Smith, Abbey (Yebba)

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    Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’ Era Outtake, and 13 More New Songs

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    Hear tracks by Ed Sheeran, Jazzmeia Horn and Her Noble Force, Ìfé 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.Radiohead, ‘If You Say the Word’In 2000, Radiohead ripped apart old, pompous Britpop assumptions. With the sessions that yielded the albums “Kid A” and “Amnesiac,” the band followed its most arty, experimental inclinations and looked inward at the same time. “If You Say the Word” is a song that the group completed but shelved, which will appear on its expanded reissue “Kid A Mnesia.” Its sound is still relatively live — a band with a steady drummer going minimalist — with lyrics that contemplate entombment and liberation. JON PARELESEd Sheeran, ‘Shivers’The producer Max Martin may have coined the phrase “melodic math,” but Ed Sheeran absolutely embodies it in his lyrics, music and production. “Shivers” is just packed with pop trigger words — love, heart, fire, kissed, party, car, dance, sunlight, soul, “tear me apart,” “lipstick on my guitar,” “all day and all night,” “do it like that” — backed by a track that pulls in pizzicato strings and flamenco handclaps over a solid four-chord structure. If computers will dance or fall in love, this is their song. PARELESSam Hunt, ‘23’A balmy track about the one who got away, “23” is about how the power of memory is sometimes more than enough. Sung with wistfulness but no malice, Sam Hunt recalls a love who moved on in a different direction, and he sounds almost as soothing remembering their good times together as imagining how her future might have turned out: “I really hope you’re happy now/I’m really glad I knew you when.” JON CARAMANICALisa, ‘Lalisa’The solo debut single from Lisa of Blackpink is politely exuberant and tautly bubbly. Perhaps her group’s most nimble rapper, she sashays her way through this thumping, popping song. It’s an extension of a familiar brand, with a sprinkle of innovation when the track and video nod to Lisa’s Thai heritage. CARAMANICAYebba, ‘Boomerang’​​Yebba (the singer and songwriter Abigail Elizabeth Smith) harks back to vintage-sounding 1960s pop and soul on her debut album, “Dawn.” In “Boomerang,” she sings about an inevitable payback for the man who, she realized too late, would “drag me through hell.” She gathers her rage in a spaghetti-Western track, with distant drums, castanets and orchestral accents; her “whoo-oo-oo-oo” hook whirls like a boomerang. PARELESJazzmeia Horn and Her Noble Force, ‘Where Is Freedom!?’The vocalist and composer Jazzmeia Horn closes her new album, the rousing big-band effort “Dear Love,” with “Where Is Freedom!?,” carrying a message of self-liberation over a groove that could have come off a 1970s soul record. “What does it mean to ascend after your journey begins?/You just might lose all your friends to be free,” she sings defiantly, as the track nears its summit and the horns’ harmonies pool together behind her. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOSleigh Bells, ‘True Seekers’How does a band built for brash, high-gloss, defiant pop address pandemic times? Brashly and knowingly, summoning its usual muscle and melody — Derek Miller’s walloping drum-machine beats and loud guitars behind Alexis Krauss’s chipper voice — but now, on its new album “Texis,” with lyrics that stare down dread and mortality: “Strip away armor, strip away fear/I think I lost it but here it comes again,” Krauss sings. “I’ll find my way out of the grave.” PARELESÌfé, ‘Fake Blood’The genre-crushing group Ìfé is a revelation. Its new song, “Fake Blood,” is a reminder of the boundless promise of music, collaging Auto-Tuned Yoruba prayer, the steady shakes of a maraca and thumping bass into a meditation on colonialism, police violence and mass shootings. Over clattering hand percussion, deep bass and razor-sharp synth stabs, the group asks, “¿Qué es lo que pasa aquí?” (“What’s going on here?”) Drawing on sounds and styles from across the African diaspora, it is an exercise in divination — a demand to imagine a better future, right here, right now. ISABELIA HERRERAFivio Foreign, ‘Story Time’The early waves of Brooklyn drill were light on storytelling, so Fivio Foreign’s breakout performance on Kanye West’s “Donda” album came as a shock. “Story Time” underscores that his narrative gifts are here to stay. It’s a vivid tale about a young man in jail facing unthinkable choices: “He was a little fish when he jumped into the water/and then he grew into a shark.” CARAMANICATirzah featuring Coby Sey, ‘Hive Mind’Like the neon glow of a below-ground cocktail lounge, Tirzah’s “Hive Mind” flickers into cool tranquillity. A kick drum thumps under oblique, dog-bark synths. Tirzah and the vocalist Coby Sey offer a serene, call-and-response conversation: “But who we were/Do we see things through?” By the song’s end, the question is seemingly left unanswered. The effect is a bit haunting and a bit loose, and all the more hypnotic. HERRERASt. Etienne, ‘Pond House’Saint Etienne, which arrived in the 1990s as a suave, optimistic, crate-digging corollary of trip-hop, is downright somber on