The latest single from the buzzy post-punk revivalists Wet Leg tells a more linear story than their drolly absurdist breakout “Chaise Longue”: “Angelica” captures that all-too-relatable experience of feeling awkward at a bad party, observing with a pang of envy the people who actually seem to be having fun. “I don’t know what I’m even doing here,” Rhian Teasdale deadpans, “I was told that there would be free beer.” But she and bandmate Hester Chambers finally get to let loose on the chorus, as the song’s surf-rock-meets-French-disco groove explodes, however briefly, into a psychedelic freakout. LINDSAY ZOLADZ
Bartees Strange, ‘Heavy Heart’
With its jangly guitar riffs and a cutting post-hardcore edge, Bartees Strange’s “Heavy Heart” at first seems like a simple slice of mid-00s nostalgia. But there is more longing for another time here. Strange, who grew up playing in hardcore bands in Washington, D.C., shatters genre tropes with ease: there is a rap-sung verse, a blossoming horn section, an aura of tender hope. “Heavy Heart,” which Strange wrote during a period of personal crisis in 2020, is about the guilt he experienced around the passing of his grandfather and the sacrifices his father made for his family. But it’s not a submission to that feeling; Strange sings, “Then I remember I rely too much upon/My heavy heart.” This is a relinquishing — a promise to embrace the possibility that lies beyond debilitating regret. ISABELIA HERRERA
Kevin Morby, ‘This Is a Photograph’
“This Is a Photograph,” by the songwriter Kevin Morby (from the Woods and the Babies), starts out sparse and low-fi and keeps gathering instruments and implications. He juxtaposes momentary images with mortality: “This is what I’ll miss about being alive,” he repeats, between descriptions of mundane scenes. His vocals are largely spoken, more chanted than rapped, over a repeating modal guitar line that the arrangement keeps building on: with keyboards, drums, guitars, saxes and voices, a gathering of humanity to hold off the solitude of death. JON PARELES
Labrinth and Zendaya, ‘I’m Tired’
“Hey Lord, you know I’m tired of tears,” Labrinth sings in “I’m Tired,” a gospel-rooted song from the “Euphoria” soundtrack that retains the barest remnants of gospel’s underlying hope. It contemplates oblivion as much as redemption: “I’m sure this world is done with me,” Labrinth adds. Organ chords and choir harmonies swell, yet even when Zendaya comes in at the end, vowing to get through somehow, she wonders, “It’s all I got, is this enough?” PARELES
Robyn, Neneh Cherry and Maipei, ‘Buffalo Stance’
Neneh Cherry’s album “Raw Like Sushi,” released in 1989, was both of and ahead of its time: reveling in the ways pop, electronics, hip-hop and rock were merging and defining what an autonomous woman could do with them all. This week she released a remade version of the international hit “Buffalo Stance” featuring the dance-crying Swedish songwriter Robyn and the Swedish American rapper-singer Mapei. Cherry’s original, with vintage vinyl scratching for rhythm, was about fashion, poverty, exploitation and defiance: “No moneyman can win my love,” she taunted. The remake is slower and warier, with snaking minor-key guitar lines and even more skepticism about what men want. PARELES
Sharon Van Etten, ‘Used to It’
Following her recent, upbeat single “Porta,” “Used to It” is a return to the more meditative side of Sharon Van Etten. Vividly imagistic lyrics and the smoky hush of Van Etten’s voice unfurl across the track with an unhurried confidence: “Where are you going, you rainstorm?” Van Etten sings. “Are you used to it, pouring out your life?” ZOLADZ
Haim, ‘Lost Track’
“Lost Track” — a playfully punny title for a previously unreleased one-off single that is also about someone in an emotional free-fall — is as understated as a Haim song gets. Handclaps take the place of the group’s usually forceful percussion, Danielle Haim’s signature guitar is absent from the verses, a plinking toy piano gives the whole thing a dreamlike vibe. But the dynamism the Haim sisters are able to create from such simple means, and the way the song suddenly and satisfyingly builds to a crescendo during the chorus, is a testament to their deft and resourceful song craft. The music video, by the group’s longtime collaborator and Alana Haim’s “Licorice Pizza” director Paul Thomas Anderson, casts Danielle as a fidgety malcontent at a country club, her frustration bubbling over as she shouts the song’s most triumphant line, “You can sit down if you don’t mind me standing up!” ZOLADZ
Omah Lay and Justin Bieber, ‘Attention’
