An event record that sounds like a late night studio session “Hot ____” is lean on the brink of reserve, measured on the verge of restrained. Individually, everyone’s verse is playful, but Cardi B is the most—she plays with pattern and throws out a few sharp barbs (“I don’t know which is longer, man, my block list or my checklist / I don’t know what’s colder, man , my heart or my chain”). This is Cardi at her most direct, and it also cuts back to one of the most appealing qualities of her 2018 debut album, “Invasion of Privacy”: the way it aligned her, subtly and directly, with the traditionalist New York-style hip-hop, a gesture aimed at naysayers. However, are there any more? JON CARAMANICA
Raye, ‘Hard here’
Romantic breakups are difficult; the collapse of a label deal can be just as brutal and even more expensive. “A pen is a gun,” notes English R&B songwriter Raye in “Hard Out Here.” She drew on her rejection by the Polydor label, after releasing EPs but no album, to sing about “the years and fears and smiles through my tears”; she also sings about her lawyer and executives with “pink chubby hands.” She switches between rock hard rapping and gospel-charged vocals, and when she says over programmed beats, “Baby I bounce back,” her voice says she will. JON PARELES
Steve Lacy, ‘Bad Habit’
“Bad Habit” is a wistful tale of a missed connection (“I wish I knew you wanted me”) filtered through the outspoken and kaleidoscopic musical personality of Odd Future-adjacent polymath Steve Lacy. While still in high school, when he first made waves as the guitarist for the eclectic group Internet, Lacy’s precocity has always preceded him. But on the singles the now 24-year-old has released from his forthcoming album, “Gemini Rights,” he’s evolved into an emotional sound that’s endearingly rough around the edges. “Bad Habit” is centered around a simple yet distorted chord progression, filtered by effects that make the entire song sound like it’s under a fish-eye lens. But about halfway through, it takes a sudden turn for the intimate, when the backing instruments drop away and the spotlight shifts to Lacy’s vulnerable voice: “I turn it on, I make it rowdy, then carry on but I won’t hide.” LINDSAY ZOLADZ
Sudan Archive, ‘NBPQ (Topless)’
Sudan Archives – the songwriter, singer, fiddler and electronics connoisseur Brittney Parks – recognizes and combats prejudice and insecurity in the autobiographical ‘NBPQ (Topless)’ from her next album, ‘Natural Brown Prom Queen’. “Just because I’m hard to manage/doesn’t mean I can’t have it,” she raps. The song contains multiple contrasts in less than four minutes, including a modal violin riff with North African flavor, two fast-paced sections with different currents, an interlude of choral harmonies, a resolute march and lots of hand clapping. “I’m not average,” she sings — and loops — and that’s clearly an understatement. PARELES
Dan Snaith has several musical alter egos: as Caribou he makes textured, sample-driven psychedelia, but he releases more straightforward dance music under the name Daphni. His latest Daphni single ‘Cloudy’, which will appear on the forthcoming album ‘Cherry’, is slick and utterly spellbinding. A repeated piano riff – so vague and probably wholly unintentionally reminiscent of Jack Harlow’s “What’s Poppin'” – floats weightlessly over a skittish beat. A chopped vocal sample adds some life, but never quite aligns with legible language, making the whole song sound like a benevolent broadcast from another world. ZOLADZ
Sampa the Great with Chef 187, Tio Nason and Mwanjé, ‘Never Forget’
The rapper and singer Sampa de Grote was born in Zambia, grew up there and in Botswana, studied in California, moved to Australia in 2013 and returned to Zambia during the pandemic. “Never Forget” is off her forthcoming album, “As Above, So Below”, and it celebrates her Zambian roots – “information passed down through generations” – specifically the Zamrock of the 70s, which combined South African traditions with rock. fused. A brisk pulse of six beats takes Sampa and her Zambian guests through raging guitar lines, drum machine beats, choral harmonies (by Sampha’s sister Mwanjé) and traditional Ngoma drumming, linking her bragging rights with deep history. PARELES
Moor Mother, ‘Jazz Codes’
Moor Mother’s beats, if you’d like to call them that, tend to sound like stardust burning itself. She doesn’t move in a way you would easily associate with jazz, but she is of tradition: a history miner and an innovator, a serious intellectual and a commentator, speaking through coded confrontation. And after a few years on the international jazz festival circuit – both as a member of Irreversible Entanglements, an acoustic quintet and as a solo artist – she has some notes. Her new album, “Jazz Codes”, has an air of intervention, but also of mischievous play and mystery. It’s heavy on features — poets (Rasheedah Phillips, Thomas Stanley), musicians (Mary Lattimore, Keir Neuringer) and vocalists (Melanie Charles, Orion Sun) are in it — and she pulls clips from interviews with older musicians (Amina Claudine Myers, Joe McPhee). She released a 14 minute short film stitching together songs from “Jazz Codes” and it captures the album’s sense of defiance and reinvention. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
Paolo Nutini, ‘Lose It’
Desperation explodes in “Lose It” from “Last Night in the Bittersweet”, the first album since 2014 by Scottish songwriter Paolo Nutini. “I couldn’t find a way out of my troubled mind,” he sings, wishing he could “get rid of it,” as the music booms around him. It’s a neo-psychedelic guitar-driven drone that opens with feedback and gets higher and higher, with Nutini releasing his rasp and a chorus yelling “yes, yeah” before being swallowed back into the swamp. PARELES
Gogo Penguin, ‘The Antidote Is In The Poison’
GoGo Penguin has the lineup of a standard jazz trio: piano, bass, drums. That’s partly a ruse. This English group is also an experiment in repetitions and possibilities. A very tricky beat and a sustained rise and fall propel ‘The Antidote Is in the Poison’, culminating in multiple layers of piano tones: open and muffled, brittle and sustained, moving in purposeful scales or hopping all over the place in arpeggios. It’s a strong mathematical counterpoint that still feels improvised. PARELES
Kirk Knuffke, ‘The Water Will Win’
On “Gravity Without Airs,” cornetist Kirk Knuffke leads the band, but he’s also made himself the newcomer of the bunch. His side musicians, the pianist Matthew Shipp and the bassist Michael Bisio, have been playing together consistently for over twelve years. But Knuffke is indispensable, finding tender edges within Shipp’s increasingly angular dashes. Earlier in his career, Knuffke was sometimes a bit antique and light. Now, partly through his study of Don Cherry’s music, he has learned to keep the emotional content central. On “The Water Will Win,” a bluesy, rubato invocation, Knuffke leads the trio head over heels. Almost immediately, Shipp holds the sustain pedal and covers the keyboard in a minor mode, and Bisio alternates between a low pedal and strings of notes on the higher strings. Knuffke, with his gritty vibrato and slippery tone, puts tender muscles on the bone in between. RUSSELLO