its album “I’ve Been Trying to Tell You,” billed as music for the film of the same name. “Pond House” meditates in a wide-open soundscape, with a vocal sample from Natalie Imbruglia’s “Beauty on the Fire” — “Here it comes again/Cannot outrun my desire” — hovering above a thudding reggae beat and bass line, as percussion and sea gull sounds open out the horizon. PARELESAakash Mittal, ‘Nocturne III’Visiting Kolkata, India, years ago, the saxophonist Aakash Mittal became inspired by the throbbing energy and lively soundscape of night in that crowded city, and endeavored to write music that captured the feeling. He ended up living there for the better part of two years, and came away with a book of compositions that he referred to as his “nocturnes.” On “Nocturne III,” he was specifically thinking of the way drivers use their car horns — freely, as a form of chattery communication — while drawing from the Carnatic raga of Bageshri. Mittal and his trio (the guitarist Miles Okazaki and the mrudangam drummer Rajna Swaminathan) play in unison, repeating an increasingly urgent rhythm at one pitch before jumping to another, like different cars stuck in a jam. RUSSONELLOCircuit des Yeux, ‘Sculpting the Exodus’Haley Fohr, the composer and singer who records as Circuit des Yeux, brings operatic drama to a sense of loss in “Sculpting the Exodus” from her album due Oct. 22, “-io.” It’s an elegy that begins with a modest, tolling harpsichord motif and swells to an overwhelming orchestral peak in a swirl of ghostly voices, as Fohr clings to a kind of memorial, singing, “The signal goes on repeating.” PARELESSarah Davachi, ‘Abeyant’“Abeyant,” a new work from the experimental luminary Sarah Davachi, is deeply reverent of time. The song is simple but potent: For seven minutes, the fuzz of tape hovers under subdued piano keys and synths, repeating, suspending and lulling melody into a kind of extended, decomposed aria. This is the kind of music that demands repeat listens, urging us to listen closely, deeply and intimately to what might appear to be just texture, but contains the promise of deep contemplation under the surface. HERRERA More

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      The Secret to Yebba’s Debut Album? A Big Voice and Lots of Time.

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      The 26-year-old singer and songwriter endured a family tragedy on the journey between tasting viral success and assembling a complete artistic vision with Mark Ronson.The singer and songwriter Yebba has a story she tells about the moment she realized she was fated to pursue a career in music.It was the summer after her freshman year of college, and she was working at a warehouse, taking apart laptops. She’d started posting clips of her singing to Instagram, and they were beginning to get traction around the internet. One day after work, she was jogging alongside a bean field near her childhood home in Arkansas, and thinking about what the future might entail, when it happened.In a recent video interview, she was reflexively self-aware about how this might sound. “I’m just going to put it in the way that I know how to say it, because I don’t really talk in churchy language as much anymore,” she said, her eyes wandering around her room before making direct contact. “But I really did feel the Lord say, from my stomach, ‘I do want you to be a singer.’ And I had this moment where I just stopped running, and I sat down and prayed, just laying in the dirt.”What followed was not unique among singers who’ve broken out in the digital era. Virality brought surprise attention from established stars like Missy Elliott and Timbaland, which led to invitations to collaborate with other established stars and move to New York, where dreams are made of, as the song goes. But what Yebba, now 26, did next is unusual: She didn’t rush out a debut album with a phalanx of young writers and producers. She waited.After around five years of focusing on her mental health, navigating the pitfalls of the music industry and recording take after take until listening back to her singing was no longer what she called “very embarrassing,” she will release her debut LP, “Dawn,” on Friday. And the spiritual connection that guided Yebba to her career has helped her take her time, regardless of how many people have said “hurry up.”“I just don’t give a damn,” she said of the expectations placed on her as her career has slowly taken shape. Over two interviews Yebba spoke with consideration and purpose, often pausing for several seconds to collect a thought. Occasionally, she would tear up when the conversation turned serious, only to crack a joke a moment later. At one point, she showed off some of the art hanging in her Chelsea apartment: an abstract painting by the artist Shawn Shrum, and a green print she jokingly brushed off as “a basic bitch purchase from Anthropologie.”