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.
Charli XCX featuring Ariana Grande, ‘Sympathy Is a Knife’
Now that her “Brat” album has given Charli XCX her long-deserved mass pop audience, she has recharged it with a follow-up album of remixes: “Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat.” On the first version of “Sympathy Is a Knife,” she sang about personal insecurities and a rivalry she couldn’t help feeling, “’Cause I couldn’t even be her if I tried.” The remix has the same two-note synthesizer riff but a new lyric about the vicious precarity of 21st-century stardom: “It’s a knife when you’re finally on top/’cause magically the next step is they wanna see you fall to the bottom.” Ariana Grande, who has been through her own fame roller coaster, makes a natural ally.
Obongjayar, ‘Tomorrow Man’
Obongjayar, a songwriter from Nigeria who’s now based in London, connects the call-and-response and social exhortations of Fela Kuti’s 1970s Afrobeat to the samples, loops and layering of contemporary computerized African pop in “Tomorrow Man.” Over a deep, thumping beat, he denounces laziness: “If you no work you suffer,” he rasps. Meanwhile, percussion clatters around him and other sounds go whizzing by — flutes, piano, distorted guitar — like career obstacles to be batted away.
Victoria Monét, ‘The Greatest’
After racking up songwriting credits for Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Blackpink and others, in 2023 Victoria Monét released an album of her own, “Jaguar II,” that won her the Grammy for best new artist. Her new deluxe version nearly doubles it, adding 10 tracks including “The Greatest,” a plush, undulating track full of bliss, gratitude and a little self-congratulation: “I look around and life is what I made it.”
Samara Joy, ‘Reincarnation of a Lovebird’
The leaping, chromatically shifty, gliding and then sprinting melody of “Reincarnation of a Lovebird,” composed in the 1950s by the jazz titan Charles Mingus, was made for instruments, not a singer. But Samara Joy seizes the challenge in this tour-de-force reinvention. She adds lyrics about an elusive love that’s “still a never-ending melody,” and handles every acrobatic twist with warmth and near-operatic precision: daringly a cappella at first, then joined by a group that swings like Mingus did.
Halsey, ‘I Never Loved You’
On “The Great Impersonator,” a new album due Oct. 25, Halsey practices the sincerest form of flattery — naming influences, posing as them in photos and writing songs in their style. “I Never Loved You” is a Kate Bush homage: a somber, swelling piano ballad that envisions death after unsuccessful heart surgery and tries to absolve a partner from lingering guilt. “I never loved you,” Halsey sings, but then partly takes it back. “I never loved you in vain.”
Maggie Rogers, ‘In the Living Room’
Like the title track to the album she released earlier this year, “Don’t Forget Me,” Maggie Rogers’s new single obsesses over longing and memories. It’s a folk-rocker that piles up electric guitars until it verges on a power ballad. With barely a hint of recrimination, she sings about the ex she still hasn’t gotten over: “I would have given every song I’ve ever written/Just to spend one day with you,” she vows. And while she tries to graciously let go, she can’t help thinking, “Do you still wonder about me?”
The Coward Brothers, ‘Always’
T Bone Burnett and Elvis Costello recorded together in 1985 as the Coward Brothers, and Burnett assembled a band of roots-rock studio stalwarts to back Costello on his 1986 album “King of America,” which will get a vastly expanded reissue in November. They’re back together, 21st-century style, for “The Coward Brothers,” a mock-biographical podcast in the style of a vintage radio drama and a companion album of new songs with a vintage patina. The opening song, “Always,” has a richly harmonized chorus that hints at Buddy Holly and the Beach Boys, straightforwardly declaring, “I want you always.” The verses, true to both songwriters, play with paradoxes.
Daniel Johnston, ‘All Good Children Got to Die’
The prolific indie-rocker Daniel Johnson, who died in 2019, made his first studio album, “Artistic Vice,” in 1991. An expanded reissue due next week adds outtakes and previously unreleased songs including “All Good Children Got to Die.” It’s a low-fi, guitar-strumming, wryly matter-of-fact acknowledgment of mortality, from birth — “Ever since that fateful day/I’ve been one step closer to my grave” — to funeral arrangements, and it calmly shrugs off both Satan and self-pity.
The Linda Lindas, ‘No Obligation’
The title track of the new album by the Linda Lindas, “No Obligation,” snarls back at any expectations that girls should be subdued, obedient and wearing a dress. It’s a galloping, four-chord punk stomp that packs plenty of exasperation into its two minutes.
Jeff Parker and ETA IVtet, ‘Late Autumn’
As a member of the celebrated Chicago instrumental band Tortoise, the guitarist Jeff Parker contributed to music that merged Minimalist patterns with jazz extrapolations. Leading the ETA IVtet, Parker explores extended structures with Anna Butterss on bass, Josh Johnson on saxophones and Jay Bellerose on drums. The 17-minute “Late Autumn” unfolds gradually but purposefully, a reverie with an underlying sense of direction. Solo guitar picking ushers in pastoral, sustained reed notes. A harmonized saxophone melody surfaces and subsides. A patient bass riff materializes to pace modest, meditative events: cymbal whispers, flickering electronic drones, reticent saxophone lines. There’s no rush, no showing off, just a shared curiosity.
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