Hear tracks by Jackie Mendoza, Matmos, Kehlani, L7 and others.
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.
There’s an insistent, syncopated pulse — but no drumbeat — behind “Jerrod,” an invitation to a timid lover from Solange’s new album, “When I Get Home.” She offers openness, intimacy and sharing: “Give you all the things that I want,” she promises, her voice nestling amid chromatic chords that refuse to resolve; her vocal phrases ride directly atop the bass line, then pull away. Nothing feels solid until the song segues into the next track, “Binz,” and the drums arrive. JON PARELES
Like the birds returning from down south and the trees finding new color, the first Drake verse of 2019 heralds the coming of spring and, with it, the hope of new options on the horizon. Not the forced choices of cold-weather confinement, but the chance to seek out what you really want. On the original “Girls Need Love,” Summer Walker sang about her cravings with lethargic swing. On this remix, Drake arrives, the recent 10-year anniversary of his genre-reframing mixtape “So Far Gone” on his mind and on his tongue, to try to make amends on behalf of the less sensitive sex. “Arched back, deep stroke, white wine, weed smoke/that’s my best combination” he starts the flirt rapping, then downshifts into cooing. And this is the real spring awakening: a performance reminiscent of when his rejection of the boundaries between tender and tough was still raw. JON CARAMANICA
A blur can be more tantalizing than something fully legible. Jackie Mendoza’s “Seahorse,” from an album due April 26, melts the edges of her vocals with echoes, reverb and stereo panning, while keyboards and guitars float in and drift around her. There’s a pop song near the surface, but it stays just out of reach. PARELES
Angst wrapped in mockery surrounded by pop-history allusions with deniable lyrics bonded to endearing melodies — yes, Weezer has released a new album called “Weezer” with a parenthetical color (The Black Album). “High as a Kite” treats its cliché title seriously: “Miles above it’s so serene/I’m letting go of all the troubles that I’ve seen,” Rivers Cuomo sings, putting a yearning tone in his voice. The track summons the orchestral stateliness of late-1960s Beatles and Beach Boys alongside bird calls and distorted lead guitar, flaunting craft and keeping its attitude guarded. PARELES
Justin Faulkner has a thrashing, teeming style on the drums — he attacks them — yet he exudes a reassurance that basically all the best drummers have. In striking that balance, he’s like Art Blakey and Elvin Jones. It might have something to do with the fact that Faulkner has effectively been taking a seminar in the music’s lineage for the past 10 years as the youngest member of the pre-eminent saxophonist Branford Marsalis’s quartet (he’s still only 27). On “The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul,” the group’s third album featuring Faulkner, he shows he’s gone from being the most startling thing about this quartet to the best thing about it. RUSSONELLO
Four banjo-wielding songwriters — Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell — reckon with the history of slavery, particularly women’s slavery, on the album “Songs of Our Native Daughters,” drawing on slave chronicles and minstrel songs as well as contemporary perspectives. In “Moon Meets the Sun,” they harmonize in a song of tenacity, cultural survival and willed optimism: “Ah, you put the shackles on our feet but we’re dancing,” Giddens sings. “Ah, you steal our very tongue but we’re dancing.” PARELES
This is going to sound meaner than intended but: think Wilson Phillips meets the Chainsmokers. CARYN GANZ
“Footsteps,” the song that opens Kehlani’s new mixtape “While We Wait,” holds the lingering afterthoughts of a breakup, with apologies, justifications and regrets from both sides. The underlying beat is slow enough to make room for fitful, asymmetrical vocal lines, while backup vocals arrive to multiply the second guesses. “When I walked away I left footsteps in the mud so you could follow me,” Kehlani and Musiq Soulchild sing at the end, even as their melodies diverge like separate paths. PARELES
The latest high-concept album from the electronic duo Matmos, arriving March 15, is “Plastic Anniversary,” which derives all of its sounds from plastic: tapped, plucked, rubbed, scraped, flexed, blown through like horns. “Breaking Bread” is constructed from samples of breaking and broken LPs by the group Bread. It goes for the comic, with a steady syncopated bounce, Caribbean-tinged riffs and an artificial zoo-full of squeaks, chirps, scrapes and plunks. Another track from the album, “Thermoplastic Riot Shield” — played on a clear shield emblazoned “Police” — is far more ominous. PARELES
In May the first album from L7 in 20 years, the first album from Sebadoh in six years and the first album from Bad Religion in six years will all be released. All three bands started putting out music in the late 1980s, hit creative peaks in the 1990s and were never beholden to the record industry. Good news: Everyone remembers how to sound like themselves. GANZ
“The Creator Has a Master Plan” is spiritual jazz’s signature piece, a glistening two-chord chant that’s like a warm aloe cleanse. Its own creator, the nonpareil tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, has been performing “Master Plan” for the past 50 years. When Joey DeFrancesco decided to venture into spiritual-jazz terrain on his new album, “In the Key of the Universe,” the virtuoso organist was wise enough to enlist Sanders. All of this album is good, but most of it keeps contact with DeFrancesco’s bop comfort zone. Not “Master Plan.” It becomes the album’s highlight, almost inevitably. RUSSONELLO
Jason Palmer’s “Rhyme and Reason” is the first release from Giant Step Arts, a nonprofit dedicated to giving underappreciated but visionary jazz musicians the support they need to make quality live albums. Palmer is a perfect first subject for this: He’s a thrifty improviser with a vast dynamic range and an ambitious composer, but he’s hardly known. On “Herbs in a Glass,” the album’s opener, he propels his band mates (the tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, the bassist Matt Brewer and the drummer Kendrick Scott) through a squirrelly nine-beat rhythm; the odd, open-ended meter ends up pushing his intense melody into the plain air, giving it a billowy freedom. RUSSONELLO
Sitting at the Jazz Gallery recently as Anna Webber led a septet through the tunes from her latest album, “Clockwise,” I wrote down a lot. Here’s a little of it: splitting and scraping her tones … descended from hocketing and Western choral music and the World Saxophone Quartet and Battle Trance … Teutonic syncopation. Webber is a composer, saxophonist, flutist and more, with big ears and a bustling career underway. “Clockwise” is her first release for Pi Recordings, and a convincing one. It’ll certainly speed your mind up. RUSSONELLO
Jon Pareles has been The Times’s chief pop music critic since 1988. A musician, he has played in rock bands, jazz groups and classical ensembles. He majored in music at Yale University. @JonPareles
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic for The Times and the host of the Popcast. He also writes the men’s Critical Shopper column for Styles. He previously worked for Vibe magazine, and has written for the Village Voice, Spin, XXL and more. @joncaramanica