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    4 New Artists You Need to Hear

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    Listen to Jana Horn, Water From Your Eyes, Debby Friday and Anna B Savage.Debby Friday is on a heroine’s quest for self-discovery.Katrin BragaDear listeners,Each year when I watch the Grammys, I am reminded of the absurdity of the best new artist category. New to whom, I always wonder. The qualifications are notoriously fuzzy and historically unstable — just ask the country musician Shelby Lynne, who released her debut record in 1989 and was amused to find herself winning best new artist in 2001. (“Thirteen years and six albums to get here,” she remarked wryly from the stage.) In 2007, Justin Vernon’s folk-pop project Bon Iver put out the lauded “For Emma, Forever Ago,” but it took five years and two more acclaimed releases to pull off one of the category’s most dramatic upsets, when he took home the 2012 trophy by beating the fan favorite, Nicki Minaj — who, as it happened, put out her first mixtape all the way back in 2007, too.And yet I did feel sympathy for the Grammy nominating body while putting together today’s playlist, which is full of up-and-coming artists who have recently caught my ear. No, they’re not exactly “new” — all have previously released music, and in some cases a few albums. But they’re new to me, and I hope that means at least a few of them will be new to you, too. They’re an eclectic bunch, making confessional acoustic folk, brash electro-pop and off-kilter art-rock. All have fresh albums that have either just been released or will be very soon. I would happily break Milli Vanilli’s (rescinded) best new artist Grammy from 1990 into four pieces and redistribute it to the following acts.Listen along here on Spotify as you read, or hit the YouTube links as you go.Jana HornJana Horn is a native Texan with a poised, glassy voice that reminds me a bit of the great ’60s folk singer Vashti Bunyan, except Bunyan’s voice evoked pastoral realism instead of Horn’s subtly mischievous mirror-world. The sparse, spine-tingling “After All This Time” — from a new album coming out next week, “The Window Is the Dream” — was what first caught my ear, but it’s since led me back to her great 2020 album, “Optimism,” and the absolutely haunting song “Jordan,” a poetic meditation on a Bible verse that Horn unfurls with the fixed gaze and confident pacing of an expert storyteller.Water From Your EyesSonic Youth never made a guest appearance on “Sesame Street,” but what the Brooklyn duo Water From Your Eyes presupposes with its latest single, “Barley,” is, well … what if the band did? “1, 2, 3, counter,” the vocalist Rachel Brown intones in a bone-dry deadpan. “You’re a cool thing, count mountains.” Nate Amos provides the perfect complement by kicking up dust storms of distorted, deconstructed guitar riffs. “Barley” stacks familiar words and musical elements in unpredictable shapes, creating an internal logic as alluring as it is mysterious. It all bodes very well for the group’s album “Everyone’s Crushed,” which comes out on May 26.Debby FridayThe Nigerian-born, Toronto-based singer and rapper Debby Friday’s ambitious, charismatic album “Good Luck” is one of my favorite debuts of the year so far. The strobe-lit club banger “I Got It,” which features Uñas, has been a mainstay of my running playlist for the past few months — it’s bona fide sprint fuel! But Friday shows off her range on the more introspective “So Hard to Tell,” which she frames as a tender but direct address to her younger self: “Lady Friday,” she sighs in a voice weighted down with the wisdom of hindsight, “all you do is rebel.” No matter her mood, though, Friday has what the kids call main character energy: She’s a shape-shifting, swashbuckling dynamo journeying through different tempos and genres, always on a heroine’s quest for self-discovery.Anna B SavageWhere does love go — like, energetically speaking — after the relationship that contained it ends? That’s the question that the British singer-songwriter Anna B Savage stares down in “The Ghost,” a quivering, emotionally raw incantation that begins her gripping new album, “In/Flux.” “I thought you were gone, but six years on, you’re back again,” Savage sings through gritted teeth before unlatching her jaw to let out a keening plea: “Stop haunting me, please.” There’s a rattling immediacy to Savage’s music; she writes like someone with a direct, unimpeded channel to her innermost feelings. “The Orange,” the album’s cautiously optimistic closer, provides a satisfying counterpoint to “The Ghost” and, I’d venture, a pretty good ending to this little playlist. “My new love is wind in the poplar trees,” Savage sings, finally free of the ghost’s interruptions and able to take stock of the simple pleasures all around her: “Round pebbles, poetry/Orange peel hacked on my knee.”If that’s not enough new music, Jon Pareles and I have 