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.

Sex and drugs and … package delivery? Frank Ocean seems to take equal pleasure in all three in “DHL,” his first new song since 2017. Over slowly oozing vamps — one changes to another near the halfway point — he raps about sex with his new “boy toy,” about assorted pills and pharmaceuticals, about his early hard work and his current wealth and ease, while he has “new files sitting on my drive.” His tone and delivery communicate as much as his words: blasé even when he speeds up to triplet cadences, blurred with overdubs, content to stay hazy until he focuses for a brief final boast. JON PARELES

Extreme success hasn’t stopped the 1975 from being convincingly chameleonic. “Frail State of Mind,” from the band’s upcoming fourth album, lands somewhere between Years & Years, Justin Bieber’s work with Skrillex and Diplo, and SoundCloud R&B. It’s sweetly evanescent on the surface, but carries heavy feeling below deck. JON CARAMANICA

Leonard Cohen left behind unfinished songs when he died in 2016, and his son and producer, Adam Cohen, has completed them for an album, “Thanks for the Dance,” which will be released Nov. 22. A version of “Happens to the Heart” was published in the 2018 book “The Flame,” but Cohen was still improving it when he recorded this performance. The music is gorgeously realized; Cohen intones his lyrics with clear implications of melody, and the track fleshes them out with an orchestra, an acoustic guitar hinting at flamenco and a melancholy piano line. “Happens to the Heart” sounds like vintage Cohen: somber and sly, invoking the spiritual alongside the mundane, making paradoxes profound.

Now the angel’s got a fiddle
The devil’s got a harp
Every soul is like a minnow
Every mind is like a shark
Me, I’ve broken every window
But the house, the house is dark
I care, but very little
What happens to the heart.

PARELES

The Argentine songwriter and singer Juana Molina has built a catalog of subtle, insinuating, crafty songs, but her coming EP, “Forfun,” cranks up the guitars for punk impact. “Paraguaya Punk” is a remake of her song “Paraguaya,” a tale of witchcraft and erotic spell-casting that leaves her bored with her conquest. It’s still in 6/4 rather than punk’s usual 4/4, but for two propulsive minutes she wrestles with how supernatural powers can go wrong; the chorus is “no no no no no no no no no.” PARELES

Throughout their new album, “Poetry in Motion,” the Soul Rebels demonstrate in a whole host of ways that sounding like New Orleans doesn’t have to mean sounding like the past. Then on the last song, the quasi-title-track “Blush (Poetry in Motion),” they hand the creative reins over almost entirely to Robert Glasper, guesting on keyboards. The brass band becomes an ace backing ensemble — as it has for Nas and Curren$y — filling out Glasper’s flowy post-Dilla hip-hop sound. Eventually the Rebels’ hometown pal Tarriona Ball (of Tank and the Bangas) comes in with a verse of bubbly, besmitten rap, sounding like Noname’s New Orleans cousin. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

Another entry in the suddenly ubiquitous Spanish-English collaboration pile, but there’s worthy motivation here: Both Prettymuch and CNCO are five-member boy bands with devoted fan bases. Given that intricate harmony is already their bailiwick, the interweaving on this song — between languages and between styles — flows peacefully and without static. CARAMANICA

“Living in the dark, waiting for the light,” Beck sings amid chiming, beeping, chattering synthesizers. “Caught up in these never-ending battle lines/Everything has changed, nothing feels right.” Written and produced by Beck and Pharrell Williams, “Uneventful Days” cycles without resolution, ending in the same limbo where it began, pretty yet oblivious to his existential qualms. Dev Hynes (Blood Orange) directed the video, which begins with the aqueous, unmoored introduction “Hyperlife” as Beck intones “Want to feel more and more”; both are from Beck’s album “Hyperspace,” due Nov. 22. PARELES

Chris Martin and Co.’s last smash was the 2017 track “Something Just Like This,” a souped-up synth-heavy collaboration with the Chainsmokers that Tina Turner loves (even if she refuses to acknowledge the Chainsmokers’ contribution). Cue the strumming: Two songs previewing the band’s Nov. 22 album, “Everyday Life,” revisit the charge of building tension and release via acoustic instruments. Femi Kuti and his band provide horn riffs and skronks on “Arabesque,” and a chorus of young voices and a bouncy bass line carry the nostalgic yet jubilant “Orphans” to what’s becoming an increasingly bittersweet promise: “I want to be with you till the whole world ends.” CARYN GANZ

Accusations and regrets arrive as a sequence of declarative sentences — “You promised the world and I fell for it” — over piano chords that grow increasingly cavernous, eventually joined by strings and choir, as Selena Gomez trades self-doubt for anger and leaves behind acquiescence for a blunt, proud, triumphal goodbye. The breakup turns monumental. PARELES

For the last couple of years, Bad Bunny has worked seamlessly across genres — reggaeton and Latin trap, collaborations with pop stars and rappers — eager to demonstrate that he’s never not at home. Now, he’s extended his reach into Mexican music, forming a bridge between regional styles and approaches that rarely meet. He appears on a remix of “Soy El Diablo” by the teen singer Natanael Cano, part of an emergent movement of performers attempting to modernize Mexican corridos. To fit in, Bad Bunny draws his singing out into broad, theatrical smears, a rollicking performance for a rollicking genre. CARAMANICA

Orrin Evans has a long personal history with Reid Anderson, the Bad Plus’s bassist, but it is his rapport with the drummer Dave King — and King’s hyper, trouncing style — that gives the new iteration of this trio its activation energy. All told, there’s a fresh ease and joy to the Bad Plus’s sound now that Evans has settled into the piano chair, which was held for over 15 years by Ethan Iverson. It is clear that Evans has been studying the group’s past repertoire, as he plays a role not altogether different from Iverson’s: He’s sentimental but with restraint, and rarely fills out his chords with a lot of jazz dissonance. But there’s plenty of difference between them. With Evans, the band’s humor is no longer hitched to a Wagnerian, Britteneque severity. (Iverson is a pianist of many gifts, it should be noted, and he made some watershed albums with the Bad Plus, particularly in the early 2000s. He continues to do interesting work on his own, as a pianist and composer venturing between jazz and classical.)

“Dovetail Nicely,” a King composition, sits near the center of the group’s new LP, “Activate Infinity,” its second studio album with Evans and its 14th overall. If the album’s title is a deprecatingly self-aggrandizing reference to the trio’s own stubborn persistence, then bring it on. They ought to stick around as long as they like. RUSSONELLO

The post-metal band Sunn O))) deals in drones and noise, stases and flare-ups. The 11-minute track “Frost” is from its new album “Pyroclasts,” and its anchoring, meditative electric-guitar drone is beset by dissonant sustained notes, looming overtones and gusts of white noise. Endure it to understand both strength and vigilance. PARELES