Latest news with #PARELES
New York Times
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Japanese Breakfast's Shimmering Sadness, and 8 More New Songs
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. Plucked string tones from all directions create a magical, shimmering cascade around Michelle Zauner's voice in 'Here Is Someone' from the new album by Japanese Breakfast, 'For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women).' The lyrics hint at tensions and anxieties, but the track radiates anticipation: 'Life is sad, but here is someone,' Zauner concludes. JON PARELES Marianne Faithfull, who died in January at 78, kept recording almost to the end. She brought every bit of her scratchy, ravaged, tenacious voice to 'Burning Moonlight,' a song she co-wrote that holds one of her last manifestoes: 'Burning moonlight to survive / Walking in fire is my life.' Acoustic guitars and tambourine connect the music to the 1960s, when she got her start; her singing holds all the decades of experience that followed. PARELES 'Letter From an Unknown Girlfriend' is from the Waterboys album due April 4, 'Life, Death and Dennis Hopper,' and was written by Mike Scott. But it is sung and played by Fiona Apple, alone at the piano, delivering a remembrance of an abusive boyfriend: 'I used to say no man would ever strike me,' it begins, 'And no man ever did 'til I met you.' She admits to the charm of the 'satyr running wild in you,' but her voice rises to a bitter, primal rasp as she recalls the worst. It's a stark, harrowing performance. PARELES Diffidence turns into resolve in the course of 'Sanctuary,' a waltzing duet from 'Every Dawn's a Mountain,' the new album by the Belgian songwriter Tamino-Amir Moharam Fouad. In separate verses, Tamino and Mitski sound fragile, contemplating uncertainty and loss; 'I reside in the ruins of the sanctuary,' Mitski sings. But when they connect — asking 'Is it late where you are?' — and harmonize, an orchestra rises behind them to offer hope. PARELES 'I'm a little crazy, but the world's insane,' the disturbed narrator of Morgan Wallen's new single contends. His character is a drug dealer who keeps a loaded gun nearby. He's sustaining himself 'on antidepressants and lukewarm beers' and yelling at his TV, 'but the news don't change.' Over steadfast acoustic guitar picking and lightly brushed drums, Wallen sings with chilling, sociopathic calm. PARELES The rhythm section from the African rock band Mdou Moctar — Ahmoudou Madassane, Mikey Coltun and Souleymane Ibrahim — has been recording on its own as Takaat, which means 'noise' in Tuareg; an EP is due in April. Takaat's first single, 'Amidinin' ('Friend'), keeps the modal riffing and six-beat propulsion of Mdou Moctar, but cranks up the guitar distortion, slathers on echo and unleashes the drums to sound even more ferocious. PARELES The Toronto-based vocalist and producer Debby Friday won the Polaris Music Prize for her sharp 2023 debut album, 'Good Luck.' She returns with the euphoric electro-pop single '1/17,' a dance-floor confessional that shows off yet another side of her multifaceted talent. 'I swear you're a sign,' Friday sings in an airy atmosphere punctured by percolating synths. The track builds layer atop gauzy layer until it explodes in a burst of club-ready catharsis. LINDSAY ZOLADZ The legacy of 1970s Stevie Wonder suffuses 'Crash,' with cushy chromatic chord changes and a loping synthesizer bass line supplied by the keyboard master (and co-producer) Greg Phillinganes. Saba raps a no-pressure come-on: 'Together we can make time go fast / And if it's late, I hope you might just crash.' And Kelly Rowland, joining in on choruses, sounds perfectly amenable. PARELES Jack Harlow and Doja Cat exchange flirty verses on 'Just Us,' a fast-paced track that forgoes catchy pop choruses and focuses instead on dexterous flows and winking wordplay. 'I know it sounds like Zack and Cody, this life's sweet,' Harlow raps, showing his age with a reference to a mid-2000s Disney Channel show. Corny? Maybe, but Doja's into it: 'You a softy, marshmallows and black coffee,' she counters affectionately. The video is full of celebrity cameos that prove how many people will pick up the phone when Harlow calls: Matt Damon, PinkPantheress, John Mayer and Nicholas Braun. Zack and Cody, alas, are nowhere to be found. ZOLADZ The long-running indie-rock band Deerhoof can be coy or oblique, but it's neither in 'Immigrant Songs,' a response to America's sudden, brutal xenophobia. Satomi Matsuzaki gives voice to unrecognized immigrant labor — drivers, cooks, entertainers — over guitars and drums that lilt and intertwine behind her. But for the second half of this seven-minute track, the instruments just scream. There's no more arguing or persuasion left. PARELES
