushions the chorus. Nonsense: The song is built for dancing. PARELESSoccer Mommy, ‘Rom Com 2004’“Rom Com 2004” could have been a straightforward indie-rock love song, vowing “Just let me be yours like no one else before” over a march beat, guitar chords and a chorus with a proud leap in the melody. But Soccer Mommy — Sophie Allison — handed over her demo to the producer BJ Burton with instructions, she has said, to “destroy it.” He obliged with glitches, distortion, speed variations and exposed moments — making the song more appealing because it plays hard to get. PARELESTurnstile featuring Blood Orange, ‘Alien Love Call’From the forthcoming Turnstile album, “Glow On,” comes this shoegaze space-soul collaboration with Blood Orange (Dev Hynes). The video compiles mayhem-esque live footage more in keeping with the hardcore band’s usual rhythms, but perhaps this is the meditation before the rage. CARAMANICADave McMurray, ‘Dark Star’Dave McMurray is a longtime Detroit tenor saxophonist with decades of experience in rock, jazz, pop and R&B, mostly as a side musician. But he’s just released his second album for Blue Note as a leader: “Grateful Deadication,” a tribute to the Grateful Dead songbook. His cover of the classic “Dark Star” channels the epically trippy M.O. of a Dead performance: McMurray declares the melody over Wayne Gerard’s twinkling, distorted guitar; eventually, a dug-in backbeat sets in. Then a coolly grooving section opens up, and the saxophonist dishes out a solo that’s laced with greasy Motor City attitude but still takes its time, as if to bask in the California sun. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOHalf Waif, ‘Swimmer’The songs on “Mythopoetics,” Nandi Rose Plunkett’s new album as Half Waif, suffer and exult in all-consuming love. As “Swimmer” leaps from everyday sensation to all-out devotion and need — “I want to know they can’t take this away from me” — synthesizer arpeggios and vocal harmonies swarm around Plunkett’s ardent voice, like a suddenly racing heartbeat and an uncontainable obsession. PARELESYas, ‘Idea of You’A viscous tar pit of a track — slow, oozing bass tones, sparse drum-machine taps and gaping silences — hints at the difficulty of pulling free from an increasingly destructive relationship. Yas (the songwriter, singer, producer and violinist Yasmeen Al-Mazeedi) sings about being “in love with the idea of you” amid details of mental and physical abuse. The negotiations aren’t quite over; her voice rises to a fragile soprano as she decides, “You think that I want you back — I don’t.” PARELESKoreless, ‘White Picket Fence’Koreless — the Welsh producer Lewis Roberts — swerves between pastorale and rave on “White Picket Fence.” A keening female voice, uncredited and possibly built from samples, floats at first over a stately harpsichord; then fuzzy synthesizers arrive with a pulsing beat under that vocal melody, before it gets stretched and chopped up; then it’s sent back to harpsichord territory. In the video, directed by FKA twigs, club creatures climb out of a futuristic green car alongside a bucolic creek, where fishing ensues; urban artifice meets Nature. PARELESKarol G, ‘200 Copas’To a friend who’s still tearful about her ex, the Colombian songwriter Karol G (Carolina Giraldo Navarro) doesn’t mince words in “200 Copas” (“200 Drinks”); she dismisses the guy with profanities after all the suffering he caused. Yet her 21st-century bluntness gets a traditionalist backing; while the rest of her album, “KG0516,” traverses modern Pan-American pop with all its technological tricks, “200 Copas” is an old-fashioned waltz backed by a few acoustic instruments, nothing more. The lyrics are decidedly impolite, but the predicament she sings about is not new. The new video has her leading a beach-bonfire singalong: solidarity against undeserving men. PARELESTainy and Yandel, ‘El Plan’“Dynasty” is a new collaborative album from Tainy and Yandel, two titans of reggaeton celebrating 16 years of eminence. With its sinister harpsichord, muted marimbas and a piercing dembow riddim, “El Plan” recalls the mid-00s reggaeton that required listeners practice dancing in front of the mirror. It’s all about the thrill of an after-hours dance-floor chase — the electrifying, will-it-or-won’t-it-happen energy of a night at the club. “Estoy esperándote y tú perreando sola,” Yandel says. “I’m waiting for you and you’re dancing alone.” Luckily, he knows he’s at the whim of his