Carnival of Soul

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.

“L.A. on my mind,” Danielle Haim sings to start her band’s first new song since 2017, but it’s Lou Reed’s New York that provides the underlying vibe for this stroll on the mild side, co-produced by Rostam Batmanglij and Ariel Rechtshaid. The singer and guitarist has said the track was intended to brighten Rechtshaid’s spirits as he battled cancer, and its cascading saxophone line and gentle vocal lines linger like a salty ocean breeze. CARYN GANZ

Another season, another Noah Cyrus rebrand. That said, this might — should? — be where the roulette wheel finally stops. A starkly moving acoustic-guitar gut-punch about feeling frozen in the headlights of a traumatizing relationship, “July” is elegiac and sometimes harrowing. “Tell me to leave, I’ll pack my bags, get on the road,” Cyrus sweetly begs of a cruel partner she can’t detach from. The song is short, but the feelings are gutting, especially the refrain Cyrus returns to again and again: “You remind me every day/I’m not enough/but I still stay.” JON CARAMANICA

This soothing ditty about after-hours possession being only 1/10 of a relationship is heavy with the scent of “Thank U, Next.” Ariana Grande, thoughtfully undersinging, delivers wounded Instagram-caption lyrics for the friends-with-benefits era. But her repartee with Social House’s Michael Foster is warmly appealing. She opens with a verse about vicious indecision, and Foster replies with eyelashes fluttering: “Even though you ain’t mine, I promise the way we fight make me/honestly feel like we just in love.” The third verse, by Social House’s Charles Anderson, is a missed opportunity — a shrug rather than a three’s-a-crowd provocation. CARAMANICA

The next time you think about going to one of those swing era-revival parties, where folks come in knickers and do the Lindy Hop all evening, consider dropping by a Mwenso and the Shakes show instead. This semi-large ensemble has its own tap dancer; a prowling, proselytizing bandleader, Michael Mwenso, whose job is to minister to the audience and call the band to action as much as it is to sing; and a robust rhythm section that kicks up dust lustily. Mwenso’s chief concern is getting its audiences moving — though, admittedly, this is not Lindy Hoppable music. Hear how the band toggles between cooled-off swing and a thrashing rock beat on “Big Spender.” It was smart of the Shakes, whose real medium is the stage, to record their debut album live. That record, the fine “Emergence (The Process of Coming into Being),” is out Friday. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

The country-rock of Chris Janson has the effervescence of peak-era Brooks & Dunn: high-energy but also soft-edged, ragged but also relentlessly cheerful. But even though he’s now a member of the Grand Ole Opry, not all his heroes appear on the Ryman stage: “Rolling Stone called me the most open-minded redneck on the block/Yeah but I ain’t the first good ol’ boy to mix country with his rock/see I grew up in a single-wide with a poster of Kid Rock.” CARAMANICA

The solipsism of the moody side of Lil Peep-adjacent SoundCloud rap meets the grandeur of 1990s arena-Britpop. CARAMANICA

The Asheville, N.C. band Secret Shame sings about the “dark synthetics” that give its Sept. album its name on the gothy “Calm”: “Prescription decisions, tangible nightmares, edible night terrors.” There’s a rage trembling under the group’s chiming post-punk, which winds itself around an ultimatum about self-preservation: “Calm me down or I am going to burn.” GANZ

The first single from Angel Olsen’s fourth album (due in October) is a sharp left turn away from quiet-but-trembling songs that lean on the intense quaver in her voice and into a more theatrical, melodramatic presentation. Her power is there, but coated in swelling synths that convey terror just on the horizon. CARAMANICA

What begins with a slow crawl upward — just somber, slumping bass notes from Jon Batiste’s piano and a few tinkles at the top of the keyboard — gives way to a break in the clouds and a section of sanguine, Count Basie-inflected horn harmonies. Before long, Batiste’s septet is rough-riding through a propellant, two-chord vamp, calling back to the modal-jazz eruptions of John Coltrane’s quartet in the early 1960s. Most of all, this Batiste original works as a showcase for the young alto saxophonist Patrick Bartley, who channels Kenny Garrett during his solo, metabolizing frustration into release. RUSSONELLO

Wynton Marsalis’s idea with Jazz at Lincoln Center has always been to enshrine jazz as a form of musical modernism: an established practice with certain formal components (swing rhythm; acoustic instruments) and a cultural identity firmly planted in the 20th century. So how did it take him this long to do the obvious, and release something like “Jazz and Art”? The new album pulls together 10 tracks from Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, all composed by members or friends of the group, and inspired by different Impressionists and modern artists. The guitarist Doug Wamble wrote the album’s slinky, sauntering opener with a painting in mind by Stuart Davis, whose colorful potpourri jumbles were themselves often painted in response to the midcentury jazz he was hearing, back when that music was fresh. RUSSONELLO