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.
Joni Mitchell, ‘Be Cool’
The first preview of “Joni’s Jazz,” an archival collection of Joni Mitchell’s collaborations with jazz musicians, is this 1980 demo of “Be Cool,” a song that featured Wayne Shorter on saxophone when it was released in 1982 on “Wild Things Run Fast.” This version — two guitars, drums and a click track — doesn’t have all its lyrics yet. It doesn’t need them. Instead, Mitchell flaunts some bold, sure-footed scat-singing. The groove and the attitude — “50-50 fire and ice” — were already fully formed.
Sarah McLachlan, ‘Better Broken’
Sarah McLachlan ponders giving a second chance to a fraught, long-ago relationship in “Better Broken,” her first new song since 2016 and the title track of a coming album. It’s in vintage McLachlan style: a stately piano ballad with a melody that climbs gradually and holds some aching notes. She knows the possible rationalizations, envisioning “a jagged edge worn smooth by time”; she also, it seems, knows better.
Caroline Polachek, ‘On the Beach’
It was probably inevitable that Caroline Polachek — whose pop pushes toward the posthuman without losing physical connection — would fulfill a videogame commission. With the hyperpop producer Danny L Harle, she created “On the Beach” for Hideo Kojima’s game Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. She sings about Sanzu — the Japanese analog of the river Styx, dividing life and death — in a slow march with a melody that leaps to superhuman, computer-tuned peaks and valleys. She still sounds awe-struck.
Us3, ‘Resist the Rat Race’
In the 1990s and early 2000s, the British group Us3, led by Geoff Wilkinson, backed rappers with jazz grooves, mixing samples — primarily vintage Blue Note jazz tracks — with performances. Now Us3 has returned as Wilkinson’s instrumental band, still merging loops, beats and live musicians — now with arrangements for 18 brasses and reeds. A low-slung piano vamp and programmed trap drums run throughout “Resist the Rat Race,” topped by tootling synthesizer melodies and dense horn-section outbursts worthy of Gil Evans and Henry Mancini. It’s a swaggering alliance of human and machine.
Camilo, ‘Maldito ChatGPT’
Artificial intelligence matchmaking fails completely in Camilo’s “Maldito ChatGPT” (“Damned ChatGPT”). When he tells ChatGPT the attributes of his ideal partner, the system insists he’s chosen the wrong person, sabotaging his confidence. “I make a list of everything I’ve always dreamed of / And it looks nothing like the person next to me,” he sings. The track feels transparent, with a steady, subdued beat and skeletal piano chords. But as with an A.I. interface, there’s a lot going on under the surface: percussion, vocals, pizzicato strings, echoes. True to chatbot conventions, the A.I. ends its response with a question; Camilo can barely sputter an incredulous reply.
PinkPantheress, ‘Close to You’
“Every time you try we fall apart / You can’t seem to hold my heart close to you,” PinkPantheress complains in “Close to You,” a song that leaked as a demo in 2021; she has remixed it to fuse her vocals with the instruments. A snappy beat, a cycle of four blurry chords, stray blips and a jumpy melody leave her as unsatisfied at the end as she was at the beginning.
Burna Boy, ‘Don’t Let Me Drown’
It’s just a soundtrack song (for “F1”), but Burna Boy uses it as a confessional. With a production that brings together South African amapiano and deep house, behind rising and falling keyboard chords, Burna Boy sings about nighttime revelations, fame and guilt: “I still play the blame game with the man in the mirror,” he moans. The track heads toward four-chord trance, usually a release of tension. But Burna Boy doesn’t get past his own self-doubt.
Superchunk, ‘No Hope’
Old habits die hard. “No Hope” applies Superchunk’s lifelong commitment to punk and indie-rock to the present moment: “Here we are singing ‘no hope, hope, no hope, no hope,’” declares Mac McCaughan, Superchunk’s founder and leader since 1989. Punk’s response to oppression has always been defiant noise, loud major chords and singalong choruses flung at institutional foes. Will it be enough?
Jonathan Richman, ‘I Was Just a Piece of Frozen Sky Anyway’
At 74, Jonathan Richman still taps into the child’s-eye innocence that has guided his songs ever since he led the proto-punk Modern Lovers in the 1970s. Now, half a century later, he’s contemplating mortality. On the title track of an album due in July, “Only Frozen Sky Anyway,” he sings, “When I make my transition, I want everyone to know I just changed position.” He strums his acoustic guitar backed by Tommy Larkins on hand drums and — from the Modern Lovers and Talking Heads — Jerry Harrison, who orchestrates the transition with wriggling, fluttering synthesizer lines that ascend heavenward.
Crushed, ‘Starburn’
Crushed — the duo of Bre Morell and Shaun Durkan, who overdub themselves into a full band — devises tracks that can shift from lo-fi diffidence to arena-scale immensity in an instant. In “Starburn,” Morell sings about exhaustion — “Time swings us against the ropes / with nowhere to fall back to” — and improbable persistence: “Does your star still burn on its own?” The verses start with a bare-bones bass line and drumbeat; then guitars and voices multiply around her, and the space expands.
Silvana Estrada, ‘Lila Alelí’
The happy lilt of “Lila Alelí” (“Lilac Wallflower”), by the Mexican songwriter Silvana Estrada, builds up to a chorus of la-las that invites a big singalong. But Estrada is singing about an unrequited love, a painful, solitary obsession that she’s keeping to herself. “What I cannot say does not save me / from feeling a warmth that thrills me,” she sings, and adds, “My love is like a star that shines without your looking.” Her voice and the optimistic melody insist that the passion is its own reward.
Herbert & Momoko, ‘Mowing’
“Mowing” is from “Clay,” a duo album by Matthew Herbert, an electronic music producer (and sometime collaborator with Björk) who transforms found sounds, and Momoko Gill, a drummer, singer and songwriter. In “Mowed,” Gill strives to overcome apathy and despair: “I still believe in a world greater than we’ve known,” she sings. The track is starkly percussive, with Gill’s drums and less traceable but impactful sounds; the steady pulse signals a vital persistence.
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 An Unearthed Joni Mitchell Jazz Demo, and 11 More New Songs appeared first on New York Times.