New York Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Lizzo Returns With a Throwback-Rock Bop, and 11 More New Songs
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. 'It's been a while,' Lizzo sings in 'Love in Real Life,' after more than a year of commotion involving her social media, her weight and lawsuits from employees. The video (though not the song itself) opens with Lizzo saying she needs 'no views, no likes, real love in real life.' Backed by a swinging beat and rock guitars, Lizzo heads out for a drunken night at a dance club, with a chorus topped by a Prince-like scream. For a few minutes, pleasure solves everything. JON PARELES The back-flipping upstart Benson Boone runs into a former flame who upends his current relationship on the lively new single 'Sorry I'm Here for Someone Else.' Amid driving percussion, pulsating synths and an escalating sense of urgency, Boone unfurls a satisfying narrative of love lost and regained in a sudden moment of clarity. The only problem is that he has to break another girl's heart in the process. 'Benny, don't do it, Benny don't do it!' he tells himself — but he does it, and lets her down easy with that classic line, 'It's not personal.' LINDSAY ZOLADZ 'Flood' exults in percussive low end: a Bo Diddley drumbeat meshed with a syncopated bass line, below Little Simz rapping in her most hard-nosed bottom range. She lashes out at anyone who'd interfere with 'my genius plan, and that's being as free as I can' and offers career advice: 'Don't trust all the hands you shake.' She's righteous and cynical, with her defenses well fortified by rhythm. PARELES Agitation is built in to 'Cinderella,' from the where's-the-downbeat intro to the dissonant note that repeats — irregularly — through nearly the entire track. As an industrial dance beat assembles itself, crumbles, and reappears, the vocalist Cole Haden wrestles with the vulnerability of revealing himself to a partner, finally deciding, 'I won't leave as I came.' PARELES The Norwegian pop experimentalist Jenny Hval takes on a familiar lyrical image — the rose — and turns it into something highly specific and alluringly strange on this first single from her upcoming album, 'Iris Silver Mist.' 'A rose is a rose is a rose is a cigarette,' she sings atop a spare track that features light, hypnotic percussion and subtle blasts of brass. As the arrangement gradually builds into something fuller, Hval sketches a vivid childhood memory of her mother smoking on a balcony, 'long inhales and long exhales performed in choreography over our dead-end town.' ZOLADZ The 19-year-old Dominican rapper J Noa and her producer, Lowlight, crank up brash horn riffs and hyperactive bongos to hark back to Sugar Hill Gang's 'Apache' and its source, the Incredible Bongo Band's version of 'Apache.' She boasts about her talent, her business and her bank accounts in crisp, rapid, nonstop syllables, punctuated with a 'la-la' refrain that's joyful in its arrogance. PARELES Even the title — 'loud' embedded in 'Clouds' — speaks to the verbal ambitions of a grown-up J. Cole as he faces his own 'gray hairs' and a rapidly changing world. The track is a two-chord vamp topped with electric piano improvisations, while Cole's rhymes confront the confounding mess that is 2025. He has to brag: 'The planet'll shake when I'm performing.' But he's also worried about 'billionaires who don't care the world's gonna break / as long as they make money off it, pain brings profit' and about songs 'generated by the latest of A.I. regimes' that will make some people ask, 'What happened to human beings?' He can't answer that question. PARELES Angel Deradoorian, best known as the bassist and singer with Dirty Projectors until 2012, reaches back to Bach — or maybe Procol Harum — in 'Set Me Free.' With a processional beat and harpsichord tones, she sings — joined by her own choral harmonies — about trying to rise above earthly disappointments to accept 'an invitation cosmically.' The song hopes, a little paradoxically, that its constrained, formal elegance can summon liberation. PARELES Deerhoof's new single holds two songs that stake out extremes. 