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    12 Key Music Collections, From Future to the Who

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    Whitney Houston’s gospel music, Future’s prolific mixtape run, a chunk of Joni Mitchell’s archives and a soundtrack of Brooklyn’s early discos arrived in new packages this year.Artists were eager to revisit the past in 2023 — some tweaking recent albums (like Taylor Swift), others revisiting long-dormant work in the vaults (like the two surviving Beatles). Boxed sets and reissue collections serve a different purpose, helping put catalogs and musicians into context, and bringing fresh revelations to light. Here are a dozen of the best our critics encountered this year.Julee Cruise, ‘Floating Into the Night’(Sacred Bones; one LP, $22)The absorbing, unconventional debut album from the deep-exhale vocalist Julee Cruise, who died in 2022, was produced by Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch; the three had previously collaborated on music for Lynch’s 1986 alt-noir film “Blue Velvet.” This batch of songs, released in 1989, plays as an extension of that fun-house mirror, lightly terrifying universe, with twisted 1950s melodies meeting destabilizing, plangent guitars meeting Dali-esque shimmers. “Falling” became the theme song for “Twin Peaks” in instrumental form, but its full vocal version is the essential one. Songs like that, “The Nightingale” and “Into the Night” feel, even now, sui generis — not exactly dream-pop or new age, but something utterly amniotic. And lightly harrowing, too. JON CARAMANICADeYarmond Edison, ‘Epoch’(Jagjaguwar; five LPs, four CDs, 120-page book, $130)Anna Powell Denton/JagjaguwarBon Iver didn’t come out of nowhere. Before he started that project, Justin Vernon was in DeYarmond Edison, a pensive, folky but exploratory band that made two albums before splitting up; other members formed Megafaun. DeYarmond Edison — Vernon’s middle names — delved into folk, rock, Minimalism and bluegrass, learning traditional songs but also experimenting with phase patterns. It made two studio albums and left behind other songs, including “Epoch.” This extensively annotated boxed set includes songs from Mount Vernon, DeYarmond Edison’s jammy predecessor, along with DeYarmond Edison’s full second studio album (though only part of its first), unreleased demos, intimate concerts, collaborations outside the band and Vernon’s 2006 solo recordings. It’s a chronicle that opens up the sources of a style getting forged. JON PARELESWe 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?  More

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      Zach Bryan’s Melancholy Bon Iver Duet, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Holly Humberstone, Byron Messia, Laurel Halo and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. 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, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Zach Bryan featuring Bon Iver, ‘Boys of Faith’The memorably wistful title track from the new Zach Bryan EP — which arrives just a few weeks after his most recent album — is a collaboration with Bon Iver, which means a couple of very pointed things. First, Bryan is making kin with fellow roots-adjacent cult heroes. Though he has become wildly successful improbably quickly, Bryan still fancies himself outside of the mainstream, stubbornly stomping to his own drum. That parallels the story of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, who likely could fill arenas if he was interested. Both singers are vividly emotional, too, building whole houses upon sadness. Where the two acts diverge is in tone — Bryan sings with raspy jabs, and Vernon buries himself behind echo and fog. Bryan is such a force, though, that he pulls Vernon in his direction on this song; when the two sing in harmony, Vernon sounds as if he’s chasing after Bryan ever so slightly, following his bark with moon-aimed howls. A lament followed by a hug. JON CARAMANICAHolly Humberstone, ‘Into Your Room’On her latest single, the warm, synth-pop tune “Into Your Room,” the English singer-songwriter Holly Humberstone oscillates between sincere yearning and wry, self-deprecating humor: “You’re the center of this universe, my sorry ass revolves around you,” she sings, begging forgiveness from someone she’s mistreated. There’s a casually tossed-off, conversational appeal to her lyrics and delivery, but when the chorus surges, she’s suddenly leading