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.
Lorde, ‘What Was That’
In her first solo song in four years, after her boffo duet with Charli XCX, Lorde skips back past the guitar-picking, Laurel Canyon sound of her 2021 album, “Solar Power,” to the keyboards and pumping electronics of her 2017 “Melodrama.” She sings about coming to terms with a breakup and missing past pleasures with someone — kisses, MDMA, a perfect cigarette — but she might also be speaking to her pop audience: “Since I was 17, I gave you everything.” She brings tremulous drama to the vocals, but despite the synthetic firepower available to Lorde and her fellow producers — Daniel Nigro (Olivia Rodrigo) and Jim-E Stack (Bon Iver) — the track is oddly muted and rounded-off, even where it could explode. Maybe that choice will make more sense within a full album.
Haim, ‘Down to Be Wrong’
Keys left behind, door locked, plane boarded — Danielle Haim sings about a decisive breakup in “Down to Be Wrong” from Haim’s next album, “I Quit,” due June 20. As the song begins, with a chunky beat and a few guitar notes at a time, perhaps there’s a hint of hesitancy in her voice. But as more instruments kick in and the miles of distance increase, her voice gets rougher and her certainty only grows. “I didn’t think it would be so easy till I left it behind,” she realizes, and her sisters’ vocal harmonies fully agree.
Jeff Goldblum and the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra featuring Ariana Grande, ‘I Don’t Know Why (I Just Do)’
Of course Ariana Grande can sing an old jazz standard. She glides through a song from 1931 (by Fred Ahlert and Russ Turk) that has been recorded by the Andrews Sisters, Frank Sinatra and Kate Smith. Grande is one of the guest singers on Jeff Goldblum’s album with the vintage-style Mildred Snitzer Orchestra; Goldblum, her “Wicked” co-star, is on piano, playing a modest, leisurely solo. But the track is hers — a poised, guileless, gently escalating complaint about unrequited affection: “You never seem to want more romancing / The only time you hold me is when we’re dancing.”
Ashley Monroe featuring Marty Stuart, ‘The Touch’
Understatement, so rare in current country production, burnishes “The Touch,” a song that promises lasting love. “As long as we’re together, it’s more than enough,” Ashley Monroe sings over Marty Stuart’s lone acoustic guitar, which is virtually the only accompaniment for the first half of the track. Harmonies blossom and more guitars (and Shelby Lynne on bass) eventually join, but the mood stays pristine.
Wisin and Kapo, ‘Luna’
“Luna” hits a very sweet spot between Afrobeats and reggaeton as Wisin, from Puerto Rico, and Kapo, from Colombia, harmonize on a friendly flirtation: “Just you and me in this room on a trip to the moon.” The production (by Daramola, a Nigerian musician based in Miami, and Los Legendarios, from Puerto Rico) is an ever-changing matrix of percussion sounds, electronics and vocal harmonies arriving from all directions. It’s pure ear candy.
Young Thug featuring Future, ‘Money on Money’
Young Thug ended his role in the longest trial in Georgia history, and two years in jail, in 2024 with guilty pleas and 15 years of probation. His first new single, after some guest spots, reclaims very familiar turf: a minor-key trap production, a longtime collaborator (Future) and boasts about money, sex and cars. Only a few lines — “I been in the trenches filled with hyenas” — hint at the hiatus.
Emma-Jean Thackray, ‘Maybe Nowhere’
The English songwriter Emma-Jean Thackray probes unhealthy mental states with upbeat, jazzy grooves on her new album, “Weirdo.” In “Maybe Nowhere,” a sense of dissociation and futility — “What if I stay? / No one was ever here anyway” — leads her to contemplate oblivion: “Are you beyond or maybe nowhere? / Maybe I’ll join you in the beyond.” She assembles a thick-chorded funk track around a rugged, distorted bass line, countering despair with craftsmanship.
Squid, ‘The Hearth and Circle Round Fire’
The genre-crunching English band Squid confronts book-burning and surveillance in “The Hearth and Circle Round Fire,” a postscript to its furious album “Cowards.” Distorted bass riffs, turntable scratching and sputtery drumming give way, briefly, to British brass-band stolidity. Then the churning resumes, along with the bitterness of the vocals: “Ring around the flames.” A droning, minute-long coda surveys the ashes.
Antropoceno featuring Parannoul, ‘The Waves’
Lua Viana, a Brazilian songwriter based in São Paulo who has been mixing samba and shoegaze under the name Sonhos Tomam Conta (“Dreams Take Over”), addresses environmental destruction under a new name, Antropoceno (“Anthropocene”), on a coming album titled “Natureza Morta” (“Still Life”). “The Waves,” with guest vocals from the South Korean musician Parannoul, envisions dire consequences of climate change, first in Portuguese and then in English: “The ocean reclaims the coastlines / Our cities will drown in fury.” The core of the song is a brisk samba, but it’s awash in disorienting percussion, echoes, electronics and noise, as if the deluge has already begun.
Cazzu, ‘Con Otra’
“Latinaje,” the new album by the Argentine songwriter, singer and rapper Cazzu, confidently traverses Latin and Spanish styles: tango, flamenco, bolero and more. “Con Otra” (“With Someone Else”) unfolds from ballad to cumbia, with accordion and vintage Tejano synthesizer tones, as Cazzu offers advice that her ex’s new girlfriend may not want to hear. “I’m not your enemy — you have your enemy sleeping in your bed,” she explains. “He’s going to deceive you with someone else.”
Jon Pareles has been The Times’s chief pop music critic since 1988. He studied music, played in rock, jazz and classical groups and was a college-radio disc jockey. He was previously an editor at Rolling Stone and the Village Voice.
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