'Overrated Species Anyhow' is an indie-rock hymn, with a multitracked Satomi Matsuzaki sustaining the melody over tremolo-strummed guitars and bird songs. By contrast, 'Sparrow Sparrow' is speedy, jumpy and intricate, a math-rock tangle of contrapuntal guitars, meter-shifting drums and a vocal melody that somehow lilts like a children's song even as its surroundings go systematically haywire. The two songs are a benefit for the Trevor Project, which supports young L.G.B.T.Q. people. 'Love to all my aliens / lost, despised or feared,' the lyrics of 'Overrated Species Anyhow' attest. PARELES 'Tear apart the elements and they'll recombine,' Laura Misch sings in this ghostly song about loss, 'letting go of all you love' and hoping that 'tears return to tenderness.' Slow, airborne patterns of keyboards and harp waft high above her voice, eventually joined by her saxophone, in a mix that opens up celestial spaces, then turns inward. PARELES The Bulgarian electronic producer Alper Durmush, now based in Berlin, records as Impérieux. 'Fo Pio' — like the rest of his new album, 'Rezil' — melds the danceable austerity of techno with anxious undercurrents and sounds that can arrive like jump scares. 'Fo Pio' has a midrange drone that waxes and wanes and a blippy, detuned melody that could have come from an early video game; other elements emerge just long enough to keep nerves on edge. PARELES
New York Times
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Tate McRae Dances in and Out of Love, and 10 More New Songs
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. A lack of instantly recognizable, stylistically defining hits — aside from the slinky, irresistible 2023 smash 'Greedy' — has somehow not stopped the 21-year-old singer and dancer Tate McCrae's star from rising over the past few years. She dips into a more promising and vulnerable sound on the moody, pulsating 'Revolving Door,' the latest single from her just-released third album, 'So Close to What.' 'I keep coming back like a revolving door,' she sings on a chorus that thumps like an anxious heartbeat, 'saying I couldn't want you less, but I just want you more.' A McCrae single is still only as good as the choreography in its accompanying music video, and by that measure, it's one of her strongest yet. LINDSAY ZOLADZ Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) and Aldous Harding share 'No Front Teeth,' a surreal excursion that seesaws between pretty folk-Baroque pop and noisy, neo-psychedelic rock. Perfume Genius sings about being shattered; Harding answers him with a high, angelic call for 'better days.' The video just adds more layers to the conundrum. JON PARELES On this heartfelt one-off single, Alynda Segarra returns to the gentle folk-rock sound they honed on 'The Past Is Still Alive,' the excellent album they released last year as Hurray for the Riff Raff. 'This is not a scene, it's a pyramid scheme,' they sing, pointing to a larger feeling of social collapse that, as the song progresses, dovetails with personal struggle. 'I don't know who you want me to be,' Segarra sings. 'And I don't know, and that terrifies me.' ZOLADZ The latest blast from the Sleigh Bells album due in April, 'Bunky Becky Birthday Boy,' memorializes Alexis Krauss's dog, who died in 2023. 