with her heart. LINDSAY ZOLADZTroye Sivan, ‘Get Me Started’Following the lusty thrill of his summertime single “Rush,” Troye Sivan starts catching feelings on “Get Me Started,” the second song released from his forthcoming album “Something to Give Each Other.” “He’s got the personality, not even gravity could ever hold him down,” Sivan sings atop an insistent, club-ready beat, aglow with the agony and ecstasy of a new crush. ZOLADZLandon Barker, ‘Friends With Your Ex’A disarmingly refined pop-punk debut single from Landon Barker — the son of Travis Barker, who plays drums here, and whose label is putting out the song. That teen-angst pop-punk became the de facto sonic landing place for the first wave of TikTok superstar pretty boys was about finding the safest available package of rebellion (and one that largely skirted issues of race). Barker is perhaps that movement’s third wave, following early adopters like Jaden Hossler and Chase Hudson, and then the mainstream carpetbagging of Machine Gun Kelly. Which is to say there is a lot to emulate — the blueprint is loud and easy to follow. It hardly almost matters who’s coloring in between the lines. CARAMANICAShakira and Fuerza Regida, ‘El Jefe’“Stick it to the man,” Shakira advises, in English, at the beginning of “El Jefe” (“The Man” or “The Boss”), a brisk polka-ska hybrid that teams Shakira — the paragon of Pan-American crossover — with Fuerza Regida, a regional Mexican band from California. Backed by crisply syncopated guitars and horns, the song is a worker’s gripe, in Spanish, about a grueling, underpaid, dead-end job with a lousy boss; “I arrive on foot, him in a Mercedes,” growls Fuerza Regida’s lead singer, Jesús Ortiz Paz. It’s peppy class warfare. JON PARELESByron Messia, ‘Mad Dawgs’Byron Messia’s breakout single, “Talibans,” is one of the year’s defining reggae songs, so saccharine you might miss its tough talk. Messia has a sweet voice that gets feistier the more clipped his singing becomes, and on his boastful new single “Mad Dawgs,” he comes almost all the way around to blustery, trading in much of his considered honeyed singing for a choppier rhythm more in key with the chest-puffing lyrics. CARAMANICAChelsea Wolfe, ‘Dusk’The goth crooner Chelsea Wolfe conjures a thick atmosphere on “Dusk,” her first new solo track since composing the score for Ti West’s 2022 slasher flick “X.” Produced by David Andrew Sitek of TV on the Radio, “Dusk” is centered around a slow, methodical beat, murky guitar chords and Wolfe’s breathy, eerie voice. “I will go through fire to get to you,” she sings with a haunting determination. ZOLADZLaurel Halo, ‘Sick Eros’Laurel Halo has a gift for the hallucinatory. “Atlas,” her first new album in five years, is a submersion into abstract imagination, resembling a head-spinning dream that shifts between epochs, story lines and locations. The Los Angeles-based conceptualist has explored Detroit techno, musique concrète and even left-field pop in the past, and was recently appointed to the faculty of Composition and Experimental Sound Practices at CalArts. But “Atlas” traces a new path, slithering between the textures of jazz, ambient and classical. On the highlight “Sick Eros,” a bass trembles and creaks, beats shiver and gurgle, synths groan and swell. There’s a Hitchcockian foreboding — a sense that someone is about to open a shadowy door and never return, or trip over an edge that will lead to oblivion. Discordant strings ache and decay, stretching over waves of vibration. By the song’s end, you can almost picture yourself at the Dead Marshes in the “Lord of the Rings,” gazing upon the corpses floating in the swamp, their spirits emerging from the water with a ghoulish menace. ISABELIA HERRERAColleen, ‘Be Without Being Seen — Movement I’A sense of peace is immanent to the music of Colleen, but especially the work she’s been making since putting aside her viola da gamba in 2017 and adopting an all-electronics approach, centered on modular synthesizers. Her new double LP, “Le Jour et la Nuit du Réel,” is a time-flattening work of minimalism, created with just a monophonic synth (that is, playing one note at a time) and two delay units. Toward the center of the album, the first of three short movements in “Be Without Being Seen” introduces a quizzical pattern of arpeggiated chords, and simply lets it hang in the air. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOMicah Thomas, ‘Eros’Listeners to Immanuel Wilkins will recognize Micah Thomas’s piano playing almost immediately: the elastic-band rhythmic tension and snap, the gloriously spilled-out harmonic delivery, his imaginatively redistributed roles for the left and right hands. Thomas is both the binding agent and the stirrer of chaos in Wilkins’s quartet, which for the past few years has been the most praised young band in jazz. On “Eros,” from Thomas’s new trio album, “Reveal,” the bassist Dean Torrey and the drummer Kayvon Gordon cooperate at cross-purposes, a six-beat flow emerging beneath a web of syncopation. Let the drums guide the rhythm of your body; then see how it changes when you let the bass. Then find Thomas within that combination, absorbing it all. RUSSONELLO More

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      A Thrilling, Rediscovered Nina Simone Set, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Snoh Aalegra, DeYarmond Edison, Explosions in the Sky and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. 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, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Nina Simone, ‘Mississippi Goddam’Just a week after performing at the historically Black Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., supporting James Meredith’s March Against Fear, Nina Simone was on fire as she strode onstage to play for a very different audience at the Newport Jazz Festival on July 2, 1966. Her interactions with the bourgeois New Englanders at Newport were hardly warm: In the middle of an acid-rinsed version of “Blues for Mama,” she dismisses them — “I guess you ain’t ready for that” — and later she hushes them: “Shut up, shut up.” But she pours every ounce of vitriol she’s got into the performance, especially on “Mississippi Goddam.” She’d first released the song in 1964, and two years later it felt as topical as ever. Meredith had just been shot while marching across Mississippi, and unrest was overtaking redlined Black neighborhoods across the country. At Newport, she amends one of the verses to address the oppression of Los Angeles’s Black community: “Alabama’s got me so upset/And Watts has made me lose my rest/Everybody knows about Mississippi, goddamn!” The entire Newport performance is now available for the first time as an album titled “You’ve Got to Learn.” It’s spellbinding, heartbreaking stuff, reminding us just how much Simone would still be lamenting today. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOSnoh Aalegra, ‘Be My Summer’Snoh Aalegra sings about not being able to let go in the forlorn, slowly undulating “Be My Summer.” She confesses, “I can’t change how I feel/Tried moving on but I’m right here where we left off.” The song arrives with a tangle of voices — some harmonizing, a few straying — and they return in choruses that are never quite unanimous, hinting at misgivings behind her pleas to “protect me from the rain.” JON PARELESAma Lou, ‘Silence’“Bring me silence till you start hearing sounds,” the English R&B songwriter Ama Lou instructs in a song that veers between sorrow and spite. The production isn’t silent but it feels sparse and hollow. Her vocals pour out over two chords implied by sustained bass notes and a hollow, stop-start drumbeat. With bursts of vocal melody that hint at prime Janet Jackson, Ama Lou mixes accusations and regrets, making it’s clear that she wasn’t the betrayer. “I believe I was convinced that you were actually all right,” she sings, quivering with disbelief. PARELESBlur, ‘The Ballad’“I just looked into my life and all I saw was that you’re not coming back,” an exquisitely mopey Damon Albarn sings at the beginning of “The Ballad,” a clear highlight from Blur’s new album, “The Ballad of Darren.” Lush backing vocals from the guitarist Graham Coxon and punchy percussion from the drummer Dave Rowntree provide a buoyancy, and layers of sonic details give “The Ballad” a kind of dreamy, weightless atmosphere. LINDSAY ZOLADZbeabadoobee, ‘The Way Things Go’The Filipino-English songwriter beabadoobee keeps a light touch as she whisper-sings about crumbling relationships like the one in “The Way Things Go.” Bouncy, folky guitar picking accompanies her as she claims the romance is only “a distant memory I used to know.” But later she gets down to accusations — “Didn’t think you’d ever stoop so low” — while a faraway orchestra with scurrying flutes floats in around her, a fantasy backdrop for her pointed nonchalance. PARELESDeYarmond Edison, ‘Epoch’Before Bon Iver, Justin Vernon was a member of