Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.
Marshall Allen featuring Neneh Cherry, ‘New Dawn’
The saxophonist Marshall Allen, 100 years old, has long carried on the legacy of Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist visionary who claimed to be from Saturn; he has maintained the communal big band, the Arkestra, since Ra’s death in 1993. “New Dawn” is the title track from the first album that names Allen as a leader — a debut at 100! — and it’s deep in Ra’s era-melting ethos. It’s a leisurely, jazz-chorded ballad, composed by Allen, with lyrics by Knoel Scott that urge, “Arise and seek / Hear spirit speak.” Neneh Cherry sings with fond composure over sustained strings and a rustling rhythm section, and Allen’s alto saxophone solo scurries down polytonal paths, still frisky.
Galactic and Irma Thomas, ‘Lady Liberty’
Two New Orleans stalwarts, the singer Irma Thomas and the band Galactic, have teamed up for an album due in April, “Audience With the Queen.” Its first single, “Lady Liberty,” harks back to the socially conscious funk of Allen Toussaint songs like “Yes We Can Can,” with Thomas declaring, “Time to shuffle these cards that we’ve been dealt and free ourselves / If you don’t do something, you know nothing’s gonna change.” The horns and bass line strut; the lyrics hunker down for a long siege.
Sunny War featuring Valerie June, ‘Cry Baby’
Consolation isn’t simple in the steadfast soul ballad “Cry Baby.” In her deep-diving alto, Sunny War sings about how she wishes nothing but the best for a troubled friend, but she also knows that “the pain is real” and it’s necessary to “feel what you feel.” Joined on the chorus by an amiably wandering harmony vocal from Valerie June, the song offers empathy rather than false cheer.
Bartees Strange, ‘Wants Needs’
Pressures, insecurities, second-guessing and a deep longing for acceptance all churn together in “Wants Needs” from the indie-rock songwriter Bartees Strange. His coming album, “Horror,” has a top pop professional on board: the producer Jack Antonoff (Taylor Swift, Lorde, Lana Del Rey, Sabrina Carpenter). But “Wants Needs” holds a nervous undercurrent, from its frantic electric-guitar strumming start, to a mid-song swerve into an odd meter, to a direct admission to listeners: “I need you too.”
Perfume Genius, ‘It’s a Mirror’
Perfume Genius — the songwriter Mike Hadreas — juxtaposes opportunity and anxiety, isolation and exploration, in “It’s a Mirror.” He wonders, “What do you get from the stretching horizon?” He knows “My whole life is open just outside the door.” But he also sees “holy terror” when he looks in a mirror. The song is an expansive folk-rock march that’s full of ups and downs, leaving it an open question whether he’ll open that door.
Lucy Dacus, ‘Ankles’
“What if we don’t touch?” Lucy Dacus suggests at the beginning of “Ankles,” a preview of her fourth album, “Forever Is a Feeling.” She continues, “What if we only talk about what we want and cannot have?” Then she gets very specific about her desires, from a love bite to crossword-puzzle help. Cellos chug repeated notes and string instruments shimmer like vintage Fleetwood Mac as Dacus basks in tenuous togetherness, crooning, “How lucky are we to have so much to lose?”
The Weather Station, ‘Mirror’
“Mirror,” from the Weather Station’s new album, “Humanhood,” assembles itself from scratch: stray piano notes, a beat, a riff, a bass line and eventually Tamara Lindeman’s voice. She sings about trying to rise above rot and wreckage, trying to find hope in thoughts like, “No matter how jangled / Signals come in.” The band coalesces in ascending chords, but there’s no victorious ending; entropy prevails.
Nao, ‘Happy People’
In her helium-range soprano, the English songwriter Nao admits she’s “sensitive to bad vibes” and opts to surround herself with positivity in the bouncy “Happy People.” She’s grateful for how “Even in the darkest night, you give me light.” The production merges low-fi guitars and percussion with spacious, cannily deployed phantom choirs — children’s and adult voices that grow into a protective congregation.
Seun Kuti and Sampa the Great, ‘Emi Aluta (Zamrock Remix)’
The Nigerian bandleader, singer and saxophonist Seun Kuti has constantly advanced the possibilities of the Afrobeat forged by his father, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, and his 2024 track “Emi Aluta” was already a marvel of head-spinning syncopation. The “Zamrock Remix” raises the pitch and spotlights the smoky vocals and English lyrics of the Zambian singer and rapper Sampa the Great. At just three-and-a-half minutes, it ends way too soon.
OK Go, ‘A Stone Only Rolls Downhill’
OK Go’s latest single — from what will be its first album since 2014 — arrives, as usual, with an ingenious, playful, effort-packed video clip: a kaleidoscopic mosaic of intricately coordinated cellphone videos, directed by the band’s lead singer, Damian Kulash. Yet the audio can stand on its own. It’s a glum, wistful look ahead: “I wish I could say it would all be all right,” it begins. But amid cowbell taps, a woozy synthesizer line and prettily stacked vocal harmonies, the song is a confession of evaporating hopes, a bleak realization that “These things will be what they will.”
Porridge Radio, ‘Don’t Want to Dance’
The English band Porridge Radio has announced its dissolution with a final tour and an EP due in February, “The Machine Starts to Sing,” that will include “Don’t Want to Dance.” Fittingly, it’s a song of separation, with more than one cathartic crescendo from acoustic strumming to Dana Margolin’s tearful, blurted, broken-voiced confessions about “trying not to fall to pieces,” even as she tries to accept that “like dust it all just blows away.”
David Gray, ‘Eyes Made Rain’
David Gray’s new album, “Dear Life,” is filled with poetically ambiguous songs about coming to grips with the end of a long relationship. “No two hearts the same / through all this time,” he moans in “Eyes Made Rain,” while he realizes, “Now it’s gone and we won’t ever see it’s like again.” The song revolves around a steady, comforting fingerpicking patter, but the high, tense rasp in his voice rips through it.
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