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    The 40 Best Songs of 2024 (So Far)

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    Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs. After six months of listening, here’s what they have on repeat. (Note: It’s not a ranking, it’s a playlist.) Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Espresso’Atop a mid-tempo beat that recalls the muffled retro-funk of Doja Cat’s smash “Say So,” Sabrina Carpenter plays the unbothered temptress with winking humor: “Say you can’t sleep, baby I know, that’s that me, espresso.” Make it a double — you’ve surely heard this one everywhere. LINDSAY ZOLADZTyla, ‘Safer’Following her worldwide 2023 hit “Water,” Tyla pulls away from temptation in “Safer,” harnessing the log-drum beat and sparse, subterranean bass lines of amapiano. Her choral call-and-response vocals carry South African tradition into the electronic wilderness of 21st-century romance. JON PARELESOne We MissedAriana Grande, ‘We Can’t Be Friends (Wait for Your Love)’At once strobe-lit and silky, Ariana Grande appropriately channels Robyn — the patron saint of crying in the club — on this nimbly sung, melancholic pop hit, a highlight from her bittersweet seventh album, “Eternal Sunshine.” ZOLADZOne We MissedBillie Eilish, ‘The Greatest’Billie Eilish extols her own composure and skill at dissembling — holding back her unrequited love — in “The Greatest” from “Hit Me Hard and Soft.” Delicate picking accompanies her as she sings about how she “made it all look painless.” Then she shatters that composure, opening her voice from breathy to belting while the production goes widescreen with drums and choir. When the music quiets again, her furious restraint is as palpable as her regret. PARELESMdou MoctarKadar Small for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Angela Bofill, R&B Hitmaker With a Silky Voice, Dies at 70

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      Starting in the late 1970s, she scored multiple hit singles, including “This Time I’ll Be Sweeter” and “I Try,” but multiple strokes in the 2000s ended her career.Angela Bofill, a New York-bred singer whose sultry alto propelled a string of R&B hits in the late 1970s and early ’80s before strokes derailed her career in the 2000s, died on Thursday in Vallejo, Calif. She was 70.Her death, at the home of her daughter, Shauna Bofill Vincent, was announced in a social media post by her manager, Rich Engel. He did not specify a cause.With a silky blend of Latin, jazz, adult-contemporary and soul, Ms. Bofill is best remembered for jazzy love songs like “This Time I’ll Be Sweeter” and funk-inflected pop numbers like “Something About You.” Armed with a three-and-a-half-octave range, her voice was “as cool as sherbet, creamy, delicately colored, mildly flavored,” as Ariel Swartley wrote in Rolling Stone magazine in 1979.Starting in 1978, Ms. Bofill logged six albums in the Top 40 of the Billboard R&B charts, with five of them crossing over to the Top 100 of the pop charts. She also scored seven Top 40 R&B singles, including “Angel of the Night,” (1979) and “Too Tough” (1983).Angela Tomasa Bofill was born on May 2, 1954, in New York City to a Puerto Rican mother and a Cuban father and grew up in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, in Manhattan and in the West Bronx. She started writing songs as a child.By her teens, she was already showing off her vocal chops in a duo with her sister Sandra and a group called the Puerto Rican Supremes, and also as a member of the prestigious All-City Chorus, a group composed of top high-school singers in the city’s five boroughs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jelly Roll’s Anthem of Perseverance, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Zsela, the Decemberists, Khalid and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Jelly Roll, ‘I Am Not Okay’The title of “I Am Not Okay” — a song Jelly Roll unveiled last month on “The Voice” — only tells half the story. It’s the kind of bruised, long-suffering, self-doubting, painfully open and high-drama testimonial that has turned Jelly Roll into a country star. He sings about sleepless nights and “voices in my head,” with production that rises from acoustic picking into stolid Southern rock behind his grainy voice. But soon Jelly Roll invokes a community — “I know I can’t be the only one who’s holding on for dear life” — and the promise of salvation: “The pain’ll wash away in a holy water tide.” Whether it’s in this life or beyond it, he declares, “It’s not OK, but we’re all gonna be all right.” It’s an arena-scale homily.NxWorries featuring Earl Sweatshirt and Rae Khalil, ‘WalkOnBy’NxWorries — the partnership of the producer Knxwledge and the rapper and singer Anderson .Paak — ponders the deeply mixed emotions of enjoying success while knowing how hard former peers are still striving. “When you walk on by, you’ve got shades to hide your eyes,” the chorus chides. The track is a relaxed, quiet-storm groove with tickling lead-guitar lines, but it provides contrast, not comfort. “No one has a clue what we had to do to survive,” Anderson .Paak raps, and adds, “When they ask me how I’m doing, I feel guilty inside.” Earl Sweatshirt admits he’s “lived too many lives removed from the strife.” But before the song ends, Rae Khalil sings for those left behind: “I feel like ain’t nobody caring/Everybody’s scared,” she laments.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Apollo Theater Celebrates Its 90th Anniversary With Usher, Babyface and More

