What’s New
U2 featuring Dolly Parton, ‘Torn’
The album “Carnaval de Luz” is U2’s third release in a prolific year, following two EPs. “Torn,” its closer, is Dolly Parton’s last recording. Parton and Bono share a duet about “a family at war” — perhaps after infidelity, perhaps atop other divisions. What could have been a country ballad becomes a sustained U2 hymn instead, with quietly pealing guitars. Parton’s voice sounds frail at first, but she seizes the song’s final moments.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Ella Langley, ‘Here Then We’re Gone’
Ella Langley’s song for the album “The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping” is a stoic meditation on loss and time: “Ain’t no yesterdays ever come back again,” she observes. It’s a patient country waltz, emerging with a plaintive harmonica and concluding with wordless vocals that are at once mournful and unflinching.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Dexter in the Newsagent, ‘Edge of the World’
Charmaine Ayoku, the English songwriter who records as Dexter in the Newsagent, delights in romantic bliss in “Edge of the World.” It’s pure limerence as she happily observes that “Something in the air has changed but / it’s more than my attitude.” Quick-strummed guitar, brisk break beats and (simulated?) strings keep her aloft in pop euphoria.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Krill, ‘Dominate’
Between 2010 and 2016, Krill made three albums of spare yet sinewy indie-rock, devising asymmetrical, meter-shifting structures around Jonah Furman’s reedy voice. The band regrouped as Knot in 2020 and has now re-emerged as Krill, swapping in a new guitarist, Andrew Clinkman, alongside Furman on bass and Ian Becker on drums. “Dominate,” from the band’s new album, “Secret Language,” ponders power and accountability, asking, “When history ends, who plays the end credits?” The music climbs to a triumphal guitar solo, then tapers off to an uneasy postscript.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Ella Mai, ‘Over and Over’
The English R&B songwriter Ella Mai often uses supple melodies to probe murky relationships. “Over and Over” oozes forward in very slow motion as she details a romance that proceeds in cyclical power struggles that have “high stakes, no rules.” She admits, “I like to mess with your mind to keep the fire alive,” and when she backs off, he charms her anew: “Just when I think it’s ’bout to end, I love you over again.” The hesitant guitar chords behind her and the ache in her voice suggest it’s not the happiest situation.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Radie Peat, ‘The Moon and Stars’
Radie Peat, the singer in the Irish trad-rock band Lankum, continues to magnify the bleakest parts of Celtic tradition on her solo album, “No Human Tongue Can Tell.” In “The Moon and Stars,” the singer laments being seduced and abandoned by a lying man; one verse refers to the herb rue, historically used to induce miscarriage. Peat layers her voice into a baleful choir as the track builds to a thunderous march.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Ana Lua Caiano, ‘Um Mais Um’
The Portuguese songwriter Ana Lua Caiano is a one-woman studio band, deploying keyboards, drums and electronics, and multiplying her voice. In “Um Mais Um” (“One More One”), from her album “Devagar Que a Vida É Curta” (“Slowly, Life Is Short”), she gathers percussion, samples screams and overdubs herself into an army of women, marching to confront mortality: “One more one, another day has passed.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Jeanne River, ‘PP2’
Pings and plinks, including some prepared-piano notes from Cameron Winter of Geese, accompany the songwriter Jeanne Hill, who records as Jeanne River, in her debut single, “PP2.” It’s a quasi-lullaby with cryptic lyrics — “Canary in a coal mine / when scales come falling from your eyes” — that sounds live and transparent, only to have surreal vocal overdubs suddenly materialize in the mix.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
What’s New in Instrumental Music
Rizan Said, ‘Choubi Kawniyya (Cosmic Choubi)’
The Syrian producer Rizan Said played keyboards behind the singer Omar Souleyman for two decades, carrying the hypnotic stomp of dabke, Syrian wedding music, to the wider world before going solo in 2015. “Choubi Kawniyya (Cosmic Choubi),” from his album “Ma Waraa Al-Shaabi (Beyond Shaabi),” pushes nasal, modal dabke melodies toward psychedelia, stacking up synthesizer tones and triggering percussion from multiple angles.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
What’s New on the Charts
BigXthaPlug featuring Ava Max: ‘Burn’
“Burn” is from “Better Over Time,” the album BigXthaPlug released on Oct. 30; it’s No. 70 on this week’s Hot 100 chart. Like much of the album, his rap rails against doubters and ingrates over moody minor chords and trap beats: “I done dealt with all they selfish ways / still changed the life they livin’.” The song’s pop asset is Ava Max with the chorus that opens the track, pushing BigXthaPlug’s resentment toward revenge as she sings, “I just won’t stop until everything burns.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
The post Dolly Parton Sings With U2, and 9 More Songs We’re Talking About appeared first on New York Times.