partner: “Pero tú dime cuál e’ el plan.” You tell me what the plan is. HERRERAMas Aya, ‘Momento Presente’It is easy to reference folkloric sounds, but have little to offer other than mere nostalgia. The instrumentalist Brandon Valdivia, better known as Mas Aya, escapes this fate masterfully on “Momento Presente.” More than a mere collision of past and present, the track is a study in the power of harnessing ancestral knowledge. Over six and a half minutes, Valdivia braids a skittish footwork beat with a flurry of Andean pan flutes, arpeggiated synths and polyrhythms. Halfway through, the voice of an elder reflects on centuries of protest, a reminder that the work of liberation is part of a continuum. One moment the song is celestial, transporting the listener 40,000 feet into the air. In another it is meditative, urging us into quiet introspection. HERRERAMatt Mitchell and Kate Gentile, ‘Trapezoids | Matching Tickles’In recent years the pianist Matt Mitchell and the drummer Kate Gentile have developed a book of pithy, one-bar-long compositions, which they play with small ensembles under the name Snark Horse. Through intense improvisation, taking equal cues from free jazz and metal, they morph and distend and scramble these little melodic fragments. On Friday, Snark Horse released its first album — a boxed set spanning no fewer than 49 tracks and five-and-a-half hours, mostly recorded at a three-day session in late 2019. “Trapezoids” is a Gentile composition, a crooked and incessant spray of notes, with Jon Irabagon’s saxophone further destabilizing the mix. It’s paired on this track with “Matching Tickles,” a Mitchell piece, which he plays more softly and abstractedly, as if it were the echo of another idea. RUSSONELLO More

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      Esther Bejarano, 96, Dies; Auschwitz Survivor Fought Hate With Hip-Hop

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      She played the accordion in the camp’s orchestra. Decades later, she spoke out against fascism and racism, using music as well as words.When Esther Bejarano was 18, she played accordion in the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz, which played marches as prisoners left the concentration camp for hard labor and upbeat music as train loads of Jews and others arrived.“They must have thought, ‘Where music is playing, things can’t be that bad,’” she told The New York Times in 2014, recalling how some detainees smiled and waved at the musicians. “They didn’t know where they were going. But we knew. We played with tears in our eyes.”Mrs. Bejarano died on Saturday at a hospital in Hamburg, Germany. She was 96. With her death, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a cellist, is believed to be the only member of the orchestra still alive.Mrs. Bejarano’s death was announced by the International Auschwitz Committee, which was founded by survivors of the death camp and to which she belonged, serving as a powerful voice against intolerance in her later years.She would also form a band with her children to sing antiwar and Jewish resistance songs and, in her 80s, joined a hip-hop group that spread an antifascist message.Being in an orchestra at a concentration camp was often an escape from forced labor, and possibly from death. For Mrs. Bejarano, playing music for her captors relieved her of having to carry heavy rocks and earned her decent medical treatment during two illnesses.Women deemed fit for work at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, in a photograph taken in May 1944.Vashem Archives/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Mrs. Bejarano learned that a women’s orchestra was being formed at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, she approached its conductor, Zofia Czajkowska, a Polish music teacher.She played the piano, but there wasn’t one at the camp at the time. When Ms. Czajkowska asked if she could play the accordion, she said she could, although she never had. Yet she passed her audition, playing a German song, “Du hast Glück bei den Frauen, Bel Ami” (“You’re Lucky With Women, Bel Ami”).“At the time it was a very well-known hit,” Mrs. Bejarano said in an interview cited in “Auschwitz Studies No. 27,” published in 2014 by the Auschwitz Memorial State Museum. “I didn’t have any problems with my right hand, because I knew how to play the piano and immediately found the keyboard, but the bass is on the left, and only thanks to the fact that I have a good ear could I find the right tones. I managed.”Orchestras were formed in many concentration camps — to entertain the Nazis, but also to serve other purposes.