Ross, Joel (Musician)

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