What’s New
Taylor Swift, ‘Patient Zero’
Never missing a commercial opportunity, Taylor Swift is releasing an expanded version — “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore” — of her 2025 album, with four additional songs that she wrote and produced with Max Martin and Shellback. The standout, “Patient Zero,” is a character study narrated by the ex of a toxic, cheating narcissist: “He loves how everybody else loves him.” When she answers a phone call from his current lover/victim, she empathizes and points out his behavior patterns — at first in a measured march, then in a chatty, talk-sung bridge. The situation is complicated; the pop structure is airtight.
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Madonna and Charli XCX, ‘Danceteria Afterhours’
Charli XCX joins Madonna on this remix of “Danceteria,” Madonna’s reminiscence of her 1980s career beginnings. As Charli recalls her own rise in the 2010s, the production mingles Madonna’s steady-pumping album track with the digitally fractured sound of Charli’s PC Music collaborations. It’s double-exposure nostalgia.
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Joy Oladokun, ‘Easy Company’
“Doomsday dancing sounds like a good plan to me,” Joy Oladokun sings in “Easy Company,” from her new, self-produced album, “Hope Is a Heavy Thing.” Backed by syncopated guitars and quoting Fela Kuti, she’s looking for a break from the troubles of the world. She knows it can’t last: “When we get sober, I’ll be fighting out in the streets till the war is over.”
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U2, ‘Silencio’
“Carnaval de Luz,” due Nov. 13, will be U2’s first full album of new songs since 2017, though the band released two EPs earlier this year. “Silencio” is a primal, four-chord garage-rock stomp carrying splintered lyrics about Christian faith, “the devil’s rock ’n’ roll,” human (dis)connection and band imperatives (“invocation, exaltation is the goal”). Mostly, it’s about flexing U2’s rock reflexes, with a blunt backbeat and proudly blaring guitar.
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Phoebe Bridgers, ‘On Video’
While Phoebe Bridgers tours arenas, she has released a song for the end titles of a new film, “Primetime.” It uses full-scale grunge dynamics, leaping from acoustic and lo-fi to loud and sweeping. The crashing refrain is a foreboding reminder that we live in an age of surveillance: “I’ve got it all on video.”
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A.G. Sully, ‘Are You Willing to Change?’
A.G. Sully — the songwriter and producer Allyson Grace Burgess — makes a demure but unmistakable demand in “Are You Willing to Change?” Breathy, multilayered vocals and jazzy keyboards waft up over a brisk six-beat rhythm. She proffers encouragement — “We can bend, we don’t have to break” — but she’s hinting at an ultimatum.
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Rhiannon Giddens, ‘Hope Is the Thing With Feathers’
With their neatly rhymed couplets, Emily Dickinson’s poems could be ready-made lyrics. For the title track of her new album, Rhiannon Giddens set a famous poem that mentions music: “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers.” Giddens and the guitarist Niwel Tsumbu composed a minor-key, Appalachian-tinged tune that’s subtly adorned with vocal harmonies, quiet percussion and eerie sustained accordion notes. The song could stand up, in Dickinson’s phrase, as “the tune without the words.”
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Jane Remover, ‘Beauty Sleep’
The prolific songwriter and producer Jane Remover exults in sonic jolts and relentless digital tweaks. A new single, “Beauty Sleep,” is a love song that begins in relative tranquillity, musing, “You came to me in a dream.” Then the beat comes slamming in and the track rockets ahead, briefly easing back to declare, “You’re the closest thing to human perfection,” before an even more ferocious distorted onslaught.
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What’s Big in Britain
Ezra Collective, ‘Sweet Echo’
“Here Because of Hope,” the fourth album by the English jazz quintet Ezra Collective, claimed No. 1 on Britain’s Official album chart after its release Sept. 18. An instrumental group sometimes joined by guest vocalists, Ezra Collective plays succinct compositions that draw on the African diaspora: reggae, R&B, salsa and more. “Sweet Echo” puts a calypso beat behind horn-section melodies suggesting Nigerian Afrobeat. It sneaks in a musicianly quirk; the bass line and horn parts each imply a different downbeat.
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What Happened 30 Years Ago
Sheryl Crow, ‘Everyday Is a Winding Road’
Sheryl Crow’s debut album was titled like a collective effort, “Tuesday Night Music Club,” leading some listeners to think she was only the singer. Her second LP — released Sept. 24, 1996 — was pointedly named “Sheryl Crow.” She produced it herself and played guitars, bass and keyboards; she glares from the album cover. Its songs are full of bruised, unglamorous characters who have no choice but to persevere. In “Everyday Is a Winding Road,” pattering drums and a pushy slide guitar sound cheerful enough. But the singer wonders “why I’m a stranger in my own life,” and in the chorus, all she can hope for is to get “closer to feeling fine.”
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The post ‘Patient Zero’ and 9 More Songs We’re Talking About appeared first on New York Times.