“They were for the benefit of the administration and staff,” said Bret Werb, the musicologist and recorded sound curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “They believed that quick march music would get the prisoners to march in time, and quickly, to hard labor.”Mrs. Bejarano, who arrived at Auschwitz in April 1943, performed at the camp for several months until being moved later that year to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany. On a death march from the camp near the end of the war, she and several other prisoners escaped.She celebrated the Allied victory over the Nazis in a market square in Lubz, Germany. A picture of Hitler was set on fire by American soldiers. A G.I. handed her an accordion, which she played as soldiers and other camp survivors danced.“That was my liberation, an incredibly great liberation,” she told Der Spiegel last year. “The American and Russian soldiers embraced and shouted, ‘Hitler is dead.’”She found her way to a displaced persons camp at Bergen-Belsen, near a former concentration camp, where she learned that the Nazis had killed her parents in Riga, Latvia. Her sister Ruth, who had fled to Switzerland, was deported and sent to Auschwitz before Esther’s arrival.“That is so fateful,” Mrs. Bejarano told the British newspaper The Telegraph in an interview. “I came to Auschwitz in April 1943, and if she had lived, I would have met her there.”From Bergen-Belsen, Mrs. Bejarano hitchhiked to Frankfurt and took a train to Marseille, France, where in August 1945 she boarded a boat to what was then British Palestine and was reunited with her sister Tosca. Their brother, Gerhard, had immigrated to the United States some years earlier.Mrs. Bejarano in 2015, with Efim Kofman on accordion. She formed a band late in life to sing antiwar and Jewish resistance songs.Daniel Reinhardt/picture-alliance dpa, via Associated PressEsther Loewy was born on Dec. 15, 1924, in Saarlouis, in southwestern Germany, near the French border. Her father, Rudolf, was a teacher and cantor. He met her mother, Margarethe, in Berlin when they were teenagers; he was her piano teacher, and the two fell in love.Ms. Bejarano described her childhood as “lighthearted,” but that part of her life ended when she was sent at 16 to a Nazi work camp near Berlin, from which she would be sent to Auschwitz.After the war, she restarted her life in what would become Israel. She studied singing, joined a choir, gave music lessons and in 1950 married Nissim Bejarano, a truck driver, with whom she had two children, Joram, a son, and Edna, a daughter. In 1960, she returned to Germany, settling in Hamburg, and ran a laundry service with her husband.She is survived by her children, two grandsons and four great-grandchildren.She found it difficult to discuss the Holocaust with anyone until the 1970s, when she watched German police officers shield right-wing extremists against protesters. The incident turned her into an activist, and she joined the Association of the Persecutees of the Nazi Regime. She began to tell her story in schools, delivered protest speeches and sang with Coincidence, the band that she formed with her children in 1989.“I use music to act against fascism,” she told The Times. “Music is everything to me.”Around 2009, when she was in her 80s, Mrs. Bejarano’s musical career took an unexpected turn. She was asked to join Microphone Mafia, a German hip-hop group, with whom she continued to spread her message against fascism and intolerance to young audiences in Germany and abroad, from Istanbul to Vancouver.Onstage with the group’s Kutlu Yurtseven and Rossi Pennino, Mrs. Bejarano was an unusual figure: a tiny woman with a snow-white pixie haircut, singing in Yiddish, Hebrew and Italian.Hip-hop was not her preferred musical genre. She joked that she persuaded her bandmates to lower their volume and stop jumping around onstage so much. She believed that hip-hop’s influence on young people could help her counter a rise in intolerance.“Twelve years together and almost 900 concerts together, and all this thanks to your strength,” Microphone Mafia wrote on its website after Mrs. Bejarano’s death. “Your laughter, your courage, your determination, your loving manner, your understanding, your fighting heart.”Mrs. Bejarano, a recipient of Germany’s Order of Merit, issued a statement this year through the International Auschwitz Committee calling for Germany to declare May 8 a federal holiday to commemorate the end of World War II in Europe.“And if you are concerned about whether Germans should celebrate this day solemnly,” she wrote, “imagine: What would the world look like if the Nazis had won?” More

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      The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber’s Bouncy Plea, and 14 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Little Simz, Nathy Peluso, Courtney Barnett,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.The Kid Laroi featuring Justin Bieber, ‘Stay’Bracingly effective, hyper-slick new wave/pop-punk hybridization from the Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber, “Stay” is about expecting more from a partner than you’re capable of giving. They both sound aptly desperate and defensive, a familiar approach from Laroi and a sneaky stretch from Bieber, who still injects some falsetto tenderness into his icy pleas. “Stay” is a more effective pairing than the two had on “Unstable,” from Bieber’s most recent album, on which he sounded as if he was jogging while Laroi sprinted. JON CARAMANICAThe Kondi Band featuring Mariama, ‘She Doesn’t Love You’Kondi Band is an electronic concoction rooted in Sierra Leone. The kondi is a 15-pronged thumb piano played by the Sierra Leonean musician Sorie Kondi, with production by DJ Chief Boima (an American whose family is from Sierra Leone), the English producer Will LV (a.k.a. Will Horrocks) and, on this song, the voice of a songwriter from Sierra Leone, Mariama Jalloh. The song is propelled by multiple layers of Sorie Kondi’s plinking thumb-piano riffs and grainy call-and-response vocals in Krio (Sierra Leonean Creole); midway through, Mariama airily delivers a reminder about consent: “It’s her mind, her body, her rules/If she doesn’t love you there’s nothing you can do.” JON PARELESLittle Simz, ‘I Love You, I Hate You’The Nigerian-English rapper Lil Simz keeps her voice calm and steely as she grapples with her relationship with her biological father, who’s “in my DNA” — she’s seen Polaroid photos — but whom she barely knows: “Is you a sperm donor or a dad to me?” The emotions that buffet her are in the track, produced by Inflo, with orchestral and choral swells, a sputtering funk beat and a male voice singing the title. She’s wrestling with her own feelings, trying to empathize and reaching for forgiveness; it’s complicated. PARELESBLK presents Juvenile, Mannie Fresh and Mia X, ‘Vax That Thang Up’Ah yes, you remember this classic, from the album “400 Degreez (Is What Your Temperature Will Be if You Get Covid-19 So Please Get Vaccinated).” CARAMANICAZuchu, ‘Nyumba Ndogo’What will happen when African musicians latch onto hyperpop? “Nyumba Ndogo,” from the Tanzanian singer and songwriter Zuchu, hints at the possibilities. It’s thin, speedy, synthetic, Auto-Tuned — and irresistible. PARELESmazie, ‘Dumb Dumb’The songwriter who lowercases herself as mazie folds multiple levels of ironic self-consciousness into her songs. She sings in a little-girl voice, and she starts “Dumb Dumb” with the sounds of kiddie instruments — ukulele, toy piano — before surreally stacking up keyboards, voices and harps and declaring, “Everyone is dumb, la la la la la la la.” It’s a song about misinformation, gullibility and incredulity; she wrote it the day after the insurrection at the Capitol. PARELESCourtney Barnett, ‘Rae Street’Courtney Barnett previews an album due in November — “Things Take Time, Take Time” — with another of her deadpan, steady-strummed songs that find large lessons in mundane observations. In “Rae Street” she chronicles her neighbors: parents, children, repair people and dogs, having an ordinary day. Behind the normalcy, there’s a wary undercurrent: “Time is money, and money is no man’s friend,” she sings, and, later, “You seem so stable, but you’re just hanging on.” Calm doesn’t mean contentment. PARELESAngel Olsen, ‘Gloria’There’s no point in a cover version that doesn’t transform the original song. Angel Olsen does just that with her version of the Laura Branigan hit “Gloria,” the first track from her coming album of 1980s songs, “Aisles.” While Branigan’s 1982 “Gloria” had pumping synthesizers and a perky vocal, Olsen paid attention to the lyrics. It’s a song about