9 more song recommendations for you in this week’s Playlist.Yours in imagining Kim Gordon meeting Cookie Monster,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Best New (to Me) Artists, 2023” track listTrack 1: Jana Horn, “After All This Time”Track 2: Water From Your Eyes, “Barley”Track 3: Debby Friday, “I Got It”Track 4: Anna B Savage, “The Ghost”Track 5: Jana Horn, “Jordan”Track 6: Debby Friday, “So Hard to Tell”Track 7: Anna B Savage, “The Orange”Bonus tracksI cannot mention Vashti Bunyan without stopping everything and listening to “I’d Like to Walk Around in Your Mind,” and if you have two minutes and 15 seconds to spare, I suggest you do the same.Another absurd Grammy fact I learned this week and must share with you: Guess which song earned Bob Dylan his first ever solo Grammy? Actually, don’t guess, you’re never going to get it so I’m just going to tell you: “Gotta Serve Somebody,” which won best rock performance in 1980. Think about that: Bob Dylan didn’t win a single solo Grammy until 1980. (In 1973, when Ringo Starr accepted a podium full of album of the year awards for the many artists featured on “The Concert for Bangladesh,” Dylan got one of those. But still.) As it happens, I do love “Gotta Serve Somebody” — even more after seeing him play it at the Beacon Theater in November 2021 — so here’s to Bob Dylan’s first Grammy. Maybe that is what Soy Bomb was trying to protest. More

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      Feist’s Electrifying Return, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Lana Del Rey, Pink, Janelle Monáe 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.Feist, ‘In Lightning’Leslie Feist’s first album since 2017, “Multitudes,” is due April 14, and “In Lightning” is the noisiest and most changeable of the three songs she has released in advance. She sings about lightning as illumination, as power and as revelation; is it “in lightning” or “enlightening”? The track begins with clattering drums and banshee vocal harmonies, then veers between hushed contemplation and a brawny, Celtic-flavored stomp. At the end, the vocal harmonies that were so cutting when the song began return as tentative queries. JON PARELESLana Del Rey, ‘A&W’Lana Del Rey works in liminal spaces: between breath and melody, between confession and persona, between image and experience, between commerce and art. The pretty but utterly bleak “A&W” has nothing to do with root beer or fast food; the initials echo “American whore,” something she calls herself in the song. She sings as a woman without illusions or hopes, a celebrity who’s always under scrutiny: “Do you really think I give a damn what I do/After years of just hearing them talking?” In this long, subdued, radio-defying track, she sings about a loveless hotel hookup that may have turned into a rape; “Do you really think anyone would think that I didn’t ask for it?” she wonders. Halfway through, the track turns to synthetic sounds and the lyrics drift into a different obsession: “Jimmy only love me when he want to get high.” In this song, everyone is a user. PARELESJanelle Monáe, ‘Float’Since “Dirty Computer” in 2018, Janelle Monáe has focused more on acting than on music; the few songs the 37-year-old has released in the past five years have been one-off soundtrack recordings. The buoyant “Float,” though, certainly sounds like a harbinger of Monáe’s next era as a recording artist: It’s looser and more conversant with contemporary hip-hop than the musician’s work in the past. The Afrobeat heir Seun Kuti leads his late father’s ensemble Egypt 80 to provide some brassy fanfare while Monáe raps, “I had to protect all my energy, I’m feeling much lighter” in a carefree cadence that backs that assertion up. LINDSAY ZOLADZDesire Marea, ‘Be Free’The South African songwriter Desire Marea stirs up a maelstrom in “Be Free.” With lyrics in English and Zulu, it’s an exhortation and a reproach to someone who won’t accept his sexuality: “Maybe another day you will find courage to love me freely,” he sings, sympathetic but judgmental. Recorded with a 13-member live studio band, the song barrels ahead from the start: first with an insistent bass riff, accelerating with voices, brasses and four-on-the-floor drums, then rumbling and roiling under a solemn, string-laden plaint: “I just want to be free,” Marea insists. PARELESAnna B Savage, ‘Pavlov’s Dog’“Pavlov’s Dog,” from the London-based singer-songwriter Anna B Savage’s new album “In/Flux,” is a wonderfully tactile depiction of lust: panting backing vocals, escalating tension and Savage’s visceral, quivering voice. “Just call me Pavlov’s dog,” she sings against the atmospheric soundscape. “I’m here, I’m waiting, I’m salivating.” ZOLADZKelsea Ballerini, ‘Mountain With a View’With her strikingly candid new EP “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” the country star Kelsea Ballerini joins the recent ranks of peers like Kacey Musgraves and Adele