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      Usher, an eight-time Grammy winner, has won many awards in his 30-year career. But the one he received on Tuesday night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem was special, he said.“It’s the prestige,” said the R&B singer, who arrived in a black S.U.V. surrounded by phone-wielding fans to the red carpet outside the theater, which was celebrating its 90th birthday at its annual spring benefit.Along with Babyface, Usher was at the Apollo, which opened in 1934 and has played host to numerous venerated musicians including Billie Holiday, James Brown and Aretha Franklin, for a celebratory concert and an awards ceremony. He and Babyface, the singer-songwriter and producer who has won 12 Grammy Awards, received Icon and Legacy awards from the organization, respectively, for their contributions to music.Gov. Kathy Hochul; the Rev. Al Sharpton; Jordin Sparks, the singer and “American Idol” winner; Ava DuVernay; the filmmaker and screenwriter; and Big Daddy Kane, the rapper, were among the more than 800 musicians, philanthropists and elected officials who filled the 1,500-seat theater.The singer-songwriter and producer Babyface was honored on Tuesday at the Apollo Theater.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesUsher and his wife, Jennifer Goicoechea.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesCora Brown and Grandmaster Caz.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rock Around the Clock: 8 Songs About Very Specific Times of Day

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      Hear tracks by the Strokes, beabadoobee, Normani and more.The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas onstage in 2011. (Sadly, we don’t have the specific time.)Chad Batka for The New York TimesDear listeners,On Friday, the R&B artist and former Fifth Harmony member Normani will finally release her debut album, “Dopamine” — a long (long) awaited, endlessly delayed release she has been teasing for nearly six years. Not that I’ve been watching the clock. Or at least I wasn’t until last month, when Normani dropped the album’s sultry lead single, “1:59.” That ode to not-quite-2-in-the-morning got me dreaming up a playlist of songs about incredibly specific times of day. Now that Normani is ready to share her opus with the world, so am I.Plenty of songs celebrate the hour on the hour; Drake has an entire playlist’s worth of songs with titles like “6PM in New York” or “8AM in Charlotte.” But that’s not what I’m interested in here. With all due respect to Ariana Grande, I’m not even talking 6:30. I’m talking absurdly precise, random time stamps glimpsed on a digital clock or a lock screen and forever burned into one’s memory: “12:51,” “10:35,” “11:59.”Luckily, there is no shortage of such songs, from artists as varied as Moby Grape, Tiësto and Elliott Smith. And weirdly enough, there exists a trio of unrelated songs that are named after three subsequent minutes in the middle of the 10 o’clock hour. Go figure! Naturally, I sequenced the track list in chronological order — like an incredibly abbreviated playlist version of Christian Marclay’s “The Clock.” It certainly won’t last you 24 hours, but it’ll take you on a temporal journey just the same.All right, you know what time it is: Press play.It’s 11:59 and I want to stay alive,LindsayListen along while you read.1. The Strokes: “12:51”We begin exactly 51 minutes after midnight, “the time my voice/Found the words I sought,” as Julian Casablancas specifies on this catchy leadoff single from the Strokes’ 2003 album “Room on Fire.” “12:51” is a mumbled tale of rekindled romance, the acquisition of malt liquor and other sordid things that happen after the clock strikes 12.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Constant Metamorphosis of Nona Hendryx

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      In a purple catsuit and spiky celestial headpiece, Nona Hendryx beckoned, with a wave. “I’m inside the tree!” she called. “In the forest of the ancestors.”It was not the real Hendryx but her digital avatar, giving a tour of a new virtual reality project. Still, there is little distance between the flesh-and-blood Hendryx — the musician, artist and futurist, who has been forging her own way for over a half-century — and the slinky cyborg on winged feet who was scampering through a turquoise and fuchsia dreamscape on a recent Friday. They both inhabit a world of their own creation, signaling urgently for everyone to catch up.The soundtrack for this V.R. journey was Hendryx’s 1983 electro jam “Transformation” — “Change your mind/Change your skin,” the lyrics go — because, she said, “I’ve constantly evolved and transformed over time.”With each metamorphosis, Hendryx has spun into an even more singular cultural presence. She is not just the throaty alto who had an enduring hit with “Lady Marmalade” as part of the 1970s trio Labelle. She is also a teacher, curator, designer and technologist — a vanguard creator. In fact, she blithely told me, she never wanted to be a singer at all.“It happened, and I’m thankful that I’m pretty good at it,” she said, downplaying a career that took her from ’60s girl groups to the pioneering soul and R&B of the ’70s, then to her solo act in the ’80s, an ahead-of-its-time amalgam of art rock, funk, no wave and electronica that put her in league with technology-forward artists like Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson.Music still drives her. But now, she said, “I’m much more interested in making that, rather than performing and presenting it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      My Starting Five Songs From Boston and Dallas

