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.
Lizzo, ‘Love in Real Life’
“It’s been a while,” Lizzo sings in “Love in Real Life,” after more than a year of commotion involving her social media, her weight and lawsuits from employees. The video (though not the song itself) opens with Lizzo saying she needs “no views, no likes, real love in real life.” Backed by a swinging beat and rock guitars, Lizzo heads out for a drunken night at a dance club, with a chorus topped by a Prince-like scream. For a few minutes, pleasure solves everything. JON PARELES
Benson Boone, ‘Sorry I’m Here for Someone Else’
The back-flipping upstart Benson Boone runs into a former flame who upends his current relationship on the lively new single “Sorry I’m Here for Someone Else.” Amid driving percussion, pulsating synths and an escalating sense of urgency, Boone unfurls a satisfying narrative of love lost and regained in a sudden moment of clarity. The only problem is that he has to break another girl’s heart in the process. “Benny, don’t do it, Benny don’t do it!” he tells himself — but he does it, and lets her down easy with that classic line, “It’s not personal.” LINDSAY ZOLADZ
Little Simz featuring Obongjayar and Moonchild Sanelly, ‘Flood’
“Flood” exults in percussive low end: a Bo Diddley drumbeat meshed with a syncopated bass line, below Little Simz rapping in her most hard-nosed bottom range. She lashes out at anyone who’d interfere with “my genius plan, and that’s being as free as I can” and offers career advice: “Don’t trust all the hands you shake.” She’s righteous and cynical, with her defenses well fortified by rhythm. PARELES
Model/Actriz, ‘Cinderella’
Agitation is built in to “Cinderella,” from the where’s-the-downbeat intro to the dissonant note that repeats — irregularly — through nearly the entire track. As an industrial dance beat assembles itself, crumbles, and reappears, the vocalist Cole Haden wrestles with the vulnerability of revealing himself to a partner, finally deciding, “I won’t leave as I came.” PARELES
Jenny Hval, ‘To Be a Rose’
The Norwegian pop experimentalist Jenny Hval takes on a familiar lyrical image — the rose — and turns it into something highly specific and alluringly strange on this first single from her upcoming album, “Iris Silver Mist.” “A rose is a rose is a rose is a cigarette,” she sings atop a spare track that features light, hypnotic percussion and subtle blasts of brass. As the arrangement gradually builds into something fuller, Hval sketches a vivid childhood memory of her mother smoking on a balcony, “long inhales and long exhales performed in choreography over our dead-end town.” ZOLADZ
J Noa and Lowlight, ‘Traficando Rap’
The 19-year-old Dominican rapper J Noa and her producer, Lowlight, crank up brash horn riffs and hyperactive bongos to hark back to Sugar Hill Gang’s “Apache” and its source, the Incredible Bongo Band’s version of “Apache.” She boasts about her talent, her business and her bank accounts in crisp, rapid, nonstop syllables, punctuated with a “la-la” refrain that’s joyful in its arrogance. PARELES
J. Cole, ‘Clouds’
Even the title — “loud” embedded in “Clouds” — speaks to the verbal ambitions of a grown-up J. Cole as he faces his own “gray hairs” and a rapidly changing world. The track is a two-chord vamp topped with electric piano improvisations, while Cole’s rhymes confront the confounding mess that is 2025. He has to brag: “The planet’ll shake when I’m performing.” But he’s also worried about “billionaires who don’t care the world’s gonna break / as long as they make money off it, pain brings profit” and about songs “generated by the latest of A.I. regimes” that will make some people ask, “What happened to human beings?” He can’t answer that question. PARELES
Deradoorian, ‘Set Me Free’
Angel Deradoorian, best known as the bassist and singer with Dirty Projectors until 2012, reaches back to Bach — or maybe Procol Harum — in “Set Me Free.” With a processional beat and harpsichord tones, she sings — joined by her own choral harmonies — about trying to rise above earthly disappointments to accept “an invitation cosmically.” The song hopes, a little paradoxically, that its constrained, formal elegance can summon liberation. PARELES
Deerhoof, ‘Overrated Species Anyhow’ and ‘Sparrow Sparrow’
Deerhoof’s new single holds two songs that stake out extremes. “Overrated Species Anyhow” is an indie-rock hymn, with a multitracked Satomi Matsuzaki sustaining the melody over tremolo-strummed guitars and bird songs. By contrast, “Sparrow Sparrow” is speedy, jumpy and intricate, a math-rock tangle of contrapuntal guitars, meter-shifting drums and a vocal melody that somehow lilts like a children’s song even as its surroundings go systematically haywire. The two songs are a benefit for the Trevor Project, which supports young L.G.B.T.Q. people. “Love to all my aliens / lost, despised or feared,” the lyrics of “Overrated Species Anyhow” attest. PARELES
Laura Misch, ‘Alchemy’
“Tear apart the elements and they’ll recombine,” Laura Misch sings in this ghostly song about loss, “letting go of all you love” and hoping that “tears return to tenderness.” Slow, airborne patterns of keyboards and harp waft high above her voice, eventually joined by her saxophone, in a mix that opens up celestial spaces, then turns inward. PARELES
Impérieux, ‘Fo Pio’
The Bulgarian electronic producer Alper Durmush, now based in Berlin, records as Impérieux. “Fo Pio” — like the rest of his new album, “Rezil” — melds the danceable austerity of techno with anxious undercurrents and sounds that can arrive like jump scares. “Fo Pio” has a midrange drone that waxes and wanes and a blippy, detuned melody that could have come from an early video game; other elements emerge just long enough to keep nerves on edge. PARELES
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