7 New Songs You Should Hear Now

Dear listeners,

I have spent the past week listening obsessively to “Getting Killed,” the great new album by the Brooklyn band Geese, and falteringly trying to describe what it sounds like as I recommend it to everyone I encounter. Here was one unsuccessful attempt: “They don’t sound anything like Ween, but they sound like they probably like Ween?” Blank stare. I also described the band’s lead singer, Cameron Winter, as seeming like the victim of a wizard’s spell, one which made him sing for the rest of his life like Julian Casablancas — and he is miserable about it. I’m not sure that gets any closer to capturing the bizarro magic that oozes out of this record. Maybe I should just say “go listen to Geese” and leave it at that.

A highlight from “Getting Killed” kicks off this roundup of recently released tracks that I think are worth your time. It also includes another band with an animalistic moniker (Gorillaz), two different collaborations between an established star and an underground hero (Hayley Williams teaming up with Jay Som, and Oklou with FKA twigs), and an unconventional love song about letting one’s freak flag fly (from one of contemporary pop’s true weirdos, Doja Cat). Gather your flock and press play.

I may be stomped flat, but my loneliness is gone,

Lindsay

Listen along while you read.

1. Geese: “Husbands”

“I’ll repeat what I say, but I’ll never explain,” begins the Geese frontman Cameron Winter, in an offering that sums up his inscrutable but somehow emotive lyricism. “Husbands” is a lurching dirge that seems as if it’s teetering on the edge of complete collapse, mirroring how Winter’s soulful warble perpetually sounds like it’s about to fall out of tune. But as the song progresses, it slowly steadies itself into a sturdy rhythm and allows an off-kilter beauty to emerge.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

2. Doja Cat: “Stranger”

“I believe the weirdest ones survive,” sings Doja Cat — from experience, if that truly bonkers performance on a recent “Saturday Night Live” episode is any indication. Doja’s bright and infectious new album, “Vie,” is less confrontational than her 2023 LP, “Scarlet,” but she hasn’t exactly sanded down her spikiest edges. That’s evident on “Stranger,” a surprisingly tender song that defines true love as feeling comfortable being your weirdest possible self in front of someone else. On a bed of dreamy synths cut through with ribbons of saxophone, Doja sings, “Nothing you do could freak me out.” How sweet!

Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

3. Madi Diaz: “Fatal Optimist”

“Fatal Optimist,” the latest album from the prolific, Nashville-based singer-songwriter Madi Diaz, is a sparsely arranged and emotionally raw chronicle of a breakup’s aftermath. This gently rollicking final track, though, finds hope in the selective memory required to fall in love again after heartbreak. “Forget I’ve ever been hurt, forget the reasons why,” Diaz sings in her powerfully plaintive voice. “Forget that I’m on Earth when I start looking at the sky.”

Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

4. Jay Som featuring Hayley Williams: “Past Lives”

In the six years since releasing “Anak Ko,” her excellent third album under the name Jay Som, the multi-instrumentalist Melina Duterte has successfully reinvented herself as a producer, engineer and supporting player in other people’s bands; her work with the supergroup boygenius earned her a Grammy. She brings a more collaborative approach to the new Jay Som album, “Belong,” which evokes the early-2000s emo and alternative rock that Duterte grew up on. To capture that sound as authentically as possible, “Belong” features guest appearances from two vocalists whose influence shaped Duterte’s style: Jim Adkins of Jimmy Eat World, on the single “Float,” and, on this moody, mid-tempo rocker, Hayley Williams of Paramore.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

5. Oklou featuring FKA twigs: “Viscus”

The French musician and producer Oklou joins forces with FKA twigs for this sleek, aqueous duet — which sort of sounds like Enya trying to make a hyperpop ballad. Produced with Danny L Harle, the track finds Oklou caught in a lonely thought spiral (“I get so lost deep inside of me”) before twigs swoops in to provide the comfort of company.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

6. Gorillaz featuring Trueno and Proof: “The Manifesto”

This multipart epic from the forthcoming Gorillaz album “The Mountain” fuses the perspectives of three different voices: the Argentine rapper and singer Trueno, the Gorillaz co-founder Damon Albarn (as his alter ego D-2) and the D12 rapper Proof, whose posthumous contribution comes from a freestyle recorded during a previous Gorillaz collaboration back in 2001. The result is a track that feels like it’s hovering somewhere above space and time, united by whatever forces bind us all together. “You’re not alone, you’re not alone,” D-2 sings. “You’re not even close.”

Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

7. Neko Case: “Winchester Mansion of Sound”

Last December, when I interviewed the great Neko Case about her memoir, she casually broke some news that made me incredibly excited: “I just finished a record on Monday.” Many months later, that record, “Neon Grey Midnight Green,” is finally here, and it is as singular and magnificent as I was hoping. It’s the first album that Case produced entirely herself, and she told me that she intentionally hired as many musicians as possible to play on it — including an entire orchestra for some tracks — because she wanted to go against the current of digitization to show how live musicians “fill space differently.” Accordingly, there’s a lush warmth to “Winchester Mansion of Sound,” a shape-shifting ballad that, in its final moments, bursts into an exuberant interpolation of the nursery rhyme “Down Down Baby.” “If you think I’m talking about romance, you’re not listening,” Case sings at one point. She’s right: The song is not a love letter to any particular person, but to music itself.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube