It takes supreme confidence to announce a 30-night residency at Madison Square Garden, along with multiple shows at stadiums in Amsterdam, London, São Paulo and Mexico City. That confidence belongs to Harry Styles, whose fourth solo album, due March 6, is titled “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.” But music doesn’t need stadium scale to thrive. This week brings releases by rock stalwarts like Lucinda Williams and Van Morrison; Latin pop and rock from Luis Fonsi, Yandel and Juanes; and the promise of new albums by the indie-rockers Snail Mail and the New Pornographers.
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What’s New
Harry Styles, ‘Aperture’
“Aperture” isn’t a disco song. Produced by Kid Harpoon, it’s subtler, propelled by three thumps and a syncopated fourth beat, double-timed by electronic buzzes and bursts of assorted percussion that mount up and then dissipate. Above that pulse, Styles croons vague lyrics on the way to a big choral affirmation — “We belong together” — only to immediately undercut it: “It finally appears it’s only love.” Ambivalence reigns.
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Charli XCX, ‘Wall of Sound’
Charli XCX is now well into her post-”Brat” project, and it’s a full swing of the pendulum. She’s slowly unveiling a soundtrack for the latest movie adaptation of Emily Brontë’s foundational gothic romance, “Wuthering Heights.” Charli XCX has set aside all of her big beats and hyperpop tweaks, instead choosing eerie string arrangements and exposed vocals. “Every time I try talking myself backwards / away from my desires, something inside stops me,” she sings in “Wall of Sound.” With no beat to push her, she hovers in emotional limbo.
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Luis Fonsi and Feid, ‘Cambiaré’
The percussive piano vamps, kinetic percussion and pushy horn sections of salsa have been making a comeback in songs by Latin hitmakers like Bad Bunny, Nathy Peluso and now with a duet by Luis Fonsi and Feid. In “Cambiaré” (“I’ll Change”), they apologize eagerly and profusely to the woman they want to get back, begging for forgiveness and promising not to err again. Can they dance their way to another chance?
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Lucinda Williams featuring Brittney Spencer, ‘Something’s Gotta Give’
Lucinda Williams was never one to mince words. She just released a new album called “The World’s Gone Wrong,” and in songs like “Something’s Gotta Give,” she’s openly bleak. “There’s an anger to these days / A simmering rage that never goes away,” she observes over bluesy, sinewy guitars, promising obstinacy but not comfort.
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Joy Oladokun, ‘Nothing Comes Easy’
Joy Oladokun offers hardheaded consolation in “Nothing Comes Easy,” a song she wrote after being dropped by her label and other personal setbacks. In a folky waltz that summons phantom vocal harmonies, she advises, “Trouble’s the cost of being alive” and “It’s just the cold truth / Nothing comes easy except for pain.” But there’s no self-pity in the song. Instead, she calls for perseverance and patiently looking ahead, fully anticipating “the good things creeping up like spring.”
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Snail Mail, ‘Dead End’
Lindsey Jordan — the songwriter who records as Snail Mail — revisits the wreckage of a messy breakup in “Dead End” from “Ricochet,” due March 27. “Can’t you even look me in my eyes?” she asks of an ex who’s not answering her call. Five years after Snail Mail’s previous album, “Valentine,” Jordan deploys grungy, thickly layered guitars and leaping melody lines as she works through good and bad memories to grudgingly insist, “I hope you get the life you want.” Perhaps she means it.
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What’s New in Instrumental Music
Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, ‘Ch’uwanchaña ~El Golpe Final~’
The guitarist Joshua Chuquimia Crampton is half of the studio duo Los Thuthanaka, who released an incendiary album in 2025. He melds Andean traditions with studio muscle in “Ch’uwanchaña ~El Golpe Final~” from a coming album titled “Anata,” after a ceremony of the Aymara, an Indigenous Andean people. “Ch’uwanchaña ~El Golpe Final~” uses drums, electric guitars and charango, an Andean lute; it scrabbles over two chords and a relentless six-beat pattern, a heritage of ritual claiming its own contemporary noise.
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What’s Big on the Hot 100
Sienna Spiro, ‘Die on This Hill’
Sienna Spiro, a 20-year-old English songwriter and singer, exults in the drama of a self-destructive romance in “Die on This Hill,” a ballad that was released in October and has been leaping up the charts this year. At a time when Adele has gone quiet, Spiro offers a similar kind of tearful buildup in a piano ballad that takes on orchestral strings. With equal parts of ardor and accusation, she stakes her ground: “I’ll be here ’cause I care,” she announces. “Yeah, I know you don’t care.”
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What’s Big in … Denmark
Guldimund and Saveus, ‘Vil Du Noget?’
“I could smash something right now,” the Danish songwriter Asger Nordtorp Pedersen — a.k.a. Guldimund — peals, a cappella, at the beginning of the song that’s currently No. 1 in Denmark, “Vil Du Noget?” (“Do You Want Something?”) Written with Saveus (Martin Hoberg Hedegaard) and others, it’s a song about teenage memories, including a lot of sexual frustration, that climbs from acoustic picking and strumming to hearty group vocals, perhaps exorcising some pent-up adolescent angst.
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Jon Pareles, a culture correspondent for The Times, served as chief pop music critic for 37 years. 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.
The post 9 Songs We’re Talking About This Week appeared first on New York Times.