'Nights are long here without you,' she sings. But the song is manic and upbeat, swerving from electro to power-chorded pop, with eruptions of thrash drumming and tangents of dissonance — mourning by celebrating. PARELES Mamalarky — the singer and guitarist Livvy Bennett and the multi-instrumentalist Michael Hunter — makes musicianly antics sound nonchalant on the duo's new album, 'Hex Key.' Bennett breezes through the self-satisfaction of '#1 Best of All Time,' declaring, 'I always win even when I fall.' Her voice stays casual (and doesn't worry about being a little flat) while the beat hurtles ahead and the chords take unlikely chromatic turns. The biggest boast is making it sound so easy. PARELES The professional fiancés Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco invite a third onto their upcoming collaborative album, 'I Said I Love You First,' with this breathy Gracie Abrams feature. Regardless of the fact that 'Call Me When You Break Up' is a conceptually confusing sentiment for a record that seems to be celebrating the singer Gomez and the producer Blanco's love story, Ariana Grande did it first, and with more attitude. ZOLADZ McKinley Dixon, a rapper from Richmond, Va., is a maximalist who regularly surrounds himself with live musical arrangements and hearty backup singers. In 'Sugar Water,' from an album due in June titled 'Magic, Alive!,' he wishes for and then witnesses the resurrection of a friend. The track deploys a springy, Latin-tinged jazz vamp, riffing horns and fervent vocal harmonies. 'Can't believe that I was finished,' says the returnee. 'No time to waste — let's get back in it.' PARELES The rolling six-beat vamp behind 'It's Okay' rushes and then relaxes, underlining the song's anti-stress message: 'Everything's OK but you gotta feel it,' the rapper and drummer Kassa Overall advises. Emma-Jean Thackray overdubs herself into a one-woman jazz combo — trumpet, bass, keyboards, drums — and backup chorus, then offers her own rapped and sung admonition: 'Don't you worry 'bout a thing.' PARELES Ledisi praises the quiet strength and unheralded sacrifices of Black women in 'Blkwmn,' singing 'Being silent, barely a thank you for all she gave / She smiles, powering through her pain.' Sparse piano chords, a slow-blues structure, hovering orchestral arrangements and the cry within Ledisi's voice all hark back to Nina Simone. But it's a new song, a reminder of labor that continues through generations. PARELES Smerz — the Norwegian duo of Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt — has been making largely electronic music for a decade. 'A Thousand Lies' relies instead on the fragile sounds of acoustic instruments: a piano intro and then acoustic guitars. The melody rises above two chords defined by sparse playing and picking, sung as tentatively as the sentiments they express: 'I realized lately that it won't be like this again.' The structure is neat and austere; the emotion is not. PARELES The electronics-loving, improvising guitarist Dustin Wong has a new single, 'Archangel Michael and the Pacific,' from a solo album due in April. It's an ever-evolving track that keeps shifting its downbeats and blurs any demarcation between playing, looping and multitracking. Wong's guitar materializes and melts away amid blipping, clanking, percussive electronics, bubbling with rhythm while keeping any final destination elusive. PARELES
New York Times
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Doechii's Victory Lap, and 10 More New Songs
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. Doechii was tearful and emotional — but primed with facts — when she became the third woman to win a Grammy for best rap album. She was also prepared; 'Nosebleeds' was released almost immediately. Over stark, pushy, bare-bones electronic sounds, she gloats, 'Will she ever lose? Man I guess we'll never know' and declares her readiness for arena concerts: 'I look good from the nosebleeds.' The track is barely over two minutes, but its last stretch segues into an entirely different sound: a double-time beat with Doechii cooing that she needs no advice from anyone who's 'never suffered.' The moment was hers to seize. JON PARELES She's overheard your theory that nostalgia's for geeks — and she couldn't care less. Lady Gaga mines the sonic and aesthetic shards of her own past on the insistent 'Abracadabra,' the third single from her upcoming album, 'Mayhem.' Fashioning an anthemic chorus out of self-referential nonsense syllables ('abracadabra, morta oo Gaga') is so 'Bad Romance,' but the verse's