Megan Thee Stallion and Dua Lipa’s sultry team-up, and 10 more songs

The first taste of Megan Thee Stallion’s next album is yet another sultry collaboration with a female co-star. But this time, Megan sounds more like a visitor to Dua Lipa’s property, on a track that prominently places Lipa’s hook at the center and deepens the sleek, radio-ready shine of her blockbuster album ‘Future Nostalgia’. As always, though, Megan gets a few clearly quoteable lines: Comparing herself to Cesar Milan, she says, “I’ve got to let a dog know who’s really running things.” The over-the-top video is sort of a special-effects-laden, adult-only version of the Hansel and Gretel story, not recommended for those afraid of spiders, fire, or, uh, rooms with walls suddenly bursting into butts. change . LINDSAY ZOLADZ

Florence + the Machine’s best singles—think “Dog Days Are Over,” “Shake It Out,” “What Kind of Man”—enjoy a sort of decadent drama, and the latest, “My Love,” finds the band triumphantly return to that mode. “Tell me where to put my love,” wailed Florence Welch in the chorus, accompanied by an arrangement lightly sprinkled with disco glitter. The twist is that it’s mostly a lament over writer’s block, but Welch infuses it with all the romantic dread usually reserved for heartbreak songs. “Every page is blank, there is nothing to describe,” she sings, although the song itself confirms that the drought is over. ZOLADZ

Miranda Lambert, ‘Strange’

Miranda Lambert (with collaborating songwriters Natalie Hemby and Luke Dick) brings the core of classic country to the disorienting reality of the 2020 pandemic on ‘Strange’, the single that previews ‘Palomino’, her album out April 29 . With money problems, a considerate economy, and the feeling that “every elevator is only going down,” it’s no wonder that “times like these make me feel weird.” There’s some grittiness from Neil Young in the verses, and Lambert has her voice scratched and broken at times, but she also makes sure the hooks land cleanly. JON PARELES

Horse Girl, ‘Anti-Glory’

“Dance! Dance! Dance! Dance!” reads the chorus of “Anti-Glory” by the Chicago band Horsegirl, the lead single from a June album, “Versions of Modern Performance”. That chorus sounds less like an invitation than an ultimatum; every “Dance!” arrives with jabs of dissonant guitar and a lash of drums. Horsegirl harks back to post-punk and indie rock with short, penetrating, repeated riffs, both deadpan and utterly unyielding. PARELES

Just as painters use every color of the rainbow, the members of the pop group Superorganism are unrelenting maximalists. The catchy “Teenager”, the lead single from their forthcoming sophomore album, “World Wide Pop”, is an explosion of gum hooks, wild production ideas and genuinely poignant reflections on growing up. As with many Superorganism songs, the cartoonish excess of the arrangement is offset by singer Orono Noguchi’s shrugging, endearing, deadpan voice: and inviting as the eye of a storm. ZOLADZ

Ghost, ‘Overflow’

The Swedish band Ghost reliably hits the three P’s: proggy, punky and poppy. The fifth album, ‘Impera’, packs the ambitious sprawl of 1970s rock epics into (relatively) bite-sized packages with amusingly confusing storylines. “Spillways”, one of the most straightforward tracks on the album, starts with a pounding piano straight out of Billy Joel’s “All for Leyna” and quickly turns into a sweetly constructed rock song. Think Bad Religion with “Jesus Christ Superstar” running through his veins. CARYN GANZ

Tinashe, ‘Something Like a Heartbreak’

Tinashe’s expanded version of her heartbreaking 2021 album, “333,” adds “Something Like a Heartbreak”: an accusation, a lament, and a pile of vocal melodies and jittery electronic rhythms set to a penetrating bass note. “You didn’t deserve my love,” she concludes, choosing scars over pain; after what she’s learned, she’s “grateful you broke me open,” she insists, concluding that “I’m a different woman — holding onto hope, not hopeless.” PARELES

Tess Roby, a singer and electronic musician from Canada, piles up two-bar loops in “Up 2 Me”: trickle-down scales, bass riffs, flickering percussion sounds, and her meditative vocals, offering succinct considerations of temporality: “calling it like it was/looking at it as it is.” It’s a four-minute track that could have easily cycled through its materials for much longer

Walter Smith III and Matthew Stevens, ‘For Some Time’

Tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III and guitarist Matthew Stevens have brought together another quintet of intergenerational jazz all-stars for their third album under the title ‘In Common’. “For Some Time” is an up-tempo Smith original that sits in the middle of the LP, and its main ingredients are a six-beat throbbing rhythm from Terri Lyne Carrington; tight rhythmic bass playing by Dave Holland (who, like Carrington, is a NEA Jazz Master); and a spicy exchange between Stevens’ muffled guitar and Kris Davis’ pointillist piano. Taking place between them, Smith carries the melody with loving attention to tone, bubbling and expanding its sound. But before a legit solo section kicks in, the song seductively fades away, leaving the residue of its beat in your ear. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

Father John Misty, ‘Goodbye Mr. Blue’

Josh Tillman’s sharp lyricism often focuses on the head – right in the middle of the deliberately arched eyebrow, to be precise – but here it goes straight to the heart. “Goodbye Mr. Blue”, the beautiful third single from his forthcoming album as Father John Misty, “Chloe and the Next 20th Century”, is a simulacrum of the 70s singer-songwriter sound; Harry Nilsson is an obvious touchpoint, but there are also shades of Jim Croce and even John Denver in the finger-picked guitars and talkative warmth of the song. “That Turkish Angora is all that’s left of me and you,” laments Tillman, filtering through a story about the slow, inevitable end of a relationship with the death of the titular house cat. It’s sweet, a little funny, and ultimately devastating, as Tillman repeats an increasingly elegiac chorus, “Won’t the last time come too soon?” ZOLADZ

The latest single from British electronic producer Sam Shepherd uses relatively simple elements and builds up to something sublime in seven and a half minutes. Following ‘Promises’, his acclaimed, ethereal 2021 collaboration with jazz saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders, ‘Vocoder’ is a hard-hitting pivot back to the other extreme of Shepherd’s sizable range – a bona fide dance floor blaster that sparks with hard-riding, kinetic energy. ZOLADZ