a desolate, lonely woman on the verge of a breakdown, or perhaps already having one: “Are the voices in your head calling, Gloria?” Olsen’s version is blearily slow, thickened with distorted keyboard chords and grunting cellos; this “Gloria” is mired, not triumphal. PARELESgglum. ‘Glad Ur Gone’Clouds of vocal harmonies float prettily; a beat bustles; keyboards throb in warm major chords. None of it quite conceals the rancor of “Glad Ur Gone,” as gglum — the songwriter Ella Smoker — sings about how clingy and manipulative an ex can be. PARELESJ.D. Allen, ‘Mother’Jon Irabagon, ‘KC Blues’J.D. Allen and Jon Irabagon, two standard-bearing tenor saxophonists, have new solo-sax albums that were forged in the solitude of lockdown. Irabagon, 41, spent much of 2020 living with extended family in South Dakota, and he often slipped off to the outskirts of Black Hills National Forest, where he spent hours revisiting the Charlie Parker songbook en plein-air with a recorder on. He’s released those recordings as “Bird With Streams” (yes, it’s a pun). Playful as ever but also luxuriously patient, his take on “K.C. Blues” is a feast of smeared tones and little open spaces. Allen, 48, went into a Cincinnati studio to capture the 13 tracks on “Queen City,” but he kept things spare, treating the process as an extension of the soul-searching he’d done in the early days of lockdown. “Mother,” an Allen original, starts with a three-note pattern that spins almost into a drone before he leaps off into free improvisation, zagging and curling and, later, painfully scraping his notes, as if to pry them open. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLONathy Peluso, ‘Mafiosa’The Argentine songwriter Nathy Peluso is ready to seize power as a woman in “Mafiosa,” vowing (in Spanish), “May bad men fear me.” She’s backed by a sinewy, old-school salsa groove with horn-section muscle: playful and teasing, but not to be crossed. PARELESMaluma, ‘Sobrio’A gentle song befitting Maluma’s gentle voice, “Sobrio” is an unhurried and lovely tale of a man only able to declare his heart after a few drinks. There’s nothing anguished about Maluma’s meanderings, though — rather, the slackness of the rhythm, and of his lightly slurry anguish, makes for a compellingly smooth confessional. CARAMANICASufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine, ‘Reach Out’Sufjan Stevens has been mightily productive during the pandemic year, with songs, instrumentals and now a collaboration. Acoustic picking defines “Reach Out,” from the album “A Beginner’s Mind” by Stevens and the songwriter Angelo De Augustine, which is due in September — and based, they say, on watching movies. Fans of Stevens’s largely acoustic album “Carrie and Lowell” will appreciate “Reach Out,” which doesn’t hide the squeaks of hands moving up strings. In close harmony, they sing about memory and healing, insisting, “the pain restores you.” PARELESSamara Joy, ‘It Only Happens Once’At 21, the vocalist Samara Joy has been approaching the jazz spotlight since she won the 2019 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition. The close precision and frothy power of her voice stand out immediately, and on her self-titled debut album, so does the depth of her comfort within the jazz tradition. “It Only Happens Once” is a rarely played tune, best known for Nat King Cole’s dreamy 1943 version, but she tucks right into it, as if she’s been singing the song her whole life. RUSSONELLO More

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      Tyler, the Creator, an Insider Forever on the Outside

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      His new album, “Call Me if You Get Lost,” is both an embrace of hip-hop tradition and a swerve into new emotional terrain.In January of last year, Tyler, the Creator’s “Igor” won the Grammy Award for best rap album. Speaking to the press backstage, he expressed frustration at the narrow ways in which Black artists are celebrated at the Grammys, calling his nomination in the rap category, for a deeply musically diverse album, “a backhanded compliment.”But the attention focused on that comment overshadowed what he’d said onstage when he received the award, which was that he was grateful for his fans’ support, because, he confessed, “I never fully felt accepted in rap.”Blockaded on both sides, Tyler nevertheless emerged victorious, an acknowledgment of the sheer force of the vision he’d built for a decade as the