Justin Bieber isn’t done with Nigerian Afrobeats; his restrained croon dovetails nicely with the equanimity of Afrobeats singers. Meanwhile, Western producers are learning Afrobeats techniques. Last year Bieber joined a remix of “Essence,” a worldwide hit by Wizkid. Now he’s collaborating with another Nigerian star, Omah Lay, on “Attention,” which melds Afrobeats and house music in a production by Avedon (Vincent van den Ende), from the Netherlands, and Harv (Bernard Harvey), from Kansas City. Separately and then together, Bieber and Lay state a longing that might be either for romance or clicks: “Show me a little attention.” PARELES
New Kids on the Block featuring Salt-N-Pepa, Rick Astley and En Vogue, ‘Bring Back the Time’
At a moment when current hitmakers like the Weeknd and Dua Lipa revive glossy, pumped-up 1980s sounds — ballooning drums, arpeggiating synthesizers — the not-so-New Kids on the Block cannily position themselves as a nostalgia act for both music and video. Abetted by early-MTV contemporaries, they fondly parody 1980s videos from Devo, Talking Heads, A Flock of Seagulls, Robert Palmer, Twisted Sister, Michael Jackson and more. “We’re still the same kids we were back in ’89,” they proclaim, all evidence to the contrary. PARELES
La Marimba, ‘Suéltame’
The Dominican singer-songwriter La Marimba may have a smoky voice, but don’t confuse it for hushed modesty. Her single “Suéltame,” or “Let Me Go,” is nothing less than a battle cry: this is punk perico ripiao, an electric take on the oldest style of merengue, with a liberatory spirit. (On Instagram, La Marimba said the song is a response to the everyday struggles of women and girls in the Caribbean.) Over razor-sharp synths and the raucous metal scrapes of the güira, La Marimba demands freedom through gritted teeth: “Let me go already/I am how I want to be.” HERRERA
Melissa Aldana, ‘Emelia’
The Chilean-born tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana was in the middle of a dream about motherhood one night when the melody to “Emelia” came to her. Pillowy and suspended, caught between longing and rest, this tune is the moment on “12 Stars” — Aldana’s latest release for Blue Note Records — when she and her hyper-literate quintet of rising jazz all-stars slow down and fully embrace the blur. The pianist Sullivan Fortner is the biggest smudge artist here, adding clouds of harmony on Rhodes, cluttering the airspace around Lage Lund’s guitar, and complementing the distant, even-toned longing of Aldana’s saxophone. At the end of the song, taking the melody home, she tongues the instrument’s reed, letting her notes crack; then the music cuts off and the voices of young children come in, bringing the track to a close. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
The Weather Station, ‘To Talk About It’
“I’m tired of working all night long, trying to fit this world into a song,” Tamara Lindeman sighs, although the striking achievement of her latest album as the Weather Station is how often she is able to do just that. “How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars,” out Friday, is at once spacious and granular: Lindeman’s precise lyricism zooms in on particular human experiences and scenes, but her airy, piano-driven compositions allow for all sorts of environmental ambience and collective anxieties to seep in. “To Talk About,” the album’s latest single, features vocals from the Toronto-based musician Ryan Driver, and seeks refuge from an emotionally fatiguing world in quiet, shared intimacy: “I am tired,” Lindeman repeats, this time adding, “I only want to lie beside my lover tonight.” ZOLADZ
Carmen Villain, ‘Subtle Bodies’
The composer Carmen Villain blends nature recordings, instruments, samples and programming to create tracks that feel both enveloping and open. “Subtle Bodies,” from her new album “Only Love from Now On,” stacks up layers of quiet polyrhythm, swathes them in pink noise that could be wind or waves, nudges them forward with a muffled two-note bass loop and wafts in sustained tones and distant wordless voices; it’s ambient but clearly in motion. PARELES
Lila Tirando a Violeta & Nicola Cruz, ‘Cuerpo que Flota’
“Cuerpo que Flota,” the first single from Uruguayan producer Lila Tirando a Violeta’s forthcoming album “Desire Path,” refuses to hew to tradition. Alongside the Ecuadorean producer Nicola Cruz, Lila stitches together murmurs; a muted, stuttering half-dembow riddim; and layers of static disturbance. The album samples pre-Hispanic flutes and ocarinas right alongside Lila’s electronic experimentation (you can even buy a 3-D printed ocarina along with the release), allowing her to forge her own dystopic, serrated universe where past meets present. HERRERA