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      Catch the N.B.A. Finals spirit with Erykah Badu, Pixies, Kelly Clarkson and more.Erykah Badu, repping for DallasErik Carter for The New York TimesDear listeners,Last night marked the start of the 2023-2024 N.B.A. Finals, a best-of-seven matchup between the Boston Celtics and the Dallas Mavericks. As a long-suffering and perpetually annoying fan of the Philadelphia 76ers, I do not really have a horse in this race*, but I also have an excess of energy I would normally reserve for rooting for one of these two teams. I have decided to put that energy to productive use by making a playlist of music by artists from both Boston and Dallas.Consider these musicians my starting five from each city. Both Boston and Dallas have rich and varied musical histories, as you’ll hear in this playlist’s blend of rock, pop, country, R&B, blues and hip-hop. It features bona fide superstars (the Texan Kelly Clarkson; the Dorchesterite Donna Summer) and influential legends (Dallas’s own Stevie Ray Vaughan; the Beantown art-rockers the Pixies). Sure, there are some omissions, but these are just my personal starting fives — and given how many times the ABC broadcast played “Sweet Emotion” when throwing to commercial last night, you’ve probably already hit your Aerosmith quota for the week.Game 1 was quite anticlimactic, with Boston blowing out Dallas 107-89, so hopefully the human Golden Retriever that is Luka Dončić will be able to galvanize his Mavericks into giving us a more competitive series. And if not, well, there’s always this playlist.She knows the highest stakes,Lindsay*Beyond an inborn and semi-irrational distaste for all Boston sports teams, of course.Listen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The-Dream, Hitmaker for Beyoncé and Rihanna, Is Accused of Rape

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      In a lawsuit, a former protégée of Terius Gesteelde-Diamant says he entangled her in an abusive relationship. Mr. Gesteelde-Diamant called the allegations “untrue and defamatory.”Terius Gesteelde-Diamant, a top songwriter and producer for Beyoncé, Rihanna and other stars under the name The-Dream, has been accused of rape and sexual battery in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday by a former protégée.Chanaaz Mangroe, who performed as Channii Monroe, says in her suit that in 2015, Mr. Gesteelde-Diamant used promises to promote her career to entangle her in an abusive relationship in which he repeatedly forced her to have sex, strangled her and once made a video recording of an intimate encounter and threatened to show it to others.As The-Dream, Mr. Gesteelde-Diamant is one of the most powerful producers behind the scenes of the music industry, an eight-time Grammy winner who helped make some of the biggest pop and R&B hits of the last two decades, including Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” Justin Bieber’s “Baby” and Mariah Carey’s “Touch My Body.” He has forged a particularly close creative bond with Beyoncé, credited as a writer and producer on her signature female-empowerment anthems like “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” and “Break My Soul,” and working on each of the superstar’s studio albums since 2008.But Ms. Mangroe’s suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, portrays Mr. Gesteelde-Diamant as an abusive Svengali-type figure, dangling the promise of fame and success before an aspiring artist while controlling her life, forcing her into unwanted sex and physically abusing her.The suit also accuses Mr. Gesteelde-Diamant of sex trafficking, a claim that has been cited in a number of recent civil lawsuits — including against Sean Combs, the hip-hop mogul known as Diddy or Puff Daddy — over accusations of harboring or transporting a victim of sexual assault by fraud or coercion. Ms. Mangroe’s suit cites the Sexual Abuse and Cover-Up Accountability Act, a California law that allows people to bring sexual assault cases even if the statute of limitations for incidents they allege have expired.“What Dream did to me made it impossible to live the life I envisioned for myself and pursue my goals as a singer and songwriter,” Ms. Mangroe said in a statement. “Ultimately, my silence has become too painful, and I realized that I need to tell my story to heal. I hope that doing so will also help others and prevent future horrific abuse.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Music’s Most Neglected Day of the Week

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      Seven songs for Tuesdays from Stevie Wonder, iLoveMakonnen and more.Stevie Wonder, a bard of TuesdayChris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,The day after Memorial Day — or any day that directly follows a beginning-of-the-week holiday — is one of those Tuesdays that feels like a Monday. A certain temporal fog lingers and will continue to confuse you all week: “Wait, what day is it again?” Well, today it is Tuesday. And I am here to offer you a sonic cure for that fog, something to ground you in the present: a playlist of Tuesday songs.Friday, Saturday and Sunday are all perennial muses of popular music; even the dreaded Monday (Monday) has its memorable anthems. Tuesday, though, tends to get short shrift — or at least it did until 2014, when the rapper iLoveMakonnen released a ubiquitous ode to clubbing on the most banal day of the week. But Makonnen’s “Tuesday” certainly wasn’t the first song to pay tribute to (or shake a fist at) the second day of the traditional workweek. Decades earlier, Stevie Wonder and Lynyrd Skynyrd both used it as a backdrop for heartache, and it also inspired the moniker of a fictitious Rolling Stones heroine, in a song later covered beautifully by the recently departed folk singer Melanie.All those songs are featured on today’s playlist, along with tracks from Blood Orange, the Pogues and, of course, the ’80s new-wave act ’Til Tuesday. If you find yourself wondering what day it is, just hum one of these tunes and all will be well. As long as they don’t stick in your head until tomorrow …Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Stevie Wonder: “Tuesday Heartbreak”It’s bad enough to be heartbroken — but being heartbroken on a Tuesday? Stevie Wonder understands the double indignity of that situation on this jazzy number from his great 1972 album “Talking Book”: “Tuesday heartbreak seems to be unfair, ’cause you say that you found another man.”▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More