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.
Fiona Apple, ‘Pretrial (Let Her Go Home)’
Fiona Apple’s first solo single in five years is topical, focused on poor women who are imprisoned before trial and drawing on Apple’s time spent as a court watcher. Over a percussive track built on hand drumming, Apple sings about a single mother who can’t afford to post bail; by the time her case is dropped, she has lost her home and her family. Her voice is bitterly sympathetic; the video adds stark statistics.
Moses Sumney and Hayley Williams, ‘I Like It I Like It’
Hayley Williams of Paramore joins Mosey Sumney for a song he wrote with a co-producer, Graham Jonson (a.k.a. quickly, quickly) about desire thwarted by its own intensity. “I turn cactus when we touch,” Sumney moans; “My lips clutch when you open up,” Williams admits. Deep, loping, stop-start synthesizer lines and a lumpy beat underline both their hesitancy and their obsession; all they can agree on is, “I like it too much.”
Billy Woods and Preservation, ‘Waterproof Mascara’
The most harrowing track on “Golliwog,” the new album by the rapper Billy Woods, is “Waterproof Mascara.” A sobbing woman and an elegiac melody share the foreground of the production, by Preservation, as Woods recalls domestic abuse and suicidal thoughts and tries to numb himself with weed. Like the rest of the album, it’s bleak and uncompromising.
Kali Uchis, ‘Lose My Cool,’
“Sincerely,” the new album by Kali Uchis, is one long, languorous sigh of relief at finding true love, then basking in it. The production luxuriates in relaxed tempos and reverbed guitars in songs like “Lose My Cool,” a two-part song — slow and slower — that shows off her jazzy side with melodic leaps and airborne crooning. She revels in clinginess: “Whenever I’m without you babe, it don’t feel right,” she coos.
Hxppier, ‘Aller’
Hxppier — the 20-year-old Nigerian songwriter Ukpabi Favor Oru — lets smoldering irritation boil over in “Aller,” singing, “I can’t right now with your wishes / You try but you lie.” The bass-loving production, by ValNtino, is grounded in an earthy low drumbeat and keeps expanding — with call-and-response voices, ululations, shouts, horns, strings, organ, even a crying baby — as if Hxppier is mustering allies from all sides.
Little Feat, ‘Dance a Little’
Little Feat has every right to celebrate its own longevity, as it does on its new album, “Strike Up the Band.” Formed in 1969, barely grazing the Top 40 albums through the decades, breaking up and reconvening, the band has persisted through the death of its central singer and guitarist, Lowell George, and many changes since, maintaining its unique fusion of blues, country, funk, New Orleans R&B, gospel, zydeco, jazz and beyond: roots-rock that embraces brilliant tangents. There’s a Bo Diddley beat behind the mandolin, accordion and horns of “Dance a Little,” a rolling, kicking song about traveling, homecoming and seizing the moment. “Tomorrow is forever, so tonight let’s dance together,” it urges, wresting pleasure from mortality.
I’m With Her, ‘Wild and Clear and Blue’
Regrouping after seven years between albums, the string-band supergroup I’m With Her — Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan and Sara Watkins — allowed itself some new studio leeway and guest musicians on its new LP, “Wild and Clear and Blue.” But the group’s essence is still in its close harmonies and delicate picking. The album’s title track pays homage to Nanci Griffiths and John Prine and touches on the inevitability of change and loss, listening to a car radio as “the static is slowly replacing the sounds of my childhood days.”
DJ Haram, ‘Voyeur’
The Brooklyn-based DJ Haram, who collaborates with hip-hop avant-gardists like Moor Mother and Billy Woods and has a regular Monday slot on the Lot Radio, pushes Middle Eastern sounds well into the red with “Voyeur.” Violin lines wail and slide over programmed beats, hand drums and untraceable distorted sounds. It’s relentless in the best way.
André 3000, ‘And Then One Day You’ll …’
André 3000 has moved his instrumental experiments from flute to piano for a new EP, “7 Piano Sketches”: brief, lo-fi, non-virtuoso keyboard doodles. “And Then One Day You’ll …” hints at Thelonious Monk, punctuating moody, descending chords with shards of whole-tone melody — fragments awaiting further development, or just whims.
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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