Drake was never one for small gestures. This week he suddenly released three full-length streaming playlists grouped as albums, rapping and singing about fame, wealth, lust, angst, entitlement and resentment. The 43 songs on “Iceman,” “Maid of Honour” and “Habibti” are strategically geared to crowd out the week’s competition, even if they’re unlikely to overwrite memories of how Kendrick Lamar trounced Drake when their feud exploded in 2024. Still, Drake doesn’t have to dominate the week’s listening; plenty of other musicians have been busy writing FIFA anthems, honing guitar hooks, looking inward or lashing out. Here are some worthwhile new tracks.
(Listen on Spotify or Apple Music.)
What’s New
Shakira and Burna Boy, ‘Dai Dai’
FIFA has enlisted Shakira again, 16 years after her World Cup theme song “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” topped charts in Europe. She’s booked (along with Madonna and BTS) for the halftime show at the final match on July 19 in New Jersey, and her new World Cup theme, “Dai Dai,” looks toward Africa again in a duet with Burna Boy from Nigeria that mingles precise electronic Afrobeats with stadium-scale handclaps, as the two sing about pain and determination on the way to “living the dream at the top of your game.” It’s a cannily international project, with global roll calls of soccer players and teams and a chorus that cheers, “Let’s go” in multiple languages.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Gracie Abrams, ‘Hit the Wall’
A loop of pinging, staccato piano notes runs throughout “Hit the Wall,” the first single from Gracie Abrams’s coming album, “Daughter From Hell.” It’s a nervous Minimalist pulse within Abrams’s latest song about insecurities and self-sabotage, coming to terms with precarious mental health: “I’m not a problem you can solve,” she warns, adding, “I live in a pattern of breakdowns.” Within the track are crescendos of self-doubt and self-mockery, only to leave her even more alone at the end.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Rostam featuring Clairo, ‘Hardy’
Busy, Vivaldi-esque Baroque strings — actually from a film score by Georges Delerue — propel “Hardy” from “American Stories,” the new album by Rostam Batmanglij. Since leaving Vampire Weekend in 2016, he has juggled productions (Haim, Clairo, Carly Rae Jepsen) and solo albums that deploy wildly assorted styles to serve a pensive self-consciousness. In “Hardy” he compares a failed relationship to an unfinished painting: “Maybe the greatest art is never completed / We only have to leave it knowing we tried,” he suggests. Partway through, Clairo shows up with whispery consolation, urging, “Don’t forget that you have an inner light.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Jorja Smith, ‘What’s Done Is Done’
What could have been a sullen, bitter good-riddance song — and still is with lyrics like “Was it always just words or was it always just her?” — is downright festive instead. Jorja Smith sings the accusations of “What’s Done Is Done” over pizzicato strings, a brisk beat and backup vocals that might as well be taunting, “nyah-nyah.” She’s dancing her way out the door.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Drake, ‘Road Trips’
Drake tries to shrug off a separation that might well be a breakup in “Road Trips.” Backed by blipping, ticking synth-pop, he admits that “Destiny is telling you to go,” but his goodbye isn’t exactly gracious; he hints that she’s selfish and money-grubbing, and he gripes, “Why is the solution always running away?” He adds, “I’m supposed to be the one whose heart is made of ice,” putting self-pity first.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Genesis Owusu, ‘Stampede’
“Time to start a riot,” Genesis Owusu declares in “Stampede.” Born in Ghana and based in Australia, Owusu is a rapper and singer whose political messages have grown increasingly blunt on his third album, “Redstar Wu & the Worldwide Scourge.” Galloping electro-pop, topped by electric guitar, makes Owusu a cheerful class warrior as he raps lines like “Giving my reply with a bat / Find a oligarch, get him taxed.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
KatzPascale, ‘Hold Me (Slowly)’
KatzPascale, the duo of Sammi Katzmann on saxophone and Jenna Pascale on cello and vocals, uses loops, multitracking and effects to construct a sonic haven in “Hold Me (Slowly)” from a coming EP, “Elegy.” Elaborate counterpoint ripples around Pascale’s breathy vocal harmonies as she sings about falling into sensuality.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
What’s New in Jazz
Davíd Sanchez, ‘Benkos y Los Cimarrones’
Davíd Sanchez, a saxophonist from Puerto Rico, found historic inspiration on a visit to San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, a region founded in the early 1600s by “cimarrones” — runaway Afro-Colombian slaves — who were led by Benkos Bioho. In the local music he heard connections to the Puerto Rican bomba beat, a diasporic kinship. Fierce percussion drives “Benkos y Los Cimarrones,” which opens with sprinting saxophone and drums and leads into a deliberative melody and expansive solos, soon meshed with unstoppable Afro-Caribbean percussion.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
What’s Climbing the Charts
Malcolm Todd, ‘Earrings’
It took two years for Malcolm Todd’s “Earrings,” released in 2024, to reach Billboard’s Top 40; this week it’s at No. 33. “Earrings” was the opening track on Todd’s major-label debut mixtape, “Sweet Boy.” He was signed to Columbia after TikTok hits, and went on to release a studio album, “Malcolm Todd,” in 2025. “Earrings” is decidedly homemade-sounding and earnestly derivative. The track owes quite a bit — nasal keyboard and guitar tones, an unhurried tempo, loose drumming, chords played squarely on the beat, multitracked vocals — to Steve Lacy’s 2022 hit “Bad Habit.” Todd’s narrator is too shy to tell a lover that he lost his “earrings in her bed,” and he taunts himself for his insecurity: “Malcolm’s in his feelings and he can’t get out of it.” At the end, he croaks, “I hope you like my mixtape.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Jon Pareles, a culture correspondent for The Times, served as chief pop music critic for 37 years. 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 9 Songs We’re Talking About This Week appeared first on New York Times.