de facto macher of the Odd Future crew. It was also a testament to the way he harnessed the power of the internet and built a vision from whole cloth, selling it to millions without much intersecting with the systems constructed to do that.Still, the exclusions sting a little. And the boisterous, sometimes scabrous, and persistently energetic “Call Me if You Get Lost” — currently the No. 1 album in the country — is the logical rejoinder to both of those obstacles. It’s as thoroughgoing a rap album as Tyler has released — rarely has he been this keen to flaunt his bona fides. But it also demonstrates the pop potential of Tyler’s now-signature approach to hip-hop, the way his post-Pharrell embrace of chords and melody is in fact in conversation with 1960s pop, French chanson, and acoustic soul and funk. A tauntingly good hip-hop album, or a rewiring of pop DNA: “Call Me if You Get Lost” has it both ways.First, the bars. Part of the chasm separating Tyler from the rest of the genre (in perception, at least) is how he has in the past sometimes downplayed his lyrical skill in favor of musical experimentation. When he leans in to rapping, as he does on this album, it’s still a refreshing jolt.“Call Me if You Get Lost” is Tyler’s sixth album.Mostly, he’s preoccupied with the lifestyle that success has afforded him, but even though the subject matter can be repetitive — there’s lots of Rolls-Royce mentions, lots of discussions of passports — he delivers them with the shock of the new. “Y’all don’t understand, fish so fresh that you could taste the sand,” he boasts on the lush “Hot Wind Blows.” On the gloomy and stomping “Lumberjack,” he emphasizes the depth of his independence: “I own my companies full, told ’em to keep the loan.”The album is structured in the manner of one of DJ Drama’s essential mid-2000s Gangsta Grillz mixtapes, with Drama himself barking over each track, weaving in between Tyler boasts. Tyler’s resuscitation of an aesthetic that was likely formative to him is both a calculated nod to the hip-hop community that couldn’t quite place him early in his career, and also a tweak to the puffed-chest energy of that era. The frictive juxtaposition of Drama shrieking “Gangsta Grizzzzillzzzz” while Tyler is speaking about keeping picnic blankets in the car — it’s both homage and disruption.That’s how Tyler approaches his production here, too. “Lumberjack” is built on an ominous sample from the horrorcore pioneers Gravediggaz, and “Wusyaname” flirts with 1990s R&B with a sample from H-Town’s “Back Seat (Wit No Sheets).” Tyler is also eager to display how seamlessly he can integrate some of contemporary hip-hop’s signature vocalists, whether it’s the unrelentingly grimy 42 Dugg (“Lemonhead”) or the sweetly tragic YoungBoy Never Broke Again (“Wusyaname”). And he extracts startlingly good guest verses from his elders: Pharrell Williams (“Juggernaut”) and Lil Wayne (“Hot Wind Blows”).A tauntingly good hip-hop album, or a rewiring of pop DNA: “Call Me if You Get Lost” has it both ways.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersThere’s a second, parallel narrative at play, too, on “Call Me if You Get Lost,” which in places reads like two separate albums born of the same circumstances tugging at each other — one about how carefree and privileged Tyler’s success has made him, and the other about how all of those spoils don’t add up to much without love.The eight-and-a-half minute long “Wilshire” is where the two collide. It’s a startling narrative about coveting a person who you can’t have (because they’re in a relationship with one of your friends) that reads as many things: an elegantly drawn story, a gut-kick emotional excavation, a track with boom-bap urgency tempered by wandering-in-space effects. Tyler lingers over feeling here, and it’s affecting and surprising: “They say, ‘Bros over hoes,’ I’m like, ‘Mm, nah, hey’/I would rather hold your hand than have a cool handshake.”He picks up the theme on the far tougher and more frenetic “Corso”: “My heart broken/Remembered I was rich so I bought me some new emotions/And a new boat ’cause I’d rather cry in the ocean.”These intersections of cocksureness and anxiety are this album at its best. (Fittingly, the title “Call Me if You Get Lost” reads either as a statement of generosity or a plea, depending on your lens.) Songs like the less emotionally ambiguous “Sweet / I Thought You Wanted to Dance” are generally less impactful — Tyler thrives on discord.A decade ago, discord was the fullness of his message. He was, by turns, a troll, an antagonist and at points outright offensive. He revisits that era on the raucous “Manifesto,” the most unexpected turn on this album: “I was canceled before canceled was with Twitter fingers/Protesting outside my shows, I gave them the middle finger.”But Tyler is older now (30, to be precise). On the back of those controversies, he built an idiosyncratic empire that belonged to no scene (maybe because no scene would have him). “Manifesto” is the rare moment in his catalog where Tyler expresses anxiety or regret about how he once presented to the world. But he also remains obstinate. Rapping about how the expectations of speaking out politically leave him vexed, he reverts to his old perspective.“I feel like anything I say, dog, I’m screwing [expletive] up,” he says, “So I just tell these Black babies, they should do what they want.” The lesson is that there was no lesson.Tyler, the Creator“Call Me if You Get Lost”(Columbia) More

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      Taylor Swift Rejoins Her ‘Folklore’ Crew, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Brent Faiyaz featuring Drake, J. Balvin and Skrillex, Chicano Batman 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.Big Red Machine featuring Taylor Swift, ‘Renegade’Big Red Machine is the project of Aaron Dessner — the guitarist in the National who was a producer on Taylor Swift’s “Folklore,” “Evermore” and her remake of “Fearless” — and Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), who wrote and sang “Exile,” a high-angst duet with Swift on “Folklore.” Swift sings two songs on the Big Red Machine album due Aug. 27, and regardless of the billing, she dominates “Renegade” with her melodic sense and personality: terse, symmetrical phrases carrying a coolheaded assessment of a failing partner, as she fends off attempts to “let all your damage damage me/and carry your baggage up my street.” The Big Red Machine aspect is in the production details — multilayered drones, tendrils of electric and acoustic guitar, Vernon’s distant backing vocals — but “Renegade” would fit easily on a Swift album. JON PARELESBrent Faiyaz featuring Drake, ‘Wasting Time’The way Brent Faiyaz approaches his verses over the lush, vintage-minded Neptunes production of “Wasting Time” is airy and a little fleeting, as if he’s so absorbed in his pitch to a potential lover that he can’t quite bring himself to stick close to the beat. “If you got time to waste, waste it with me,” Faiyaz pleads, almost pulling back from the request, casting his line while averting his heart. But there’s surety in the layered chorus — a Neptunes standard — and the thumping bass line, and then in the guest verse from Drake, which strikes a sour note about what it means to give of yourself and get crickets back: “Fluent in passive aggression, that’s why you actin’ dismissive/Hearing me out for once would require you actually listen.” JON CARAMANICAJ. Balvin and Skrillex, ‘In da Getto’Credit where credit is due: The lion’s share of the block-party spirit in this song, which is perfectly designed to be blasted all summer, comes from the beat, organ hook and female vocals that the producers Skrillex and Tainy got by sampling “In De Ghetto” by David Morales and the Bad Yard Club featuring Crystal Waters and Delta, from 1994. They built on their acknowledged source, grabbing and crisping up the best moments and tossing in some sirens, while Balvin’s gruff rapping stokes the festivities. But the foundation was already there. PARELESDe Schuurman, ‘Nu Ga Je Dansen’In the late ’80s, DJ Moortje, a selector from the Dutch Antillean island of Curaçao, mistakenly played a dancehall track at the wrong speed during his set at a club in The Hague. The result was a breakneck, squeaky-voiced sound called “bubbling,” a style that would veer into a thousand new directions over the next couple of decades. A new release from the Ugandan label Nyege Nyege Tapes is a reminder of the movement’s innovation. “Bubbling Inside” compiles previously unreleased tracks from De Schuurman, a staple of the scene a decade ago. Its standout, “Nu Ga Je Dansen” (“Now You’re Gonna Dance”), is a two-and-a-half minute club rampage. The first 30 seconds recall a late ’90s rave — all sirens and unhinged ferocity. But before long, a flood of kick drums arrives, beckoning everyone to the dance floor. ISABELIA