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New York Times
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Weeknd's Gloomy but Glittering Pop, and 9 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. The Weeknd's quest for the ultimate combination of pop formula and self-destructive misery continues in 'Cry for Me' from his new album, 'Hurry Up Tomorrow.' The song is a suicide note left as a voice message: 'I can see myself and I'm not breathing,' he sings. 'At least you'll play a song when I'm gone.' There's a trap beat, minor-key synthesizers, bits of distorted guitar and pitch-shifted vocals, spanning genres but still sounding oh so alone. 'Gimme some room to breathe — I just need some space from you,' the Jamaican singer Shenseea tells a far too possessive partner in 'Puni Police.' The production by Di Genius has sirens cruising behind a crisp dancehall beat while Shenseea sings and raps about someone who's suspicious enough to track her 'location, AirTaggin' on my purse.' It's counterproductive, of course: 'You can't stop me from cheat if I want cheat,' she warns. The K-pop star Jennie, from Blackpink, coos, 'I swore I'd never do it again — until you came over,' with a sly tone that mixes a lot of satisfaction with just a tinge of regret. Her partner, Dominic Fike, raps about how he's ducking his responsibilities as a 'baby father.' But the easy swagger of the beat and the cushiony backup vocals suggest that the hookups will continue. In 2009, before hyperpop had a name, Sleigh Bells — the duo of Alexis Krauss and Derek Miller — were already slamming together power-chord riffs, drum-machine eruptions, synthesizer swoops, perky pop melodies and arena-sized choruses in explosive, catchy non sequiturs. 'Wanna Start a Band?' deploys all those devices, and more, for a song that couples sonic ambushes with a touch of well-earned nostalgia: 'Come and blow the world away / Talk about the good old days,' Krauss sings, in a brief interlude of gentleness. 'Take it apart and build it again,' sing the songwriters and vocalists in Momma, Allegra Weingarten and Etta Friedman. What they've rebuilt in this track is the layered guitars, effects and voices of 1990s rock, from bands like the Breeders, Dinosaur Jr. and Pixies: multitracking, distortion, echo-delays, reversed riffs, all of them stacked and restacked. The song exults in an infidelity that's also a reunion: 'Do you think she knows we're back together?' It equates a musical revival with a rekindled romance. Will Oldham, who records as Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, calmly ponders mortality in 'Turned to Dust (Rolling On)' from a new album full of grizzled, philosophical songs, 'The Purple Bird.' Recorded with seasoned Nashville sideman, the countryish, organ-infused march 'Turned to Dust,' notes, 'It won't be long till we're gone' and observes, 'When I see the things that man can do / It makes this poor heart break.' The song takes comfort in simple perseverance, in rolling on, but the shakiness in Oldham's voice leaves room for doubts. Alison Krauss has reconvened her string-centered band, Union Station, for their first album together since 2011; 'Arcadia' is due in March. 'Looks like the End of the Road,' written by Jeremy Lister, is a mournful farewell to 'the world that I know,' a waltz carrying lyrics of misfortune and betrayal. The bitterness is only heightened by the purity of Krauss's voice, answered by Jerry Douglas's measured, melodic slide-guitar solos. The polymorphous English band Black Country, New Road has been through major upheavals. Its lead singer, Isaac Wood, abruptly left the group days before the release of its 2022 album, 'Ants From Up There,' so the band introduced brand-new material on its subsequent tour. The violinist and guitarist Georgia Ellery takes lead vocals on 'Besties,' which fast-forwards through meters, keys and styles — Baroque harpsichord, march, waltz, music-hall bounce, jazzy dissonances — as Ellery sings about fluctuating relationships, songwriting, TikTok and persistent need: 'I know I want something more.' Lucrecia Dalt brings her skills as a soundtrack composer to her songs, conjuring spaces and moods with her sound designs. In 'Cosa Rara' ('Strange Thing'), she sings in Spanish about 'the rhythm of desire' over percussion that evokes Afro-Colombian traditions and samples that emerge from shadowy places. At the end, the song downshifts to half speed and takes on some dub echoes as none other than the art-rocker David Sylvian, who was in the new wave band Japan, recites a somber coda: 'I'm vulnerable and I know it / Is that door locked?' The Congolese musician Jupiter Bokondji and his band, Jupiter & Okwess, bring echoes of funk, psychedelia and salsa to their unmistakably African rock. 'Les Bons Comptes' ('The Good Accounts') — a song denouncing deadbeats from the new album 'Ekoya' — goes bounding ahead with wiry guitar hooks, a parade of lead vocals and a groove that could go on much longer.
