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, ‘Man of the Year’
“I’ve become someone else, someone more like myself,” Lorde sings, somewhere between pride and astonishment, in “Man of the Year,” the second single from her album due in June, “Virgin.” It’s a crescendo of self-transformation, from quietly plucked cello to full-band stomp, as Lorde seizes the masculinity within herself. In the video clip, she flattens her breasts, taping them down with duct tape; she ponders, “Who’s gonna love me like this?” and then proclaims, “Now I’m broken open / Let’s hear it for the man of the year.”
Miley Cyrus featuring Brittany Howard, ‘Walk of Fame’
“Walk of Fame,” from “Something Beautiful,” the new Miley Cyrus album, turns the proverbial morning-after walk of shame into something prouder: “I walk the concrete like it’s a stage.” The song is mostly formulaic disco, thumping away. But the voice of Brittany Howard — adding little responses and wordless overlays, then promising “You’ll live forever”— gives it some gravity.
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, ‘Urges’
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, an dedicated electronic-pop experimenter, toys with and displaces dance-floor rhythms in “Urges,” from her coming album, “Gush.” She whisper-sings “I keep getting urges / I can’t understand them” while brittle programmed syncopations, disembodied voices and distant, tootling arpeggios materialize around her voice; even as the sounds disintegrate, the pulse is danceable.
Santana and Grupo Frontera, ‘Me Retiro’
Two generations of Mexican American musicians — the Texas band Grupo Frontera and the guitarist Carlos Santana — make a natural combination in “Me Retiro” (“I’m Leaving”), a song about trying to drink away a heartbreak. Santana sits in with the Grupo Frontera band and, rightly, takes over; his guitar slices through the clip-clop beat and accordion chords and compounds the sorrows that Adelaido “Payo” Solís III sings about.
Obongjayar featuring Little Simz, ‘Talk Olympics’
Obongjayar — Steven Umoh, a Nigerian musician based in London — has a new album, “Paradise Now,” that’s full of inventive, Pan-African electronic grooves like the zippy staccato propulsion of “Talk Olympics.” With an octave-bouncing bass line and the sounds of balafons, drums, synthesizers and sampled voices, Obongjayar and Little Simz take turns complaining about someone who’s far too chatty: “I let you speak, that was my mistake,” Little Simz notes; Obongjayar adds, in his sweetest falsetto, “Shut up! Shut up!”
Albita and Chucho Valdés, ‘Mi Rumba Echando Candela’
Two seasoned musicians born in Cuba, the singer Albita (Rodriguez) and the pianist Chucho Valdés, front a brassy, jazzy big band as they tear into a Cuban guaguancó standard, “Mi Rumba Echando Candela” (“My Rumba Throwing Fire”) from their collaborative album, “Masters of Our Roots.” The arrangement, by Hilario Durán, gives the horns some breakneck, boppy interludes. And with raspy syncopations, Albita warns, “If you don’t know how to dance it, be careful — you’ll get burned.”
Case Oats, ‘Bitter Root Lake’
Spencer Tweedy, the son of Wilco’s songwriter Jeff Tweedy, shares his fondness for terse roots-rock storytelling. Case Oats is Spencer’s band with Casey Gomez Walker, who sings “Bitter Root Lake.” It’s a fiddle-topped, folk-rock ballad about a caper gone fatally wrong: a crime, a plane, an escape, a crash into a lake, a lover trapped underwater. “Tried my best to save you, but I knew that you were dead,” Walker sings. Survivor’s guilt lingers.
James Blackshaw, ‘Why Keep Still?’
“Unraveling in Your Hands,” the first album since 2015 from the English guitarist and composer James Blackshaw, revisits his blend of folky acoustic and studio enhancements. While the 27-minute title track is a worthwhile extended meditation, the six-minute “Why Keep Still?” is a briefer excursion, with homey picking patterns that occasionally skip or add a beat, eventually joined by a piano that glimmers like sunlight glinting from a creek.
Thom Yorke, ‘Dialing In’
Finesse and anxiety are exquisitely calibrated in “Dialing In,” Thom Yorke’s opening-credits song for an Apple TV+ series, “Smoke.” A drone runs through the track, and electric keyboards play twinkling arpeggios, as Yorke responds with stringent calm to a disturbing late-night phone call: “Let the demons out of your head,” he advises, trying to stay detached.
Lucrecia Dalt, ‘Divina’
“You are the only one I can fool death with,” the Colombian songwriter Lucrecia Dalt sings in “Divina,” a love song haunted by mortality. Produced by Dalt and David Sylvian, It’s a waltz constructed from a myriad of ghostly fragments: voices, instruments and electronics, vanishing almost as quickly as they appear, intricately aware of its own fragility.
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.
The post Lorde’s Anthem of Transformation, and 9 More New Songs appeared first on New York Times.