HERRERAChicano Batman, ‘Dark Star’The musical DNA of Chicano Batman is rich with references to bygone eras: the trippy deliria of psych soul, the political ambitions of Brazilian tropicália and the concept-driven idiosyncrasies of prog-rock, among others. But the Los Angeles band has never been interested in mere nostalgia, as it reminds us on “Dark Star.” The song is arranged like a puzzle: a jagged, layered bass line (à la Madlib) clashes with serrated guitar lines, while laid-back vocals glide over the production. In the chorus, the lead singer Bardo Martinez’s voice blooms into what feels like sunny psychedelia. But blink for a second and you’ll miss the ominous undercurrent of the track: The “Dark Star” at hand is not a celestial being, but America — a somber place contending with the legacies of racial violence that still drive its everyday reality. HERRERATi Gonzi, ‘Kudzana Dzana’Tinashe Gonzara, the 28-year-old Zimbabwean rapper and singer who performs as Ti Gonzi, has been recording prolifically since 2009 and winning music awards in Zimbabwe. He has already put out an album this year, “Sendiri Two.” But his newer singles have concentrated on melody as much rapping. “Kudzana Dzana” (“Hundreds and Hundreds”) stacks up vocal harmonies over a teasing, flexible three-against-two groove of percussion and guitar picking that hints at Shona mbira (thumb-piano) traditions but also lets an electric guitar wail. “Life is a journey,” announces one of the few lyrics in English. PARELESTarrus Riley, ‘Heartbreak Anniversary’Giveon’s “Heartbreak Anniversary” is almost incomparably inconsolable. That it’s become the soundtrack for a TikTok dance trend borders on the lunatic. But perhaps that unlikely juxtaposition set the table for this cover, by the reggae star Tarrus Riley, which neatly leavens its angst. Over undulating, swinging production by Kareem Burrell and Dean Fraser, Riley sings not like a man mopping himself up off the floor, but rather one smoothly sauntering to safety. CARAMANICASarah Proctor, ‘Worse’“I know that it hurts/I know I’m going to make it a little bit worse,” Sarah Proctor tells the lover she betrayed. Piano chords toll and vocal harmonies swirl around her, making her sound reverent and contrite — except that she’s not apologizing. She’s breaking up. PARELESSquirrel Flower, ‘Iowa 146’Ella Williams, the songwriter behind the indie-rock of Squirrel Flower, doesn’t shy away from whisper-to-shout full-band crescendos on her band’s new album, “Planet (i).” But “Iowa 146” sticks with the whisper, accompanied by folky picking and all sorts of sustained near-phantom sounds, as she sings about the romance of sharing a guitar. PARELES More

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      Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Sour’ Returns to No. 1, Four Weeks Later

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      The Disney star’s debut album circles back to the top of the Billboard 200 with the equivalent of 105,000 sales in the United States.Three weeks ago, a vinyl bonanza from Taylor Swift blocked Olivia Rodrigo from enjoying a second run at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, but now the teenage newcomer is back on top.“Sour,” the debut album by Rodrigo, the 18-year-old pop phenomenon and Disney actress, returns to No. 1 with the equivalent of 105,000 sales in the United States, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. Five weeks into its release, “Sour” has now notched two weeks at the top of the album chart, and two songs from it, “Drivers License” and “Good 4 U,” have topped the Hot 100 singles chart.On the latest Hot 100, BTS’s “Butter” rules for a fifth straight week.Also on this week’s album chart, “Hall of Fame,” the latest from the Chicago rapper Polo G, drops one spot to No. 2. “The Voice of the Heroes,” a joint album by the rappers Lil Baby and Lil Durk that led the chart two weeks ago, is in third place. Migos’s “Culture III” is No. 4, and Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 5 in its 24th week out.Opening at sixth place is H.E.R.’s “Back of My Mind.” Although it is her first official studio album, “Back of My Mind” follows five EPs and two compilations by H.E.R., the singer-songwriter Gabriella Wilson. She has also already won four Grammy Awards, including song of the year (“I Can’t Breathe”), and an Oscar, for best original song (“Fight for You,” from “Judas and the Black Messiah”). More