The Independent
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Like a roadhouse bartender, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy serves familiar comforts and soaks up the world's strange spillages on his new album
The Purple Bird – Will Oldham's 22nd album as Bonnie 'Prince' Billy – may be one of the warmest, mellowest country-pop releases of recent years, but that doesn't stop him using it to vent a little spleen about modern America. Over the porch-swing sway of opening track 'Turned to Dust (Rollin On)', he laments a nation 'tempted by the lure of a liar, who preys on the foolish and the weak'. Later, against the farty brass parp and accordion lurch of a polka called 'Guns Are for Cowards', he asks listeners: 'If you could do it without anyone saying that you'd committed a crime/ Who would you shoot in the face?/ Who would you shoot in the brain?/ Who would you shoot in the back?' More curious is his follow-up question: 'Then how would you feel?/ Exalted? Or destroyed?' Produced by David 'Ferg' Ferguson (best known for engineering Johnny Cash 's later albums and producing John Prine) and recorded with some of the most seasoned session musicians in Nashville, The Purple Bird is reassuringly well-crafted and woodsy. Musicians assembled at the restored studio of Cowboy Jack Clement – who started out engineering/producing for the likes of Elvis Presley Sun Records – and slotted into an easy groove. Fiddle solos slide like dovetail joints into heel-tapped beats; smoothly planed pedal-steel notes curl over the grain of sleepy strumming; banjo and mandolins skip across washboards; brushed drums saw into the sigh of backing vocals. There's soft-shoe, last-dance romance on 'Spend the Whole Night With You' as Oldham winks: 'Instead of seeing me off, you might just wanna turn me on.' The jaunty 'Tonight with the Dogs I'm Sleeping' sits squarely on its 4/4 beat while Oldham has fun tipping his throat back and howling: 'I'm all bark and she's all biiiiiiiite.' Co-written with country great John Anderson, 'The Water's Fine' chugs along merrily in the tyre tracks of well-worn Nashvillian chord progressions, as Anderson's companionable voice joins Oldham's from the passenger seat. The lovely, lullsome 'Boise, Idaho' floats by like a Southern breeze, with its watercolour washes of backing vocals by Brit Taylor and Adam Chaffins. Sometimes, though, the practised ease of the band and the safe song structures mean that tracks can slip into the background. More striking is 'London May'. A collaboration with the drummer of the same name from punk-goth band Samhain, it rises up from a dramatic piano hook – the kind that wouldn't be out of place in a Bond theme song. Over some gnarly electric guitar and an occasionally ominous drum pattern, the 55-year-old father of two sorrowfully (and acrostically) observes: 'Love Overcomes Nothing Despite One's Needs.' Oldham is consistently groping for a wider perspective. He sings of screaming at the stars; his own smallness in the context of seas, sunsets and centuries. On 'Sometimes it's Hard to Breathe', Oldham stretches his voice high and wobbly to assure us that: 'Though the constant implied threat of violence/ Eats away at our precious loving time/ We can make it for a while.' An emotional, sun-cracked Anderson joins him again on 'Downstream', a post-apocalyptic lullaby on which the pair agree: 'We live in the ruins of another life's dream.' It's a classic country slice of campfire wisdom. As is the bumper-sticker lyric: 'You're only as good as the people you know', from the yee-haw singalong closer 'Our Home' featuring Tim O'Brien. By sticking close to cosy genre format, The Purple Bird gives Oldham a framework for vocalising painful 21st-century truths with sly, stark wit. Like a roadhouse bartender, he serves familiar comforts and soaks up the world's strange spillages before sending you on your way with a wave.
