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.
Doechii, ‘Nosebleeds’
Doechii was tearful and emotional — but primed with facts — when she became the third woman to win a Grammy for best rap album. She was also prepared; “Nosebleeds” was released almost immediately. Over stark, pushy, bare-bones electronic sounds, she gloats, “Will she ever lose? Man I guess we’ll never know” and declares her readiness for arena concerts: “I look good from the nosebleeds.” The track is barely over two minutes, but its last stretch segues into an entirely different sound: a double-time beat with Doechii cooing that she needs no advice from anyone who’s “never suffered.” The moment was hers to seize. JON PARELES
Lady Gaga, ‘Abracadabra’
She’s overheard your theory that nostalgia’s for geeks — and she couldn’t care less. Lady Gaga mines the sonic and aesthetic shards of her own past on the insistent “Abracadabra,” the third single from her upcoming album, “Mayhem.” Fashioning an anthemic chorus out of self-referential nonsense syllables (“abracadabra, morta oo Gaga”) is so “Bad Romance,” but the verse’s thumping house piano refines the more recent sound of her mixed-bag 2020 release “Chromatica” into something sharper and more urgent. Gaga’s not forging new ground here so much as she’s remixing her former selves, reminding her many imitators who they learned their strangest moves from and grasping so strongly at dance-or-die self-seriousness that she somehow ends up doubling back into absurdist fun. LINDSAY ZOLADZ
Valerie June, ‘Joy, Joy!’
The resolutely upbeat Valerie June insists that everyone can find “that joy joy in your soul,” no matter what. Her twangy, wavery voice, doubletracked in not-quite-unison, rises over a brawny two-chord vamp that gets buttressed by saxophones, cymbals, cranked-up lead guitar and a string section, massing to overpower any doubts. PARELES
Giveon, ‘Twenties’
“Thought that if I put you first enough / we would last for sure,” Giveon laments, with neat wordplay, in a vintage-style soul ballad complete with strings and electric sitar. The reminiscences quickly lead into recriminations over “six years gone down the drain,” and none of the retro trappings cushion the pain. PARELES
Moses Sumney featuring Syd and Meshell Ndegeocello, ‘Hey Girl(s)’
Moses Sumney has revamped “Hey Girl,” a slow-jam come-on from his 2024 album “Sophcore,” to make it more gender-fluid by handing over verses to guests. Syd teases, “You say you ain’t done this before,” and Meshell Ndegeocello moves evolutionary goal posts, intoning, “I am not a woman, I am not a man / I am a water- and carbon-based life form you’ll never comprehend.’ The track’s easy-rolling syncopation and suavely supportive horn arrangement welcome them all. PARELES
Coi Leray, ‘Keep It’
Coi Leray is equal parts tearful and enraged in “Keep It,” her indictment of a cheater: “Should’ve kept it real but you were fraudulent / Everything you said you did the opposite.” Her only accompaniment is calm piano chords and wisps of her own voice. She almost breaks down, wondering, “Why, why, why, why, why?” But then she summons her dignity and ends things. PARELES
Sleeper’s Bell, ‘Bad Word’
What happens to a relationship that survives a betrayal? Blaine Teppema, the songwriter for the Chicago duo Sleeper’s Bell, captures the lingering wounds, self-doubt and distrust in “Bad Word” from the new album “Clover.” Her voice is breathy and tentative over modestly strummed acoustic guitar and drums, as she sings “We got right back together / Now you treat her name like a bad word.” For the moment, she’s willing to go along. “One day I might know what it is you think,” she shrugs. “Till then I’ll laugh it off.” PARELES
Waxahatchee, ‘Mud’
Katie Crutchfield, the songwriter behind Waxahatchee, rarely escapes ambivalence. The cozy, countryish, banjo-picking march of “Mud” has MJ Lenderman and Spencer Tweedy singing along with Crutchfield as she tries to sever a guardian-angel relationship where “I might beam with empty virtue / but I’m a feather blowing in your storm.” The problem is that the “girl suffering” might be herself. PARELES
Destroyer, ‘Hydroplaning off the Edge of the World’
The latest single from Destroyer’s forthcoming album “Dan’s Boogie” is Dan Bejar’s version of a beachy summertime bop, released, with his typical contrarian’s air, in the dead of winter. Atop shimmering synths and sing-songy backing vocals, he talks to the wind (“Hey, breeze, where you going?”) and indulges in some zany observational spoken-word (“A priest mistakes me for a priest”), all while delivering the sort of wry, quotable bons mots for which he’s become known. “Fools rush in,” goes one of the best of them, “but they’re the only ones with guts.” ZOLADZ
Mekons, ‘War Economy’
It’s impossible to say when Mekons wrote this jagged, violin-topped post-punk song, probably the first to denounce “supernatural financialization.” It’s one of the tracks that the tenacious punk-era band has released to preview its next album, “Horror.” But the telegraphic lyrics that Tom Greenhalgh spits out sound all too applicable right now. PARELES
Macie Stewart, ‘Spring Becomes New, Spring Becomes You’
Macie Stewart, a classical composer who has also written arrangements for SZA and Mannequin Pussy, has her own album, a suite titled “When the Distance Is Blue,” due March 21. The track “Spring Becomes New, Spring Becomes You,” unfolds as a minimalistic waltz for prepared piano and string trio. Clanking piano motifs dissolve into pizzicato strings, while high violin harmonics hover far above; it’s at once lulling and eerie. PARELES
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