Talib Kweli and Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def) have reunited as Black Star – 24 years after their first and only previous full-length album together – with “No Fear of Time”, backed by an ideal producer: the crate-digging, funk -loving Madlib. Most of the new album is exclusive to the subscription podcast app Luminary, but the opening track, “OG” – “On God” – is on YouTube. Over a sustained bassline and swelling organ chords, the rapping is equal parts bragging and adoration, emphasizing “time is relative, for truth is eternal.” Both rappers juggle mortality and persistence, rightly showing off their own “Encyclopaedia Britannica flow,” mixing Brooklyn pride and reggae references (and samples of Gregory Isaacs’s “The Ruler), which sound complacent, but still always determined to teach. JON PARELES
The most soulful voice in “Vegas” — by far — is Big Mama Thornton’s sample, with raspy “You ain’t nothin’ but a” from “Hound Dog,” the song Elvis Presley would cling to. “Hound Dog” was about a materialist posing as a sweetheart, and the rapping and multi-track vocal harmonies of Doja Cat’s “Vegas”—from the soundtrack to Baz Lurhman’s “Elvis”—update it to the life of a 21st-century star: “Sit on the field with your arm around me.” The underlying three chords are a classic blues structure; Doja Cat lends their archetypal power
Carly Rae Jepsen, ‘West Wind’
Carly Rae Jepsen’s bright, bold pop gets an impressionistic twist on her new single ‘Western Wind’, thanks in part to the production of Rostam Batmanglij. A hypnotic beat and Jepsen’s entranced, eyes-closed vocals make the whole thing sound like a pastoral reverie – an intriguing new direction for her. “First bloom, you know it’s spring/Remember love it’s all connected,” Jepsen sings dreamily. The solar power is strong with this one. LINDSAY ZOLADZ
Holly Humberstone, ‘Sleep tight’
Holly Humberstone, 22, is the current opening act of Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour Tour, and the two share a taste for emotionally resonant songwriting and music that sounds like what was on the radio shortly before their birth. “Sleep Tight,” which Humberstone co-wrote with 1975 frontman Matty Healy and her longtime collaborator Rob Milton, is a tale of mixed emotions and that gray area between friends and lovers, set to rustling acoustic guitar chords that evoke ’90s pop. . stone. “Oh my God, I did it again, I almost killed our friendship,” Humberstone sings. Her presentation is at once as casually jovial as a text message and as timidly secret as an internal monologue. ZOLADZ
Lady Gaga, ‘Hold my hand’
Lady Gaga may be the only contemporary pop star to convincingly cover Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” and Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone”, so it’s fitting that her theme from the upcoming “Top Gun: Maverick” channels is a bit of both. “Hold My Hand” is as bombastic and romantic as all of her torch songs from the soundtrack for “A Star Is Born”, but it’s also spiced up with soaring electric guitar and giant 80s drums that sound like they’re on an airplane. included hangar. “So cry tonight, but don’t let go of my hand,” she belts as if her life depended on it, making a gloriously serious pastiche as only Gaga can. ZOLADZ
070 Shaking, ‘Web’
Danielle Balbuena, the singer and rapper who records as 070 Shake, overdubs her voice into a cascading chorale in ‘Web’, a cryptic call for personal contact and honesty. “This thing doesn’t work/Let’s be here in person,” she sings. “I want to get through to you.” Perhaps the song is a response to too many Zoom meetings; it’s a wonderful response. PARELES
Sharon Van Etten, ‘Come back’
Confessions of distress and uncertainty lead to monumental choruses in the songs on Sharon Van Etten’s new album, “We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong,” which reflect on how to reconcile a performing artist’s life with motherhood, relationships, and self-realization. “Come Back” begins with a modest acoustic guitar, while Van Etten muses with a quivering voice about “Subtle moments from the past/What a wonderful time.” But the chorus arrives in a gigantic wall of sound – drums, keyboards, guitars, vocal harmonies in cavernous reverberation – as Van Etten longs for a return to ‘wild and uncertain/And naked and pure’. PARELES
Kathleen Hanna, Erica Dawn Lyle and Vice Cooler, ‘Mirrorball’
With Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill encouraging “Put your finger in the socket!”, “Mirrorball” is the first explosion of post-punk mayhem from “Land Trust”, a benefit album for North East Farmers of Color, which acquires land for indigenous and minority farmers. During the pandemic, current Bikini Kill guitarist Erica Dawn Lyle and drum tech Vice Cooler worked with multiple generations of feminist rockers; along with Hanna, the trailblazing riot grrrl, the album — due out June 3 — is based on members of the Raincoats, the Breeders, Deerhoof, Slant 6, Palberta, and the Linda Lindas. While ‘Mirrorball’ gives sarcastic late-capitalist advice like ‘Stay true to your personal brand’, stomping drums and souped-up guitars tolerate no nonsense. PARELES
Leyla McCalla, ‘Le Bal Est Fini’
The songwriter Leyla McCalla played banjo, guitar and cello in the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Our Native Daughters; her parents were Haitian immigrants and she spent time with her grandmother in Haiti. Her new album, “Breaking the Thermometer,” began as a music theater work commissioned by Duke University, which acquired Radio Haiti’s archives and put them online. Blending Haitian songs and McCalla’s own songs with excerpts from broadcasts and interviews, the album explores Haiti’s history of exploitation, revolution, dictatorship and unrest. “Le Bal Est Fini” (“The Party Is Over”) is based on an editorial by a Radio Haiti journalist in 1980, the year the government shut down the station. The music is upbeat, with syncopated undercurrents of rara carnival rhythms. Meanwhile, the lyrics, in Haitian Creole, lash out at anti-democratic forces: “Arbitrary, illegal, anti-constitutional.” PARELES
ASAP Rocky, ‘DMB’
For ASAP Rocky, “bitch” is an affection. “DMB” – “That’s my bitch” – is a love song; the music video contains a glimpse of his girlfriend Rihanna. “Bitch” is also a useful percussive syllable in a multi-layered production that constantly distorts itself with hazy countercurrents of pride, defensiveness, affection and machismo. Rocky raps and sings through “DMB” with a shifting flow, and for all his aggression, he sounds genuinely affectionate. PARELES
Tirza, ‘Ribs’
London-based artist Tirzah makes love songs in the abstract: free-flowing and amorphous meditations on intimacy and interconnectedness. As on her 2021 album ‘Colourgrade’, the first record she made since becoming a mother, the unconditional relationship she sings about on her hazy new single ‘Ribs’ could be between a parent and a child, although it is a welcoming universality has about that too. “You see things I can’t see, you see love and in between,” Tirzah sings candidly. “Hold me.” ZOLADZ
Glasser, ‘New Scars’
“New Scars” is a terrifying, enveloping blessing from Glasser, aka the songwriter, singer, and producer Cameron Mesirow. It opens with sparse, bell-like, electronically altered and harmonically ambiguous piano notes, a counterpoint as Glasser holds on to a sort of mantra, repeating, “Try to stick with love / There’s no room for shame.” Eventually, orchestral strings swell around her and her vocals grow into a chorus as she continues with a succinct but somehow encouraging thought, “We carry through life.” PARELES