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.
Barbra Streisand with Hozier, ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’
At 83, Barbra Streisand still commands a voice of dewy-eyed purity, long-breathed grace and tremulous anticipation. She has announced “The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume 2” — an album of duets with Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Sting, Laufey and more — with “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” A deferential, un-gritty Hozier joins her in a slow, string-laden arrangement that changes key to accommodate him. This duet definitely won’t eclipse Robert Flack’s eternally radiant version, but it has an earnest charm.
Ed Sheeran, ‘Old Phone’
Fireside folk-rock contends with digital technology in “Old Phone.” It’s a guitar-strumming, foot-tapping ditty about realizing, too late, that cellphone storage can hold a Pandora’s box of regrets: lost friends, misjudgments, arguments, “messages from all my exes.” Better to wipe it next time.
Summer Walker, ‘Spend It’
The sound is plush and sensual, a silky, spacious R&B ballad with glimmering vocal harmonies sharing the chorus. But the message is coldly mercenary: “Give me the last four of your credit card / Buy back my love, you can keep your heart.” Instead of refuting the hip-hop cliché of women as gold-diggers, Summer Walker leans into it.
Nilüfer Yanya, ‘Cold Heart’
With her new single, “Cold Heart,” Nilüfer Yanya sets aside her trusty fuzz-toned guitar. Amid undulating keyboard chords and programmed beats, she sings about desire, separation, resentment and heartache: “I don’t wanna bear this burden ’cause it hurts like hell,” she sings. Many of her previous songs have built toward grungy catharsis, but in “Cold Heart,” the chords keep cycling around her; she’s still enmeshed.
Bambii featuring Jessy Lanza and Yaeji, ‘Mirror’
Bambii, a Jamaican-Canadian D.J. turned producer and songwriter who’s based in Toronto, keeps reconfiguring a sparse, syncopated bass riff and twitchy, flickering breakbeats in “Mirror.” Jessy Lanza sings in English and Yaeji sings and raps in English and Korean, pondering connection and identity — “I look in the mirror / I see your eyes” — as the rhythms ricochet.
Indigo De Souza, ‘Heartthrob’
Indigo De Souza brings unbridled enthusiasm even to situations she comes to regret. For “Heartthrob,” De Souza and her songwriting and producing collaborator, Elliott Kozel, kick up the tempo and pile on the guitars. The chorus is exultantly physical: “I really put my back into it,” she sings over two galloping chords. Meanwhile, the verses are full of lessons learned — “He really tricked me / I let him touch me where he wanted” — that still don’t prevent her from hoping to find “a full cup / a true heartthrob.”
Sami Galbi, ‘L’mjmr’
Sami Galbi — a Swiss, French and Moroccan musician based in Lausanne and Casablanca — applies electronic expertise to modal, Arab-inflected North African styles like rai and chaabi. “L’mjmr” from his new album, “Ylh Bye Bye,” flaunts Auto-Tuned vocal harmonies, trap percussion and buzzing synthesizer lines without losing the Moroccan essence of the tune.
These New Puritans, ‘A Season in Hell’
“Sing that lullaby to the abyss,” Jack Barnett chants in “A Season in Hell,” neatly summing up one of the missions of his band, These New Puritans. “A Season in Hell” sets up a bleak industrial beat, then laces it with somber, Bach-like church-organ lines as Barnett envisions being “Tied to the wheel, nailed to the ground / Put to the sword, fed to the hounds.” At the end, Caroline Polachek adds wordless, keening near-screams to perfect the gloom.
Marc Ribot, ‘Daddy’s Trip to Brazil’
The guitarist Marc Ribot — an essential sideman for Tom Waits, John Zorn and others — is about to release his first album featuring his lead vocals, which are modest. “Daddy’s Trip to Brazil” is a cranky tour diary from an overly jaded musician: “I have nothing to say to the local engaged intellectuals / I don’t wanna be reminded what I did here in 1998.” Of course it’s a bossa nova, subdued with an underlying tension, along with some twisted humor. Who else would complain, at his seaside hotel, about the sound of the waves?
Eli Keszler featuring Sofie Royer, ‘Drip Drip Drip’
The latest album by the percussionist Eli Keszler, who has worked with Oneohtrix Point Never and other musical experimenters, isn’t a typical drummer’s album. It’s more atmospheric than athletic. In “Drip Drip Drip,” Sofie Royer sings with world-weary calm about “deaths of despair and lives worth living” over skulking, noirish guitar and distant clanks and clatters. The tempo picks up in the second part of the track, as Keszler layers on live and synthetic sounds before a final dissolution.
Jon Pareles has been The Times’s chief pop music critic since 1988. 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.
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