thumping house piano refines the more recent sound of her mixed-bag 2020 release 'Chromatica' into something sharper and more urgent. Gaga's not forging new ground here so much as she's remixing her former selves, reminding her many imitators who they learned their strangest moves from and grasping so strongly at dance-or-die self-seriousness that she somehow ends up doubling back into absurdist fun. LINDSAY ZOLADZ The resolutely upbeat Valerie June insists that everyone can find 'that joy joy in your soul,' no matter what. Her twangy, wavery voice, doubletracked in not-quite-unison, rises over a brawny two-chord vamp that gets buttressed by saxophones, cymbals, cranked-up lead guitar and a string section, massing to overpower any doubts. PARELES 'Thought that if I put you first enough / we would last for sure,' Giveon laments, with neat wordplay, in a vintage-style soul ballad complete with strings and electric sitar. The reminiscences quickly lead into recriminations over 'six years gone down the drain,' and none of the retro trappings cushion the pain. PARELES Moses Sumney has revamped 'Hey Girl,' a slow-jam come-on from his 2024 album 'Sophcore,' to make it more gender-fluid by handing over verses to guests. Syd teases, 'You say you ain't done this before,' and Meshell Ndegeocello moves evolutionary goal posts, intoning, 'I am not a woman, I am not a man / I am a water- and carbon-based life form you'll never comprehend.' The track's easy-rolling syncopation and suavely supportive horn arrangement welcome them all. PARELES Coi Leray is equal parts tearful and enraged in 'Keep It,' her indictment of a cheater: 'Should've kept it real but you were fraudulent / Everything you said you did the opposite.' Her only accompaniment is calm piano chords and wisps of her own voice. She almost breaks down, wondering, 'Why, why, why, why, why?' But then she summons her dignity and ends things. PARELES What happens to a relationship that survives a betrayal? Blaine Teppema, the songwriter for the Chicago duo Sleeper's Bell, captures the lingering wounds, self-doubt and distrust in 'Bad Word' from the new album 'Clover.' Her voice is breathy and tentative over modestly strummed acoustic guitar and drums, as she sings 'We got right back together / Now you treat her name like a bad word.' For the moment, she's willing to go along. 'One day I might know what it is you think,' she shrugs. 'Till then I'll laugh it off.' PARELES Katie Crutchfield, the songwriter behind Waxahatchee, rarely escapes ambivalence. The cozy, countryish, banjo-picking march of 'Mud' has MJ Lenderman and Spencer Tweedy singing along with Crutchfield as she tries to sever a guardian-angel relationship where 'I might beam with empty virtue / but I'm a feather blowing in your storm.' The problem is that the 'girl suffering' might be herself. PARELES The latest single from Destroyer's forthcoming album 'Dan's Boogie' is Dan Bejar's version of a beachy summertime bop, released, with his typical contrarian's air, in the dead of winter. Atop shimmering synths and sing-songy backing vocals, he talks to the wind ('Hey, breeze, where you going?') and indulges in some zany observational spoken-word ('A priest mistakes me for a priest'), all while delivering the sort of wry, quotable bons mots for which he's become known. 'Fools rush in,' goes one of the best of them, 'but they're the only ones with guts.' ZOLADZ It's impossible to say when Mekons wrote this jagged, violin-topped post-punk song, probably the first to denounce 'supernatural financialization.' It's one of the tracks that the tenacious punk-era band has released to preview its next album, 'Horror.' But the telegraphic lyrics that Tom Greenhalgh spits out sound all too applicable right now. PARELES Macie Stewart, a classical composer who has also written arrangements for SZA and Mannequin Pussy, has her own album, a suite titled 'When the Distance Is Blue,' due March 21. The track 'Spring Becomes New, Spring Becomes You,' unfolds as a minimalistic waltz for prepared piano and string trio. Clanking piano motifs dissolve into pizzicato strings, while high violin harmonics hover far above; it's at once lulling and eerie. PARELES