in chronicling a young woman’s experience of divorce. “I’m wearing the ring still, but I think I’m lying,” Ballerini sings wrenchingly. “Sometimes you forget yours, I think we’re done trying.” The boldness of her confessionalism is paired with a sparse, airy new sound, full of echoing synthesizer chords, naturalistic sounds and plenty of empty space, evoking the home that Ballerini is suddenly learning to fill on her own. ZOLADZNaima Bock, ‘Lines’Following her lovely and eclectic debut album from last year, “Giant Palm,” the London musician Naima Bock’s new single, “Lines,” is dynamic and unpredictable, a folky rocker that rises and ebbs like the sea. Violin, saxophone and an unruly electric guitar all emerge at points to wrestle with Bock’s bracing vocal, but each one ultimately cedes the spotlight to her flinty presence. ZOLADZNickel Creek, ‘Holding Pattern’“Holding Pattern” is from “Celebrants,” the first album in nine years from the reconvened string trio Nickel Creek, due March 24. It’s a song that evokes the first months of the pandemic — “Washing my hands/Through the night can’t sleep for the sirens,” Chris Thile sings — and tries to draw comfort from companionship, urging, “Don’t forget we’re/Alone in this together.” The siblings Sara and Sean Watkins pick circular guitar patterns and add vocal harmonies, while Thile plays a counterpoint on mandola that rises like mist off a pond. PARELESPink, ‘When I Get There’At first, “When I Get There” sounds like a love song. It has basic piano chords and Pink singing, “When I think of you, I think about forever.” But soon it’s clear that she’s singing about someone who has died, maybe a songwriter: “Is there a song you just can’t wait to share?” It’s a careful crescendo that contemplates eternity. PARELESOval, ‘Touha’Plinking, glimmering, stuttering keyboard tones, somewhere between a piano and a music box, ripple across “Touha,” a track that previews “Romantiq,” the next album by Oval. Markus Popp, who has been recording computerized music since the 1990s as Oval, has long worked with loops, phantom spaces and electronic glitches. “Touha” proceeds in irregular flurries of keyboard activity and overlapping shards of melody, gradually interwoven with distant drones and glissandos and sporadic patterings of percussion. Aiming for neither dance nor meditation, it’s music for nervous introspection. PARELES More

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      Coi Leray Borrows a Hip-Hop Classic, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Ethel Cain, PinkPantheress, 100 gecs 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.Coi Leray, ‘Players’It takes a certain audacity to sample Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” but, as the 25-year-old rapper Coi Leray puts it on her punchy new single “Players,” “when you a boss you could do what you want.” The track has a playful swagger, and a relatively straightforward, if potent, message: “Girls is players, too.” LINDSAY ZOLADZPinkPantheress, ‘Boy’s a Liar’Insecurities and fragmented bits of heartbreak ping across the weightless atmosphere of “Boy’s a Liar,” the latest two-minute missive from the TikTok phenomenon PinkPantheress. “Every time I pull my hair, well, it’s only out of fear/That you’ll find me ugly and one day you’ll disappear,” the 21-year-old British musician confesses, melancholically, to an unappreciative guy. The producer Mura Masa, though, turns out to be an attentive accomplice: His kinetic, carbonated beat bolsters the energy of PinkPantheress’s vocal and makes her sound like the heroine of her very own video game. ZOLADZ100 gecs, ‘Hey Big Man’Ahead of their much-anticipated second album “10,000 Gecs” — which finally has a release date of March 17 — the beloved hyperpop enfants terribles 100 gecs have released a surprise three-song EP, “Snake Eyes.” The whole thing is very much worth your time (and it’s only six minutes long): “Torture Me” features Skrillex and effectively compresses his glossy production style into the gecs’ lo-fi universe; “Runaway” is Dylan Brady and Laura Les’s warped version of a piano ballad, all AutoTuned operatics and melodramatic sonic explosions. The opener “Hey Big Man” is the EP’s most potent adrenaline shot, a scream-along live staple that updates the sound of “Treats”-era Sleigh Bells and piles on absurdist quotables. They’ve rarely been more audacious, or funnier: “I smoked two bricks, now I can’t pronounce ‘anemone.’” ZOLADZEthel Cain, ‘Famous Last Words (An Ode to Eaters)’Ethel Cain — the darkly gothic yet high-gloss songwriter Hayden Silas Anhedonia — quietly released to SoundCloud this prettily morbid waltz inspired by “Bones and All,” the Luca Guadagnino film about a romance between cannibals. “Eat of me, baby, skin to the bone/Body on body until I’m all gone,” she sings, over strummed, echoey guitar chords and a wavery keyboard, serenely offering to sacrifice herself for love. JON PARELESserpentwithfeet, ‘The