What’s New
Queens of the Stone Age, ‘Run Away From the Mob’
“Perfecth,” the new album by Queens of the Stone Age, is deliberately bare-bones and live-sounding, as if it were made before the era of infinite digital overdubs. “Run Away From the Mob,” its closing song, warns against brainwashing and bloodthirsty groupthink. Built on parts recorded 20 years ago, with Dave Grohl on drums, it starts out with a spindly, low-fi acoustic guitar, and even as it crests at the end with an attempt at reassurance — “I’m right there wherever you are” — it sounds far from invincible.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Snoh Aalegra, ‘I Love You’
Here’s a song for the dance floor at countless weddings to come. Over a beat between Prince’s guitar-scrubbing funk and 21st-century Afrobeats, the Iranian-Swedish singer and songwriter Snoh Aalegra declares unconditional, loyal affection: “I want this forevermore,” she promises.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Everything but the Girl, ‘Young and Dumb’
Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, who have been making music together as Everything but the Girl since 1982, set aside their longtime, club-friendly electronics on “Young and Dumb,” from an album they’ll release in February, “Blue Reservoir.” The song is a restrained, pensive, unplugged bossa nova about maturity and mortality. In her wistful contralto, an “older and wiser” Thorn looks back on a feckless youth, wonders “Where did the wildness go?” and admits, “I’d give up all the wisdom to be young and dumb again.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Sampa the Great, ‘Location’
The rapper Sampa the Great was born in Zambia and grew up in Botswana. She claims her own genre with her new album, “Nu Zamrock” — that is, rapping atop the guitar and horn riffs of Zamrock, Zambia’s early-1970s answer to psychedelia. Her uncle George Kunda was a founder of a top Zamrock band, Witch. In “Location,” her rapid-fire triplets address African music’s global reach and meager reward: “Don’t own all your art / Then it’s all just the same.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Diiv, ‘The Fountain’
Diiv has built its catalog as a guitar band that orchestrates its songs with gusts of distortion. For its new album, “Zirp!,” it chose an unexpected producer: A.G. Cook, the hyperpop pioneer and Charli XCX collaborator. But Cook didn’t try to impose digital crispness. “The Fountain,” opening the album, marches out of a staticky haze with bent guitar notes and blurry cymbals, while the lyrics are ambivalent about whether to “tear it up and start again.” They warn, “There’s poison in the fountain of youth.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Orchestra Baobab, ‘Ana Maria’
Founded in 1970, dissolved in 1987 and regrouped in 2001, the Senegalese band Orchestra Baobab has moved through generations of lineups with its guitar-topped, trans-Atlantic, hand-played blend of West African and Afro-Caribbean styles. “Ana Maria,” from its new album, “Made in Senegal,” is an African-tinged bolero with vocals answered by saxophones and guitar, romancing one another.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Clara Mann, ‘Oblivion’
The English songwriter Clara Mann is in her 20s, but she reaches back to the cozily organic sound of folkies from the 1960s and ’70s like Nick Drake and Bridget St. John on her new album, “Wishbone.” In “Oblivion,” she’s backed only by acoustic guitar, bass, drums and viola, pondering love and uncertainty. “Oblivion’s in bed with me / Tonight will be our last,” she sings, letting a sense of mystery linger.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Hannah Frances, ‘Circadian Heart’
Nothing is stable in “Circadian Heart” by the Vermont songwriter and composer Hannah Frances. What begins as pastoral folk-rock shifts in meter, tempo, arrangement and attitude. The beat speeds up and eases back; strings and saxophones wander in and out. The music hints at psychedelia, chamber-pop and prog-rock, as Frances sings about iffy, unrequited love and, eventually, finding the self-confidence to persevere. “Someday it’ll be easy to choose me and hard to let me go,” she concludes.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
What’s on the Charts
Zach Bryan: ‘Robot Killed the Working Man’
Zach Bryan’s new EP, “Young Manhood and Other Donatable Organs,” claims multiple spots on the Hot 100, including No. 35, the bluntly titled “Robot Killed the Working Man.” It’s bitter heartland rock, a fiddle-topped waltz that rails at faceless capitalism: “There’s no one to be angry at every time a working man falls,” Bryan sings. “Just more ads for gambling and more ads for more of it all.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
The post Queens of the Stone Age Returns, and 8 More Songs We’re Talking About appeared first on New York Times.
