What’s New
Kacey Musgraves, ‘Weekend in Texas’
“Weekend in Texas” will be on Kacey Musgraves’s “Middle of Nowhere Vol. 2: Tex Mex Tapes,” due in January, an easygoing but clear statement about musical and cultural links across borders. Backed by twangy guitar, mariachi horns, Tex-Mex organ and plenty of cowbell, Musgraves contemplates a weekend of tequila and Mexican beer. She leaves a guy behind bilingually, singing, “I said adiós to his ego / ’cause he ain’t my amigo anymore.”
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Michael Kiwanuka, ‘California’
The English songwriter Michael Kiwanuka sounds utterly forsaken in “California,” from his new album, “Fudge.” His voice is a scratchy near-whisper as he sings, over minor chords, about separation and yearning: “I’ve been gone, gone, gone for way too long.” Even as an orchestral crescendo materializes around him, he seems frail and alone.
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@, ‘I Know You Are (But What Am I Thinking)’
Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak record under the search-defying name @, or “at.” They strum acoustic guitars and harmonize in warped, folky songs that take asymmetrical turns and suddenly sprout unexpected instruments. “I Know You Are (But What Am I Thinking)” wanders between jig and waltz as the duo marvels at a relationship that’s survived self-sabotage: “I can’t believe that you’re really staying,” they sing.
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Laila!, ‘So Much So Much’
A 20-year-old singer, songwriter, programmer and producer from Brooklyn, Laila Smith lavishes countless vocals on “So Much, So Much” from her second album, “We’ll Never Be This Young Again.” It’s a slow-motion track that wallows in anticipation: “There is so much I want to do with you,” she sings. Midway through, the song all but dissolves into cascading vocal harmonies, blissfully abandoning the beat.
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Dummy, ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’
The Los Angeles band Dummy confronts artificial intelligence in “Full Spectrum Dominance” on its new album, “do you love the color of the sky?” Dissonant wah-wah guitar and a funk beat with a touch of Stereolab back Emma Maatman as she sings, “You just take anything you like.” Is the computer-graphic video a taunt or a capitulation?
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Chuwi featuring Daymé Arocena, ‘Veo Veo’
The Puerto Rican band Chuwi merges Afro-Caribbean traditions, 21st-century electronics and a clear political edge on its brilliant debut album, “Libertad” (“Freedom”). Daymé Arocena, from Cuba, joins Chuwi in “Veo Veo” (“I See, I See”), a shape-shifting track that accelerates through yambú, batá and guaguancó rhythms and surrounds them in dizzying electronics and impassioned, incantatory vocals, striving “pa liberar” — “to get free.”
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The Olivia Tremor Control, ‘Timewaster’
“Waste don’t waste your time at hand,” the Olivia Tremor Control sings in “Timewaster” from the long-germinating, 27-track magnum opus, “The Same Place.” The song is upbeat with a scrappy horn section, taking its metaphysics lightly. The album is a memorial to the band’s songwriters: Bill Doss, who died in 2012, and Will Hart, who died in 2024. The Olivia Tremor Control made two albums in the 1990s as part of the neo-psychedelic Elephant 6 collective. Doss and Hart reconnected, gathered a band and started recording “The Same Place” in 2010, but the project was shelved after Doss’s death. Hart revisited it in 2023 and left plans to finish it; Elephant 6 musicians followed through. Now the song’s musings on impermanence — “We all fade into the never-ending struggle” — hit differently.
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What’s New in Instrumental Music
Nikki Nair, ‘Groundhogs’
Headphones on for this percussive, spatially dispersed extravaganza of rhythm from the EP “Majestic Animals” by the producer Nikki Nair. Snares, bass, bells, perhaps marimba and late-breaking piano and strings — not to mention handclaps — turn basic 4/4 into splashy sonic acrobatics.
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What’s on the Charts
Cameron Whitcomb: ‘Kingdom of Fear’
The Canadian songwriter Cameron Whitcomb deals in rapid emotional escalation. Like Mumford & Sons gone feral, his songs ascend from acoustic strumming to thumping drums to full rock stomp, and from mild discontent to raspy, self-pitying fury. “Kingdom of Fear,” No. 89 on Billboard’s Hot 100, sticks with the formula of previous hits like “Quitter.” Whitcomb sings about holding himself back, pretending to be strong so he won’t drive his partner away; “I won’t be that person that calls you when I’m hurting,” he vows. Thirty seconds in, he’s shouting.
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What Happened 20 Years Ago
Amy Winehouse, ‘You Know I’m No Good’ (Live at Paradiso, Amsterdam/2007)
Amy Winehouse released “Back to Black,” her second and final studio album, on Oct. 27, 2006. With jazzy vocal syncopations and savvy, retro-flavored arrangements, her songs made confessions of betrayal and self-destruction sound playful, knowing and almost jokey. A newly expanded reissue of the album includes a live 2007 concert from Amsterdam with Winehouse in superb form, improvisatory and tight.
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The post Kacey Musgraves’s Tex-Mex Kiss-Off and 9 More Songs We’re Talking About appeared first on New York Times.
