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.
Kesha, ‘Red Flag.’
Now that Kesha’s lawsuits and record-company contracts are in the past, her first independently released album, “. (Period),” doubles down on her persona as an unruly, thrill-seeking party girl who wants what she wants. In the peppy “Red Flag,” she welcomes chaos and complication over boredom. “I need a certain kind of chemical / It’s dangerous and unforgettable,” she sings, with an edge of Auto-Tune. The track revs up a combination of synth-pop pulsation and hand-clapping trance buildups, an adrenaline rush of romantic disaster.
J.I.D. featuring Eminem, ‘Animals (Pt. 1)’
The Atlanta rapper J.I.D. — born Destin Route — zooms through a barrage of syllables in the virtuosic “Animals (Pt. 1).” It’s a breakneck boast that juggles rhyme schemes and percussive flows with casual precision: “I’m good at my job / It’s not a walk in the park ’cause I’m in a metropolis / I’m lost in a thought but escaping the darkness.” J.I.D. is confident enough to split the track with a past master of enunciation and internal rhymes, Eminem. He pivots the production from eerily electronic to orchestral, without lessening the beats per minute or syllables per second.
Foo Fighters, ‘Today’s Song’
“Today’s Song,” the first new Foo Fighters song since 2023, starts as an elegy, then explodes into an exhortation to persevere. “Two sides to a river,” Dave Grohl sings as drums and power chords come crashing in, and, later, “We’ll drown in the middle / Which side are you on?” It’s the band’s latest earnest, uplifting hard-rock anthem, and despite a few rhyming-dictionary lyrics, the feeling comes through.
The Reds, Pinks and Purples, ‘What’s the Worst Thing You Heard’
The Reds, Pinks and Purples, from San Francisco, merge the 1960s and the 1980s at their most dejected. They share the ringing picked guitars of folk-rock with the bitter tunefulness of the Smiths and the Go-Betweens. On their new album, “The Past Is a Garden I Never Fed,” the song titles are a checklist of pessimism, from artistic careers to life choices: “The World Doesn’t Need Another Band,” “You’re Never Safe from Yourself,” “No One Absolves Us in the End.” In “What’s the Worst Thing You Heard?,” rising chords disguise dimming expectations; “I know we’re going to crash,” Glenn Donaldson sings, unconsoled by a brisk beat and a pretty guitar pattern.
Ethel Cain, ‘___ Me Eyes’
In the new single from Ethel Cain’s album due in August, “Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You,” she sings about a troubled fast girl from a small town, potentially a romantic rival in the album’s narrative. “She’s got her makeup done and her high heels on,” the singer observes. “She goes to church straight from the clubs / They say she looks just like her mama before the drugs.” The track’s pulsing synthesizers echo the 1981 Kim Carnes hit “Bette Davis Eyes,” which Cain has covered on tour. But unlike the casual seductress in that song, Cain’s character grows tearful behind her bravado. “They all want to take her out / But no one ever wants to take her home,” Cain wails in a surge of sympathy.
Zach Bryan, ‘River Washed Hair’
“I’ve grown partial to having a powerful memory that I cannot bear,” Zach Bryan sings in “River Washed Hair.” In a plaintive ballad, Bryan, 31, mourns his vanished youth, wishes he could make some apologies and has deep misgivings about fame and “the state of the world.” With a hooting harmonica, he invokes 1970s Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen, from an analog era that he knows is long gone.
Tyler Childers, ‘Oneida’
Tyler Childers has been playing “Oneida” onstage for years. An official studio production will be on his album “Snipe Hunter” later this month. But the preview is a live version, with a full band — including fiddle, accordion and pedal steel — set up in a front yard. The song is a country waltz about falling in love with an older woman, even though she’s “referencin’ movies I’m too young to know,” and it sounds genuinely affectionate.
Chicago Underground Duo, ‘Click Song’
Cross-rhythms abound in “Click Song” by Chicago Underground Duo: Rod Mazurek on trumpet and Chad Taylor on drums, along with instruments they add in the studio. “Click Song” has an electronic core — a looping synthesizer line — and melodies for trumpet that hint at African music, Ornette Coleman and the Rolling Stones’ “Miss You.” They’re completely surrounded by Taylor’s drums and percussion — multiple overdubs in stereo — slinging exultant variations on six-against-four.
Trio of Bloom, ‘Queen King’
Trio of Bloom brings together musicians who easily straddle jazz and rock: Craig Taborn on keyboards, Nels Cline (from Wilco) on guitar and Marcus Gilmore on drums. “Queen King,” the first single from an album due in November, brings a touch of kraut-rock to its jazz fusion. It uses what sounds like a looped, six-beat bass vamp as a maypole for the trio to improvise around. Gilmore locks into the beat but constantly subdivides it and toys with crackling, syncopated accents. Taborn’s electric keyboard hints at both blues and 1970s Ethiopian funk. Cline contents himself with insinuating rhythm chords most of the way through, then lashes out with speed and distortion before joining Taborn in a late-breaking melody.
Holden & Zimpel, ‘Time Ring Rattles’
Relentless momentum carries subtle but constant changes in “Time Ring Rattles” from the album “The Universe Will Take Care of You.” James Holden and Waclaw Zimpel deploy an idiosyncratic assortment of electronics and instruments — the credits include “computer organ” and “alto clarinet fractals” — in a piece with a fast, metronomic pulse, shifting layers and countless little melodic motifs, as jittery and changeable as Brownian motion made audible.
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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