DeYarmond Edison, which also included Brad Cook, Phil Cook and Joe Westerlund, who would form the band Megafaun. “Epoch,” recorded in 2005 and 2006, is the title track of a boxed set due in August and a harbinger of Bon Iver. It’s a resigned, measured ballad, with cryptic lyrics contemplating mortality and technology: “Out with the new in with the old/The wavelength rests at its node.” And behind the stately melody, the folky acoustic instruments that open the song — a banjo, a tambourine — face surreal echoes and incursions of noise. PARELESThe Mountain Goats, ‘Clean Slate’In 2002, the Mountain Goats — then the solo project of John Darnielle — released one of the most beloved albums in its vast catalog, “All Hail West Texas,” a collection of wrenching character studies bleated into a boombox accompanied by just an urgently played acoustic guitar. More than two decades later, and now with a full band behind him, Darnielle will revisit those same characters on the forthcoming album “Jenny from Thebes.” The first single, the lively “Clean Slate,” suggests that he won’t be returning to the previous album’s lo-fi sound; the new track has a rock operatic grandeur and a ’70s AM radio brightness. The lyrics are full of closely observed desperation and stubborn glimmers of hope — which is to say they’re classic Darnielle. “It’s never light outside yet when they climb into the van,” he sings. “Remember at your peril, forget the ones you can.” ZOLADZGrupo Frontera and Ke Personajes, ‘Ojitos Rojos’There are worse misfortunes than having no space left on a cellphone because it’s filled with photos of an ex. But that’s the situation in “Ojitos Rojos” (“Little Red Eyes”), the latest collaboration by the well-connected Mexican American band Grupo Frontera, from Texas — this time with another cumbia band, Ke Personajes from Argentina. Over hooting accordion and a clip-clop cumbia beat, the singers trade plaints about maxed-out memory capacity and lingering, near-stalker-ish devotion: “Although you tell me no and deceive yourself with another baby/I know I’m the love of your life,” sings Emanuel Noir of Ke Personajes. Is it heartache, or would cloud storage help? PARELESTravis Scott, Bad Bunny, the Weeknd, ‘K-Pop’One beat, three big names and an SEO-optimized title are the makings of “K-Pop,” a calculated round of boasting and come-ons from Travis Scott, Bad Bunny and the Weeknd. The track, produced by behind-the-scenes hitmakers — Bynx, Boi-1da, Illangelo and Jahaan Sweet — hints at crisp Nigerian Afrobeats, and it spurs three distinct top-line strategies. Travis Scott is quick, percussive and melodically narrow; Big Bunny leaps and groans; the Weeknd is sustained, moody and on brand, crooning “Mix the drugs with the pain” and promising vigorous, alienated sex. As in K-pop, hooks are flaunted, then tossed aside when a new one arrives. PARELESExplosions in the Sky, ‘Ten Billion People’The Texas band Explosions in the Sky has been playing instrumental rock — “post-rock” — since the late 1990s, relying on patterns, textures and dynamics to make up for the absence of lyrics. “Ten Billion People” is one of its perfectly paced wordless narratives: clockwork and skeletal to start, swelling with keyboards and guitars, seesawing with stereo dueling drum kits, pausing the beat and then rebuilding toward something more majestic and reassuring. It’s both minimalist and dramatic. PARELES More

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      Britney Spears and Elton John’s Mash-up, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Margo Price, Julia Jacklin and Michael Kiwanuka.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.Elton John & Britney Spears, ‘Hold Me Closer’By presenting Britney Spears’s first new music since the end of her conservatorship, Elton John adds newsiness to his already canny late-career playbook. As he did last year with Dua Lipa in “Cold Heart,” he has reclaimed hooks from his old songs over a plush disco track, then enlisted a headlining duet partner. “Hold Me Closer” — with choruses from “Tiny Dancer” and verses from “The One” — is produced by Andrew Watt with an echoey, nostalgic haze, floating into earshot and eventually dissolving like a mirage. In between, Spears and John mostly sing in unison, but she grabs just enough melismatic flourishes — and a distinctive “baby” — to make her presence known. JON PARELESRema & Selena Gomez, ‘Calm Down’Exposure to new audiences, or colonialism? Let’s hope the lawyers