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Hear tracks by Emotional Oranges, Future, the Secret Sisters and others.
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.
After a year of rocket-fueled fame, Billie Eilish enters the sadness on her melancholic new single, “Everything I Wanted.” In the verses, over keyboards that are both urgent and elegiac, she’s singing about misery and self-doubt, and how they intersect with overwhelming acclaim in the damnedest ways. At the chorus, she exhales, and pays tribute to someone who offers to protect her against the fickleness of others, and also from her own worst instincts. It’s draining, yet hopeful. JON CARAMANICA
On Thursday, Taylor Swift went public with the latest tensions between her and Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta, the music executives currently in control of her back catalog. It was an attempt to wrest control of a situation that’s unfolded in ways unfriendly to her. What she can control, however, is what she releases moving forward; two new songs came this week. “Beautiful Ghosts” — written by Swift with Andrew Lloyd Webber, for the forthcoming “Cats” film adaptation — is successful, by the terms of the “Cats” ecosystem. Swift sings melodramatically, and with an indeterminate accent, but isn’t over the top in the way Webber is best suited. Something similar happens on the remix of “Lover,” from her album of the same name, which imports Shawn Mendes as a tool of extending its life to little effect. Mendes is at his best when he’s jangly and punchy, but this song is too tightly wrapped, too pristine, for him to triumph over. He’s a rowdy cat, and Swift is content to simply purr. CARAMANICA
The R&B duo Emotional Oranges has a clear concept: A male-female dialogue set to midtempo, 1990s-tinged grooves. It also has a coy strategy; its two members just call themselves A and V. “Sundays” is from “The Juice, Vol. II,” the second Emotional Oranges EP released this year. It’s a tense negotiation between not-quite-exes, trading accusations — “Gave you my best, you just gave it away” — but realizing they’re not through with each other yet. JON PARELES
Life is a never-ending slog of a story penned by a dull writer for Alison Rachel, the frontwoman for the South African quartet Honeymoan, on the addictive “Still Here.” “Though that I’d dissolve/Thought that I’d disappear,” she sighs over a perky bass line dancing over fuzzy guitar and more sinister synths. “But I wake up in bed the next day I’m still here.” It’s a song about repetition that begs repeat plays. CARYN GANZ
The sisters Laura and Lydia Rogers have been releasing gorgeous close-harmony Americana for nearly a decade and have a knack for attracting top producing talent. Dave Cobb worked on their 2010 debut; T Bone Burnett handled their 2014 follow-up; and Brandi Carlile and the twin brothers Tim and Phil Hanseroth, who collaborated on their 2017 LP, are back for “Saturn Return,” due in February. “Cabin” is a chillingly beautiful song about escaping from the prison of abuse that builds to a fiery peak, but doesn’t guarantee justice. GANZ
One of the only improvisers to make the quiet, papery-voiced bass clarinet his primary instrument. One of the only nationally known jazz musicians to have remained in Baltimore. One of the only artists in a conspicuously conscious age to actually work full time as a community organizer. All right, now let go of all that and just listen. On “Trio+,” his new album, Marcus’s burly projection and loose-cannon improvising style make the case for him on their own — especially on high-velocity burners like “Neophilia,” a cover of this lesser-known jazz classic by the storied bass clarinetist Bennie Maupin. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
A highly comic, exceedingly randy remake of Silkk the Shocker’s 1998 hit. Trouble raps with a swallowed drawl and an arched eyebrow. Midsong, just like Mystikal on the original, Boosie Badazz arrives for some loose-hinged pyrotechnic boasting. CARAMANICA
Is there anyone more unrelentingly sad than Future? He’s in peak lamentation form on “Last Name,” bemoaning women trying to corner him and violence that lurks just around the corner. CARAMANICA
Recorded at a barn in upstate New York with just the alto saxophonist Darius Jones and the cellist Marika Hughes accompanying her, Fay Victor’s new album is a direct-delivery mechanism for her inimitable vocal style, which wriggles happily in the space between Off Off Broadway theatricality and casual transcendence. Jazz singers have always been asked to strike some balance between the proper and the personal, but Victor’s style is all hers: a mix of speech and song, words and abstraction, interior monologue and call-to-action. The pieces on the new disc, “Barn Songs,” were co-written by Victor and the bassist Jochem van Dijk, her husband. On “There They Are,” which closes the disc, lyrics about a simple pleasure — catching one’s own reflection in a puddle while biking down a wet road — give way to luminescent, wordless singing; Victor’s open vowels find harmonic resonance with Jones’s saxophone, swaying along to Hughes’s steady drift below. RUSSONELLO