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.
Karol G: ‘Latina Foreva’
The Colombian singer and rapper Karol G cheerfully fends off some unwanted male attention by praising Latin women instead: “Those curves don’t even exist in NASCAR.” The inventive pop-reggaeton production stays light and changeable, with little keyboard blips and string lines making sure the familiar beat is always laced with bits of melody.
Alejandro Sanz featuring Shakira: ‘Bésame’
Husky meets breathy in “Bésame” (“Kiss Me”), the new duet by Alejandro Sanz, from Spain, and Shakira, from Colombia: a 20-years-later reconnection after their 2005 megahit “La Tortura.” They trade endearments over a track that connects Latin pop to Nigerian Afrobeats — and, in the bridge, tosses in some flamenco handclaps for more trans-Atlantic fusion.
Guedra Guedra: ‘Drift of Drummer’
Abdellah M. Hassak, the Moroccan electronic producer, records as Guedra Guedra. Guedra is a Tuareg dance that shares its name with a cook pot that becomes a drum when covered with an animal skin. “Drift of Drummer” mixes field recordings that Hassak gathered in his travels across Africa with hand drum machines and synthesizers. Juggling ever-changing layers of percussion over a brisk implied pulse and a terse bass line, the song is a cauldron of rhythms, humanized by snippets of speaking voices.
St. Vincent featuring Mon Laferte: ‘Tiempos Violentos’
St. Vincent is joined by another high-drama songwriter and singer, Mon Laferte, for a third iteration of “Violent Times,” which appeared on her 2024 album “All Born Screaming” and its Spanish-language version, “Todos Nacen Gritando.” The ominous horns, looming drumbeats and James Bond-theme chords of the original track remain. Where Laferte takes over certain lines, she brings her own sharp-clawed sweetness.
Stereolab: ‘Melodie Is a Wound’
In the 15 years between the band’s studio albums — and extensive archival releases in the interim — Stereolab has had ample time to assess and focus its strengths and ambitions. Its new album, “Instant Holograms On Metal Film,” reinvigorates and concentrates all of Stereolab’s best ideas from the 1990s: perky minimalist cycles, odd meters, amiable pop melodies, wavery analog synthesizer tones and calm denunciations of oppressive power structures. In “Melodie Is a Wound,” Laetitia Sadier warns about, among other things, disinformation that’s meant to “Snuff out the very idea of clarity / Strangle your longing for truth and trust.” The seven-minute track detours into an instrumental coda that starts out breezy, dissolves into noise, reassembles itself and then proceeds to climb through changes of key and texture that cannot contain a rising anxiety.
Julia Michaels: ‘Try Your Luck’
Flirtation can be fraught. Julia Michaels urges a timid suitor to “Try Your Luck,” offering advice with equal parts nonchalance, encouragement, amusement and exasperation: “If you want the goal, then you gotta shoot the puck,” she sings, backed by easygoing, guitar-scrubbing R&B. “I could be into it too, depending on you,” she nudges, waiting for the hint to be taken.
Laura Stevenson: ‘Honey’
Romance is thorny and ill-starred for Laura Stevenson in “Honey.” “No one’s come close enough to ever love me back,” she sings. “I’m not enough, I never am.” What starts out modest and folky, with a lone guitar and then a country-ish band, metamorphoses into a psychedelic reverie, at first delicate and then buffeted by distorted guitars as all her troubled longing surfaces.
Kieran Hebden and William Tyler: ‘If I Had a Boat’
In a thoroughly unexpected collaboration, the electronic musician Kieran Hebden (who also performs as Four Tet) joins the meditative guitarist William Tyler for an 11-minute instrumental fantasia on Lyle Lovett’s “If I Had a Boat,” from an album due in September. Tyler fingerpicks the song’s cozy, folky chord progression partway through. But most of the track forges electroacoustic hybrids: sustained resonances, metronomic blips, what might be either scraped strings or synthesizer tones. It trades Lovett’s verbal free associations for sonic ones.
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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