Hands’“Look at the hands that fed me today/Bless the hands that wiped the tears from my face,” serpentwithfeet (Josiah Wise) sings in “The Hands.” It’s a hymn of gratitude that arrives with sonic undercurrents of dread. As serpentwithfeet harmonizes with himself, joined by a choir, piano chords give way to inhuman electronic tones and drumbeats rumble like distant thunder. He sings about finding a refuge, but the production makes clear that he’s still very much at risk. PARELESKali Horse, ‘In the Water’Kali Horse, formerly Kaleidoscope Horse, is the style-hopping Canadian duo of Sam Maloney and Desiree Das Gupta with assorted backup musicians. “In the Water” works up to beat-driven psychedelia: motoric like Krautrock, using the sound of dripping water as percussion, flecked with violin and harp sounds, cheerfully offering advice — “Don’t ask for much/Don’t ask if you will ever change” — and kicking up a ruckus before dissolving into a welter of vocal overdubs and a cryptic postscript: “Guilt takes many forms,” they sing. PARELESAnna B Savage, ‘In|Flux’The English songwriter Anna B Savage sings about one more tense, failing relationship in “In|Flux,” the title track from an album due in February. The song is a contrasty two-parter. Sustained woodwinds breathe a chord behind her at the beginning as she sings, between fraught pauses, about an angry, unsatisfying lover. But then a beat arrives, and it turns out that separation is liberation. Her low, troubled voice starts to leap upward as she exults, “I want to be alone/I’m happy on my own.” PARELESJelly Roll, ‘She’Jelly Roll — the stage name of Jason DeFord — has a Southern-rock yowl to rival Chris Stapleton or Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant; he can also rap. In “She,” he just sings. It’s a song about an addict — as strings and horns join him, all he can do is warn, “She’s afraid of coming down.” PARELESFievel Is Glauque, ‘Save the Phenomenon’Fievel Is Glauque — the duo of the singer Ma Clemént and the instrumentalist Zach Phillips — glides easily through the musical and verbal acrobatics it packs into “Save the Phenomenon.” It’s from their new album, “Flaming Swords,” a set of 18 jazzy, hyperactive miniatures, all but one lasting less than three minutes; “Save the Phenomenon” runs 1:46. Over knotty chords and brisk meter shifts, Clement tosses off head-scratchers like “By parting the leaves you meet the sublime/and there a fake you find,” all with an utterly charming nonchalance. PARELES More

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      Red Hot Chili Peppers Honor Eddie Van Halen, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Margo Price, Jamie xx, the Comet Is Coming 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.Red Hot Chili Peppers, ‘Eddie’Red Hot Chili Peppers memorialize Eddie Van Halen and 1980s Los Angeles with what sounds like an old-fashioned, real-time studio jam in “Eddie.” Anthony Kiedis sings biographical snippets — “My brother’s a keeper/I married a TV wife” — while Flea’s bass and John Frusciante’s guitar chase each other all the way through the song, in an ever-changing counterpoint of hopping bass lines and teasing, wailing, shredding, overdriven guitar — the sound of a band in a room, still pushing one another. PARELESKelsea Ballerini, ‘Muscle Memory’In “Muscle Memory,” Kelsea Ballerini orchestrates an instinctive reunion with an old flame — “my body won’t forget our history” — with classic tools: two chords, a backbeat, a lead guitar with wordless caresses. “How long will you be back in town?” she asks, concealing her eagerness. PARELESMargo Price, ‘Change of Heart’Margo Price reaches toward the 1960s and the confrontational side of psychedelia with “Change of Heart.” A wiry blues guitar riff and jabs of organ hint at the Doors as Price delivers a breaking-away song that toys with paradoxes: “You run from danger/straight into trouble,” she sings, adding, “Way down deep you’re as shallow as me.” Just to keep things off- balance, every now and then the band adds an extra beat, while a long, gradual fade-out suggests she’s still a little reluctant to move on. PARELESJamie xx, ‘Kill Dem’It’s now been seven long years since the D.J., producer, and longtime xx member Jamie xx released his beloved solo album “In Colour,” but this year he’s put out two rousing new singles: first the ecstatic “Let’s Do It Again” and now the elastic “Kill Dem.” Built around a sample of the dancehall great Cutty Ranks’ “Limb by Limb,” Jamie minces his source material into barely discernible syllables and launches it into hyperspace, leaving its component parts to ping off one another with a bouncy, exuberant energy. ZOLADZThe Comet Is Coming, ‘Pyramids’The British jazz saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, who lived in Barbados from ages 6 to 16, is at the core of multiple groups with different lineups. In the Comet Is Coming, he works with the synthesizer