worked it out. “Calm Down,” by the Nigerian singer Rema, has been an international hit — more than 100 million plays on Spotify — since February. It’s carried by a cunningly syncopated track that uses acoustic guitar and a synthesizer blip alongside Afrobeats drum programming. Now, Selena Gomez has wisely latched on to it, and she coos boasts — “My hips make you cry when I’m moving around you” — to Rema’s own seductions. The rhythm leads; the voices affirm. PARELESMargo Price, ‘Been to the Mountain’Margo Price contains multitudes on her rollicking new single “Been to the Mountain”: “I’ve been a dancer, a saint, an assassin,” she sings with a hard-living swagger atop a chugging guitar riff. Perhaps representing a new sonic chapter for the Nashville singer-songwriter, “Mountain” hews closer to straight-ahead rock than her usual alt-country sound — there’s even a punky freakout in the middle of the song that allows her to show off the more guttural side of her voice. The striking, desert-hued music video finds Price exploring and embodying the many different aspects of her identity during a particularly potent ayahuasca trip. Embracing psychedelia may have allowed Kacey Musgraves to get spacier than ever, but here, Price sees it as an invitation to unleash her wildest side yet. LINDSAY ZOLADZJulia Jacklin, ‘Be Careful With Yourself’The Australian singer-songwriter Julia Jacklin implores a loved one to take care on the sweetly cautious “Be Careful With Yourself,” the latest single from her third album, “Pre Pleasure,” which comes out Friday. In her conversational delivery, Jacklin offers a font of healthy and practical advice: Quit smoking, drive the speed limit and put away some money in case of an emergency because, as she admits, “I’m making plans for my future and I plan on you being in it.” It’s a tender sentiment, but the song crackles with an undercurrent of jangly, distorted guitar and palpable anxiety, as Jacklin frets that a love so pure is doomed to be lost. ZOLADZThe National featuring Bon Iver, ‘Weird Goodbyes’The National and Bon Iver — a.k.a. Justin Vernon — have long been close. Aaron Dessner has worked with both as songwriter, musician and producer. Their overlap is in stately songs with hymnlike chords, and that’s what “Weird Goodbyes” is: Matt Berninger of the National and Vernon sharing harmonies in lyrics about self-doubt. It’s glum and thoughtful and neatly crafted for both; it’s not particularly new, but it is substantial. PARELESMichael Kiwanuka, ‘Beautiful Life’A love song could hardly sound more desperate than “Beautiful Life,” a song Michael Kiwanuka first released in 2021 for the Covid documentary “Convergence: Courage in a Crisis.” With mournful vocals over descending chords, eventually joined by full orchestra and choir Kiwanuka sings about how love “rescued me from a nightmare.” Now he has re-upped the song with a grim video by Phillip Youmans that envisions a game of Russian roulette and makes life seem even more precious. PARELESNoah Cyrus and Benjamin Gibbard, ‘Every Beginning Ends’Here’s an unexpected collaboration that works: Noah Cyrus with, of all people, Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie. “Every Beginning Ends” is a bleak folk-rock waltz about lovers growing estranged: “I can’t remember the last time you touched me,” he sings, in his plaintive high tenor, and she answers, “I can’t recall you making the move.” It’s matter-of-factly heartsick. PARELESNosaj Thing featuring Julianna Barwick, ‘Blue Hour’Nosaj Thing — the electronic musician Jason Chung — conjures nothing less than rapture with the multilayered “Blue Hour.” Julianna Barwick sings forgiveness and “flying into bliss” in a track that swathes a brisk, double-time beat in edgeless, reverberating synthesizer chords, her voice answered by the raw tone of a viola, balancing the ethereal and the earthy. PARELESBitchin Bajas, ‘Amorpha’Bitchin Bajas is the jokey name of a serious instrumental trio from Chicago that explores the possibilities of repetition where minimalism, psychedelia, jazz, dub and electronica overlap. “Amorpha” starts with plinking mallet percussion patterns that recall Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians,” but the 10-minute piece soon takes its own dizzying path, with undulating synthesizers, flickers of hyperspeed and slyly shifting meters behind its steady pulse. PARELES More

