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.

From the beginning, “Darkness” feels like a familiar kind of Eminem song — the mood is morbid and the rapping is anxious, seemingly about an upcoming concert. But soon it becomes clear he’s stringing together a series of double entendres. Then the song’s video turns shattering: He’s not rapping as himself, sweating before a big show. He’s rapping from the perspective of someone on the verge of slaughtering people at a music festival, in the vein of the Route 91 Harvest Festival, where 58 concertgoers were killed in 2017.

The video is gruesome, disorienting and ethically defective. It stomps on the empathy you’d been encouraged to extend to Eminem, who’s long rapped potently about battling his personal demons, making it unclear if you’ve been commiserating with a sociopath the whole time. (After the main part of the song concludes, the video clumsily pivots to a PSA about gun violence.)

This track will have a typical Eminem rollout — shock, followed by outrage. (It’s part of a surprise album that arrived on Friday called “Music to Be Murdered By”; another new song, “Unaccommodating,” references the Manchester bombing outside an Ariana Grande concert.) Certainly, a representative of the victims’ families will speak out about how this thought exercise helps no one, and hurts many. That person will be correct. Perhaps a different artist could have explored this tension in a way that didn’t feel like a traumatizing bait-and-switch, but the moral irresponsibility of invoking imagery of this nature without an unassailable message is almost too much to bear. And the veneer of wordplay it’s coated in is no armor at all. JON CARAMANICA

“I just bought a crib on top of the hill,” Thundercat proclaims in his familiar falsetto — halfway giddy, halfway dreamy — at the start of “Black Qualls,” the first single from an album due in April. “And I bought a brand-new ride/Am I keeping it real?” He decides to let himself off the hook: “There’s nothing wrong if you got it/I’m not living in fear, I’m just being honest.” He chose musicians from opposing generations as guest vocalists here: Steve Arrington (formerly of the funk pioneers Slave) and the young multi-instrumentalist and singer Steve Lacy. After all, this music picks up right where he left off with “Drunk,” his breakout 2017 album: springing straight out of the Isley Brothers’ 1970s milieu, landing somewhere in the near future. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

The first single from “Heavy Light,” the forthcoming album by Meg Remy (who records as U.S. Girls) is like early-period Madonna sputtering out of a radio while an ESG concert is going on. CARAMANICA

Sunny Jain, the drummer who leads the Red Baraat brass band, vastly expands his palette on “Wild Wild East,” a furiously propulsive song from his solo project. Bollywood meets New Orleans, new age, rock and whatever else it takes to make this five-minute track hurtle forward with a new fusion at every junction. JON PARELES

A crisis of masculinity? A consideration of grown-up duties, responsibilities and limits? Nope. This is a boy-band come-on, begging for the attention of a flawless girl, with “boy” find-and-replaced by “man”: “What a man got to prove to be totally locked up by you?” Professionalism reigns, as the Jonas Brothers and their team update the syncopations, handclaps and gospel thump of George Michael’s “Faith.” The brothers’ vocals still sound perpetually eager; the production builds fast and slickly. Will young girls still believe it?PARELES

Gregory Porter yokes together his blues and soul roots with 21st-century pop power balladry on the lead single from “All Rise,” his sixth studio album. The result is about what you might expect if Leon Bridges, Alicia Keys and Trombone Shorty dashed off a songwriting collab (in fact, Porter wrote “Revival” with help from a couple of partners). Handclaps, a 10-person choir, fuzzily distorted bass and a tapestry of horns surround Porter’s leonine baritone as he hollers the chorus: “You lift me higher, out of the fire, out of the flames/I lost the feeling, but you give me meaning again.” The video shows a young dancer, Jemoni Powe, reacting to the acquittal of Rodney King’s assailants in 1992, drawing a loose connection between the song’s vaguely pious themes and the continuing struggle for racial justice. RUSSONELLO

Mike Campbell was a founding member of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in 1976 and his production and playing — with countless layers of vintage guitars — were at the core of Petty’s music for the four decades afterward. Campbell’s own band, the Dirty Knobs, puts absolutely no distance between his music and Petty’s. The music is a classic-rock portmanteau, invoking eastward-looking Beatles, the Who, the Byrds and the Rolling Stones just for starters. And in all those years together, Campbell clearly soaked up Petty’s craggy vocals and pithy sentiments: He sings, “You were lucky just to be alive/Living without a net.” PARELES

When Spotifycore evolves from pure algorithm to something more human, it’ll likely sound like this — sprightly, emotionally tactile, a little sweet and cloying, while never not being breezy, so that those disinclined to pay close attention won’t feel left out. CARAMANICA

How Canadian is this? “St. Peter’s Bay” — it’s on Prince Edward Island — is a folky, minor-key song about ice skating at night, with a gentle vocal and a sturdy melody, that maps a precarious relationship onto the wintry conditions. “Every little crack in the ice seemed to be enough/To make you think you might go under,” Sarah Harmer sings, with her voice gliding nearly unsupported above drums and bass. Later, a string orchestra bolsters her as she offers consolation: “Still, we had a good skate, didn’t we baby?” PARELES

On John McLaughlin’s new album, “Is That So?,” the esteemed fusion guitarist teams up again with his longtime collaborator, the Hindustani percussionist Zakir Hussain, as well as the vocalist Shankar Mahadevan. McLaughlin is known best for his blazing, distorted, line-driven guitar playing with Shakti and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, but here he surrounds Mahadevan’s clear, gently beseeching voice with a mist of Western harmony. The powdery synthesizer is actually coming from his electric guitar, run through a computer program that McLaughlin built over a period of two decades using sine waves, oscillators and filters, in an attempt to capture what he has called “a particular aspect of my inner music.” RUSSONELLO