player Dan Leavers, or Danalogue, and the drummer Maxwell Hallett, a.k.a. Betamax, in a zone where electronic dance music and jazz collide. “Pyramids” is from the trio’s new album, “Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam”; the title of this track might allude to “Pyramid Song” by Radiohead, which shares some of the same ascending yet foreboding chords. Danalogue uses 1980s synthesizers for plump bass tones and upward swoops; Betamax mixes drums and drum machines, constantly accenting different offbeats. And with his meaty tone on tenor saxophone, Hutchings plays a jumpy, dissonant line that’s equally mocking and party-hearty, a bent Carnival shout. PARELESWitch, ‘Waile’In the 1970s, the Zambian rock band Witch — an acronym for We Intend to Cause Havoc — fused garage-rock, psychedelia and funk with African rhythms, spurring a movement called Zamrock. The wider world discovered them with the release of a 2011 collection, and surviving members of the band — the singer Emmanuel (Jagari) Chanda and the keyboardist Patrick Mwondela — returned to the studio in 2021 backed by international musicians, including the Dutch neo-psychedelic songwriter Jacco Gardner. “Waile,” written in 1978 but not previously recorded, addresses “sorrow and suffering” and the separation of a family. It moves through a percolating xylophone-and-guitar riff, blasts of fuzztone, some brisk African funk and, midway through, a slower lament carried by women’s voices before the beat picks up again and hard-nosed guitar riffs push ahead — undaunted. PARELESFlo, ‘Not My Job’On “Not My Job,” the British girl group Flo update the glittering sound of Y2K pop-R&B with a little modern-day therapy-speak: “It’s not my job to make you feel comfortable,” the trio asserts on the chorus. “If you ain’t being vulnerable, that says it all.” The blingy sheen, skittering beat and synthesized strings all conjure an aesthetic you may have not even realized you were nostalgic for — it’s giving “Case of the X”; it’s giving “The Writing’s on the Wall” — albeit enlivened with a fresh, contemporary twist. ZOLADZLil Nas X, ‘Star Walkin’If Lil Nas X continues to play jester, expertly, on social media — this week, he posted impishly hilarious videos of himself sending pizzas to protesters outside of one of his concerts, and of his newly minted wax figure FaceTiming his confused friends — his new single “Star Walkin’” suggests that he is still interested in using his music as an outlet for feelings that complicate that persona, like anxiety, light melancholy and self-doubt. “They said I wouldn’t make it out alive,” he sings defiantly on this gleaming, synth-driven track, which serves as the theme song for this year’s League of Legends World Championship. The one-off certainly doesn’t rank among his most memorable singles, but it’s further proof that he’s figured out a reliable sonic formula to turn personal apprehension into steely braggadocio; by the end of the song, he asks, “Why worship legends when you know that you can join them?” ZOLADZEmiliana Torrini & the Colorist Orchestra, ‘Right Here’Emiliana Torrini attests to the reassurance of a lasting relationship in “Right Here”: “Here’s to all the roads that we’ve been down,” she sings with a smile. “I’m right here by your side.” She’s backed by the Colorist Orchestra, a happily quirky Belgian chamber-pop ensemble that mixes standard instruments with homemade ones — including, for this song, the sound of stone scraping stone. Torrini and the Colorist Orchestra rearranged some of her older songs on an album they shared in 2018, while “Right Here” previews an LP of new collaborations due early next year. There’s pointillistic syncopation from marimba, glockenspiel and pizzicato strings, with a backdrop of sustained chords: the ticktock of everyday minutiae held together by the promise of constancy. PARELESShannen Moser, ‘Oh My God’Shannen Moser recreates a community sing and a hometown band concert in “Oh My God,” from an album arriving next week. In “The Sun Still Seems to Move,” Moser offers theological and existential musings — “I know that life’s not one linear seamless destination” — over fingerpicking and woodwinds, muscles and hands and breath. The music is thoughtful but determinedly physical. PARELESAnna B Savage, ‘The Ghost’The London-based artist Anna B Savage’s devastating new single, “The Ghost,” derives its power from a gradual accumulation of small, intimate details. “We used to notice the same things: His toenails, that little bug,” she sings to an old flame in a trembling low register. “But that changed, you couldn’t see the grave we dug.” Long after the breakup, though, the memory of her ex still lingers. “Stop haunting me, please,” she begs on the chorus, as the austere, piano-driven arrangement suddenly fills up with an eerie atmosphere. It sounds like an exorcism — or at least a yearning, last-ditch attempt at one, in desperate hope that it works. ZOLADZ More