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      Arcade Fire Ignites a Fresh Era, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Normani, Brad Mehldau, Valerie June 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.Arcade Fire, ‘The Lightning I, II’Rarely does critical consensus pivot as quickly and sharply as it did for Arcade Fire, a band that began the 2010s snagging a surprise album of the year Grammy for its beloved, towering double album “The Suburbs,” and ended the decade caricatured as out-of-touch scolds when its 2017 technology critique “Everything Now” left just about everybody cold. The overwhelming return-to-form narrative that has greeted its first new music in five years, from an album due May 6, though, suggests that many were simply waiting for the group to once again make songs that sound like “The Lightning I” and “II.” “I won’t quit on you, don’t quit on me,” Win Butler sings through gritted teeth on the first part of the song, which moves at the tempo of someone running against the wind. Then, all at once, the track kicks into a rapturous gallop and becomes the kind of urgent, clenched-fist anthem the band was once known for: “Waiting on the lightning, waiting on the lightning, what will the light bring?” Butler sings, burning once again with an earnest, fiery hope. Somebody kept the car running after all. LINDSAY ZOLADZOumou Sangaré, ‘Wassulu Don’Oumou Sangaré has carried a women’s song tradition from Mali’s Wassoulou region to a worldwide audience. Her first new song since 2017, from an album due in April, is the Malian fusion of “Wassulu Don”: the quavering vocal lines and call-and-response of Wassoulou songs propelled by the modal, six-beat electric guitar picking — echoing Ali Farka Toure — that has been called “desert blues,” topped by an openly bluesy slide guitar. The song, it turns out in translation, praises regional economic development “thanks to colossal investments”: a prosaic text for a euphoric piece of music. JON PARELESNormani, ‘Fair’Her debut full-length is so long awaited, to some people the phrase “new Normani album” has come to mean roughly what “Chinese Democracy” used to, or — heaven help us —“#R9” still does. But the arrival of Normani’s new single “Fair” is promising on two counts: It indicates that 2022 really could be the year she puts out that mythical album; and it’s much better than “Wild Side,” the sultry but ultimately snoozy Cardi B duet from 2021. Mining the liquefied sounds of Y2K-era TLC or Aaliyah, “Fair” is an anguished ballad with a deep, menacing undertow. “Is it fair that you moved on?” Normani asks, “’cause I swear that I haven’t.” All the while, the moody track throbs with a sputtering but persistent heartbeat. ZOLADZInside the World of RosalíaIn just a few years, the Spanish singer from Catalonia has grown into one of the most worshiped, scrutinized and counted on young artists in the world.Reinventing Flamenco: Rosalía first burst onto the scene with her take on tradition, earning worldwide acclaim and introducing new generations to the genre.New Album: With “Motomami,” the singer adds irony and humor to her thematic arsenal, while turning up the sex and swagger.The Making of a Star: Before racking up magazine covers and millions of views with her YouTube videos, Rosalía spent years training in one of the world’s oldest musical art forms.Diary of a Song: For her hit “Con Altura,” the singer and her collaborators entered the studio with the express mission of paying tribute to old-school reggaeton.Residente featuring Ibeyi, ‘This Is Not America’Setting aside his intramural reggaeton beef with J Balvin, the Puerto Rican rapper Residente returns to major sociopolitical statements with the furious “This Is Not America,” which is rapped in Spanish but purposefully titled in English. It’s a darker sequel to the hemisphere-spanning “Latinoamérica” by Residente’s former group, Calle 13: a far-reaching indictment of repression, corruption and abuse across North, Central and South America. Driven by deep Afro-Caribbean drumming and choir harmonies, it insists, “America is not just the U.S.A.,” with a video that recapitulates brutal human-rights abuses in nation after nation. PARELESBrad Mehldau, ‘Cogs in Cogs, Pt. I: Dance’A three-part suite, “Cogs in Cogs” sits at the center of Brad Mehldau’s new album, “Jacob’s Ladder,” which collects 12 complex, hard-toggling tracks: an attempt to use the tools of prog-rock — his first musical love — to explore how a worldly life might have both shaken and strengthened his Christian faith. Mehldau, who continues to build out from his fixed identity as one of the country’s top jazz pianists, plays almost every instrument on Part 1 of “Cogs in Cogs”: piano, Rhodes, harmonium, mixed percussion and more. He sings some, too. Underpinned by the syncopated rhythm and woven harmonic progression that he outlines at the start, the track works as a patient immersion, providing some balance to the heady overload of so much of this album. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLODonae’o featuring Terri Walker, ‘Good Mood’Everyone in this dystopian moment wants something better. Here’s a song for whenever, eventually, the situation might feel right: a stripped-down bit of electronic funk topped by gritty human voices, placed in a digital grid but hoping there’s a warm, real, physical space beyond it. PARELESSyd and Lucky Daye, ‘Cybah’On the brink of a new romance, Syd — Sydney Loren Bennett, the songwriter and producer who emerged from Odd Future — airs her misgivings in “Cybah,” whispering a question to a prospective partner: “Could you break a heart?” Lucky Daye responds with conditions of his own: “Promise me you’ll always keep my heart in a safe place.” The hesitancy is built directly into the track, three slowly descending chords atop a bass line that sometimes falls away into complete silence, keeping the next step uncertain. PARELESValerie June, ‘Use Me’Valerie June’s “Use Me” isn’t the 1972 Bill Withers song. It offers a more kindly, less exploited version of the same generously loving sentiment: “I’ll let you use me when the world is doing you wrong,” she promises. It’s a soul waltz that gathers a circusy momentum from an oom-pah-pah beat, slightly delayed snare-drum rolls and jovial horns that sound like they wandered into a bar and decided to stick around. PARELESRosalía, ‘Hentai’A delicate, demure piano arrangement serves as a sonic red herring for the raunchiest song Rosalía has released to date. On the surface, “Hentai” is achingly gorgeous, as sparse and intimate as anything the pop-flamenco queen has ever done. “So, so, so good,” she croons ecstatically on the chorus, starry-eyed and accompanied by nothing more than a few plinking notes — the sound of a multifaceted artist revealing yet another side of herself. ZOLADZEthan Gruska and Bon Iver, ‘So Unimportant’Two meticulously disorienting songwriters and producers — Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and Ethan Gruska (Phoebe Bridgers’s producer) — collaborated remotely on “So Unimportant.” It’s a waltz that mingles an argument and an apology, with Gruska eventually deciding, “It’s so unimportant what started the fight.” What could have been a folksy, homey waltz is layered with hazy sonic phantoms — echoes, altered voices, electronic tones, a hovering string arrangement — that hint at the emotional complexities of everyday frictions. PARELESDanilo Pérez, ‘Fronteras (Borders) Suite: Al-Musafir Blues’As the founder of the Berklee Global Jazz Institute in Boston, the celebrated Panamanian pianist Danilo Pérez has a utopian goal, framed by his own experience of jazz: He sees the music as a tool for international solidarity, and a pathway toward some kind of global sonic language. Pérez’s Global Messengers are a transnational band that has grown out of his work at Berklee, and that seeks to put some evidence behind the ideas. “Al-Musafir Blues” comes as part of the “Fronteras (Borders) Suite,” which contemplates the pain of forced migration. “Al-Musafir Blues” is an 11-minute epic unto itself, starting with a plodding, lovely pattern from the Palestinian cellist Naseem Alatrash that melds slowly into a full-band arrangement; by the end, Pérez’s scampering piano is guiding the conversation. RUSSONELLO 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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      Taylor Swift Illuminates ‘Folklore’ in a Stripped-Down Studio Concert