“They can’t haze me, because I didn’t sign up for a sorority,” she said. “But I did sign up to create things with other people’s money, and that’s all anybody can ask of me — that’s all I can ask of myself, is to hold true to what I’ve agreed to do so far. And the second I’m called to do something else, I’m gone.”Mark Ronson, who produced “Dawn,” said Yebba is steadfast in her taste. “You’re never going to get a sound or a color or a tone past Yebba that she doesn’t like,” he said. “She put her trust in me, but only in the name of realizing her vision.”Though Yebba has logged high-profile collaborations with artists like Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith — and an appearance on Drake’s latest album, “Certified Lover Boy” — “Dawn” doesn’t sound like the debut of a burgeoning pop sensation hopping onto trends. The album has a rich retro palette, draws deeply from jazz and R&B and is set in a dusky register that gives Yebba’s flexible voice room to roam. (On the cathartic “October Sky,” her melody lines gently float along before suddenly ascending in a burst of pyrotechnics.) The LP was inspired by D’Angelo’s “Voodoo,” one of Yebba’s artistic touch points, and recorded at Electric Lady Studios with several members of the “Voodoo” band.“In my head I wish I was a rapper, but really I just write folk songs,” she said.Yebba was born Abbey Smith in West Memphis, Ark. Her father was a preacher, and she grew up singing in the church, becoming a worship pastor by age 15. With fond exasperation, she relayed a story about her intermittent rebellions: “I would say that I want to quit, and he would say ‘Abigail, who’s your favorite singer?’ And I’d say, ‘Aretha Franklin.’ ‘And what did Aretha do before she became Aretha Franklin?’ ‘She sang in her daddy’s church.’”Not long after her moment of divine intervention, Yebba dropped out of college and moved to New York, where she played a 2016 show for the events company SoFar Sounds and sang a hypnotic song called “My Mind.” When video of the performance was eventually uploaded to YouTube that December, it blew up bigger than she could have imagined. “That one song was such a moment of worship, instead of really performative — I felt like God’s presence was there,” she said.But just a few weeks after the SoFar show, Yebba’s mother died by suicide. She went home to West Memphis, where she struggled with her feelings. “A lot of people around me encouraged me to ‘let it go’ — like, what the [expletive] does that mean?” she said. “All I have, as an artist, is a whole bunch of time to reflect.”After “sitting at home in Arkansas, like a robot,” Yebba returned to New York, where she thought a lot about the next step of her nascent career. She sang for A Tribe Called Quest. She went to London to meet with potential labels. But nothing was appealing. More troubling was the realization that her mother’s death was perceived as potential content, in some rooms. At a Grammys event, she said one label head introduced her to another artist by saying, “Her mom just died by suicide, but it’s all good because she’ll be able to write really good songs out of it.”In response, “I dropped my purse, and I ran out,” Yebba said, a look of transparent disbelief scrawled over her face. She needed more time.A crucial turning point came in 2018, when she met Ronson as he was putting together collaborators for what would become his “Late Night Feelings” album. Ronson said their rapport was cemented on their second day together, when Yebba good-naturedly made fun of a jacket he’d worn, telling him he was “trying too hard.” (“When an artist has the talent and the warmth to back it up, I don’t mind,” he said of the dig.) Their sessions led to three songs on Ronson’s album, and the music that would eventually become “Dawn.”“In my head I wish I was a rapper, but really I just write folk songs,” Yebba said.Heather Sten for The New York TimesSome of the tracks took years to complete. “October Sky,” initially written in the wake of her mother’s death, required around 300 vocal takes. “I felt like when I lost my mom, I felt like I had lost everything that meant anything to me before,” Yebba said. But over time, with Ronson’s support, the process eased. “All I Ever Wanted,” the final song written for the record, with stacks of harmonies and a glowing string arrangement, came together in just a few days.The pianist James Francies, a friend of Yebba’s who plays on the album, said she took care to surround herself with the right people. “At any moment, she’s like ‘If this doesn’t feel right, I don’t want to do this,’” he said. “And I’ve always respected and loved that about her, because she’s always put the music first, and she’s always put her peace of mind first.”The album was completed before the start of the pandemic, but Yebba decided to hold its release and prioritize her mental health. “I don’t want to glorify rock bottom, but I was sitting on my couch doing my daily routine of chain smoking cigarettes,” she said. “I was just like, ‘I can either be a professional cigarette smoker and a professional drinker, or I can be a professional singer.’ I don’t agree that artistry has to be miserable, because that’s against every single reason why I was bonded to the music.”But after taking her time, she’s finally ready for the next step. The album’s title doesn’t just refer to the break of day; it was her mom’s name, too. “I feel like now I get to be 26, instead of always being so immersed in grief,” she said. “I no longer feel like my life is some chore that I haven’t completed — that my mom is hanging over my head. There are new ways to honor her.” More