Pop critics for weigh in on the
week’s most notable new tracks.
Drake, ‘Search & Rescue’“I didn’t come this far, just to
come this far and not be happy” — so said Kim Kardashian on the 2021 series
finale of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” discussing why it was time to split
from her husband, Kanye West. Two years later, their divorce is finalized, but
the narrative persists. That line appears at a pivotal moment in Drake’s new
song, “Search & Rescue.” Hovering above a morbid, anxious piano figure,
Drake raps about the hollowness of being lonely, and after the chorus, uses
Kardashian’s words but reframes them, making them sound like a lament about the
single life.
اضافة اعلان
Here are two contrasting forms of
despair, played off each other. Drake is pleading for connection: “Take me out
the club, take me out the trap/Take me off the market, take me off the map.”
Kardashian is yearning to be free. But Drake is also a sometime high-profile
antagonist of West’s, and his leveraging of Kardashian’s words — an official
sample, certainly approved by her — is unlikely to be understood as anything
but a broadside from two seemingly unattached people, who would cause a whole
lot of trouble were they to attach to each other. —
Jon Caramanica
Kaytraminé featuring Pharrell
Williams, ‘4EVA’“4EVA” is the winningly bubbly debut
single from Kaytraminé, the duo of rapper Aminé and dance music producer
Kaytranada. It pairs the irreverence of Leaders of the New School with the
sumptuous physicality of A Tribe Called Quest, all delivered at a tempo that triggers
a sense of freedom and release. —
Caramanica
Mahalia, ‘Terms and Conditions’ English R&B singer Mahalia sets out her own EULA — the
page everyone clicks through on the way to a website or app — in “Terms and
Conditions.” She specifies “the man you’re required to be” over a briskly
ticking beat, vocal harmonies and bursts of strings; she wants honesty,
attention and fidelity, which don’t seem that much to ask. Can she treat a
relationship as a matter of cold internet metrics? The penalties are spelled
out: “I’ll cut you off and I won’t regret it,” she sings. —
Jon Pareles
Indigo De Souza, ‘You Can Be Mean’With a proudly discordant yelp in
her voice, Indigo De Souza vents every bit of her annoyance at her latest
hookup in “You Can Be Mean,” a grungy stomp topped by a mock synthesizer. “I
can’t believe I let you touch my body,” she snarls. “It makes me sick to think
about that night.” She briefly considers extenuating factors, like a bad
parent, but not for long. “I don’t see you trying that hard to be better than
he was,” she notes. —
Pareles
Lucinda Williams, ‘New York
Comeback’A characteristic grit and defiance
courses through “New York Comeback,” a new single from country-rock legend
Lucinda Williams, which features Bruce Springsteen and his wife and bandmate,
Patti Scialfa, on backing vocals. The song comes from “Stories from a Rock N
Roll Heart,” Williams’ forthcoming album and her first release since suffering
a stroke in 2020. That context adds a bit of weight to the song, but as ever,
Williams is gimlet-eyed and unsentimental, singing in her signature growl, “No
one’s brought the curtain down, maybe you should stick around.” —
Zoladz
Yaeji, ‘Passed Me By’DJ-producer Yaeji, whose debut album
“With a Hammer” was released Friday, pens a letter to her younger self on the
booming but introspective “Passed Me By.” The song — on which Yaeji oscillates
between English and Korean — begins as a kind of free-form incantation, but all
at once a slow, echoing drum beat drops and gives it a loose pop structure. “Do
you know that the person is still inside of you, waiting for you to notice?”
she sings in the song’s final moments, a question that both lingers and haunts. —
Zoladz
Uncle Waffles, ‘Asylum’Lungelihle Zwane, the DJ-producer
who calls herself Uncle Waffles, distills her new album, “Asylum,” into a
five-minute megamix and dance extravaganza for her “Asylum” video. Uncle Waffle
was born in Swaziland (now Eswatini) and is now based in South Africa. With a
quick-changing array of singers and rappers — men, women, soloists, groups —
she works countless variations on the midtempo beat, shaker percussion and
gaping open spaces of South African amapiano. It’s still only a small sampling
of what she concocts in the course of the album. —
Pareles
Arthur Moon, ‘7 O’Clock Clap’Lora-Faye Ashuvud, the songwriter,
singer and producer behind Arthur Moon, finds joy in disorientation in “7
O’Clock Clap.” As speedy staccato blips and skittering percussion race above a
languid bass line, the song has advice what to do when “you’re a foreigner in
your own production/in your own bed, in your own body.” There’s a big grin in
the vocal as Ashuvud sings, “Take your shoes off, get a move on/Pray to
someone, break your cover!” —
Pareles
Labrinth, ‘Never Felt So Alone’“Never Felt So Alone” first surfaced
as part of Labrinth’s soundtrack for “Euphoria,” and snippets thrived on TikTok
for years. The full-fledged version — a collaboration by Labrinth, Billie
Eilish and Finneas — luxuriates in heartache. Labrinth intones the title as a
falsetto plaint above hollow, puffing organ chords that hark back to Brian
Wilson; the beat is slow, sporadic, almost stumbling. Midway through, the track
stages a near-collapse, with fragmented lyrics and bits of dead air, then
grandly reassembles itself. Eilish takes over to deliver her side of the story
— “Who knew you were just out to get me?” — before each moves on, resigned to
loneliness. —
Pareles
Peter Gabriel, ‘I/O’The title of Peter Gabriel’s first
new album in 21 years, “I/O,” stands for input/output, a metaphor he earnestly
spells out in its title track, preaching the oneness of humanity and nature
over solemn keyboards; “Stuff coming out, and stuff going in/I’m just a part of
everything.” But the song takes off in the nonverbal moments of the chorus,
when electric guitars surge and the Soweto Gospel Choir backs him in the
exultant vowel sounds of “i, o, i, o.” —
Pareles
This Is the Kit, ‘Inside/Outside’Calm on the outside but bustling
within, “Inside Outside” ponders fate, physics and free will. “All the
molecules were focused on your next move,” Kate Stables sings, as complex
counterpoint gathers around her. The sparse acoustic guitar at the beginning is
deceptive; soon she’s in a polytonal tangle of horns, guitars, and
cross-rhythms, living up to her admonishment: “Bite off as much as you can
chew.” —
Pareles
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