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      “Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions” is straightforward and cozy. Taylor Swift and her two main collaborators and producers for her album “Folklore” — Aaron Dessner (from the National) and Jack Antonoff (a linchpin of Bleachers and fun., and a producer for Lorde, Lana Del Rey and others) — play through the album’s 17 songs at Dessner’s Long Pond Studio, a rural haven in Hudson, N.Y. Conversations between the collaborators introduce each song; birds and insects chirp.“Folklore” was released in July, and the documentary, out now on the Disney+ streaming service, was shot in September. Swift, Dessner and Antonoff perform as a trio on guitars, piano and a handful of other instruments, stripping away some of the fussy intricacies of the album’s studio versions in a way that heightens the songs’ sense of pristine contemplation. Often the music is just a rippling piano pattern and a modestly strummed guitar or two, each note precious. “The Long Pond Sessions” is a small-scale, casual-looking production; Swift is credited as the makeup artist. Mostly it’s just three musicians in a room, wearing everyday clothes and headphones, analyzing and performing songs they’re proud of.The big twist is that the September sessions were the first time that Swift, Antonoff and Dessner were together in the same place. During the pandemic, they had each recorded in their own studios, collaborating long-distance. In a nighttime conversation on a deck at the studio, Swift says that playing the songs in real time will “make me realize it’s a real album. Seems like a big mirage.” Musicians deeply miss performing live; with any other album, she would have gone to tour arenas.Swift got her start bringing teen-pop scenarios — breakups, crushes, insecurities — to country music. Then she moved decisively into the pop mainstream, trading banjo for synthesizers. “The Long Pond Studio Sessions” is not the first time she has made clear that she’s the songwriter and not just the singer. The deluxe edition of her 2014 blockbuster “1989,” which was made with the Swedish pop mastermind Max Martin, included her own demos of some songs, demonstrating her authorship. And last year, alongside her album “Lover,” she released an extensive archive of journal and diary entries, including song drafts.“Folklore” backs off slightly from the bold-outline, clear-cut arena-pop songwriting of albums like “1989” and “Red.” In quarantine, Swift chose a more introspective approach — but also, as she points out when talking about “Illicit Affairs,” a choice to be less autobiographical than her past songwriting. For many of the songs, Dessner — one of the main composers behind the National’s somber, reflective rock — sent instrumental tracks to Swift; then Swift came up with words and melodies. In the documentary, Swift says she was nervous about telling her label, “I know there’s not like a big single, and I’m not doing like a big pop thing.”But her songwriting remains self-conscious and meticulous. Swift and her collaborators detail the ways that songs on the album overlap with and echo one another; three of them — “Cardigan,” “August” and “Betty” — tell the same story from different characters’ perspectives. She explains “Mirrorball” to Antonoff as a cascade of interlocking images: “We have mirrorballs in the middle of a dance floor because they reflect light. They are broken a million times and that’s what makes them so shiny. We have people like that in society too — they hang there and every time they break, it entertains us. And when you shine a light on them, it’s this glittering fantastic thing.”Swift has written and sung — particularly on her 2017 album, “Reputation” — about the pressures of celebrity. On “Folklore,” she sings about them more subtly in “Mirrorball,” “Hoax” and “Peace,” coming to terms with her place in the information economy. But she also knows how to feed tabloids. A big reveal from “The Long Pond Studio Sessions” is that the pseudonymous, no-profile songwriting collaborator on two key songs, “Exile” and “Betty,” is her boyfriend, Joe Alwyn. She got her headlines.For “Exile” — a cathartic post-breakup ballad that’s a duet with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver — Vernon appears remotely, from his own recording setup in Wisconsin. His face is almost entirely concealed behind a bandanna and a baseball cap, but the emotion in his voice rises to meet hers as the song spills over in recriminations.While “The Long Pond Studio Sessions” is a positioning statement like her recent Netflix documentary, “Miss Americana” — which revealed her longtime struggle to declare herself as a left-leaning thinker amid the conservative assumptions of country music — it’s also, more important, a musical experience. Songwriting — mysterious, telegraphic, crafty and personal as well as potentially lucrative — is Taylor Swift’s mission. “Folklore,” made under singular circumstances and challenging old reflexes, is likely to be just one step in her trajectory. More