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.

Missy Elliott’s first studio collection in 14 years is an underwhelming EP called “Iconology”: only four new songs plus the a cappella vocals for one of them, the doo-wop-style “Why I Still Love You.” Yes, she was an icon — a remarkable, incontestable groundbreaker — in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. She wrote hits (particularly for Aaliyah), rapped, produced, sang, danced and claimed a place for hardheaded talent.

But on “Iconology,” her assurance is flecked with anxiety. The video for “Throw It Back” begins with a museum scene featuring a young girl who never heard of Elliott. And a big part of Elliott’s rap on “Throw It Back” is her résumé: “I did records for Tweet before you could even tweet,” she reminds us. Her delivery — surrounded, in the video, by dancers in bright matching-colored outfits — is pure deadpan confidence: “What you’re doing now, I did for a while,” she notes, adding, “Don’t look for another Missy ’cause there’ll be no other one.” But the production, by Elliott with her longtime collaborator Timbaland and Will Hendrix, is also a throwback: just a three-note synthesizer bass line and vintage drum-machine sounds. Elliott deserves to be acknowledged, but hip-hop moves a long way over a decade-plus. “Iconology” doesn’t prove that the icon is still innovating. JON PARELES

Melina Duterte, who records as Jay Som, makes most of her music by herself in a home studio. Yet her songs are anything but spartan or simplistic; within three or four minutes, they repeatedly transform themselves, musically and emotionally. “Anak Ko,” which means “my child” in the Tagalog language of the Philippines, is the title song of her second album. It’s at once flinty and vulnerable and dreamlike, expanding from an understated beat to psychedelic inner worlds, leaving her stranded with her voice chopped into sampled syllables as she ends up, “Somewhere I can feel it when you’re gone.” PARELES

Edward Norton’s film “Motherless Brooklyn” includes a soundtrack song from Thom Yorke: a hollow-eyed, disconsolate piano waltz with his double-tracked falsetto carrying tidings like “You’re on parade for daily battles/The other side, it has no face.” Flea joins him with echoey trumpet lines, overlapping but providing no support or resolution. There’s a second version, too: a slow jazz waltz with Wynton Marsalis in muted 1950s Miles Davis mode, tracing the melody’s curves in chiaroscuro, finding a few glimmers of hope. PARELES

Maybe it was inevitable that “Green Eyes” — the sassy, smitten closer of Erykah Badu’s album “Mama’s Gun,” featuring a trumpet arrangement by Roy Hargrove — would enter jazz’s 21st-century songbook. And who better to enshrine it there than Badu’s fellow Dallasite, the 28-year-old vocalist Jazzmeia Horn, whose new album, “Love and Liberation,” cements her as the next big carrier of straight-ahead jazz’s vocal tradition? Horn stakes her claim to the song through what she leaves out (its cute opening verse, talking about vegetables and lovesickness; any trumpet playing at all) as much as through what she puts in (braided vocal harmonies and a coda of scatted improvisations). GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

Up at 3 a.m., all alone, Baby Rose ponders drunk-dialing her ex, even though she remembers how badly he hurt her. Her voice is low, tearful and torchy, building drama as she argues with herself; her backup is sustained and hymnlike, complete with a gospelly organ. The song is from “To Myself,” a debut album full of songs about the damage love can inflict, sung with deep soul insight. PARELES

A wise woman recently said that rock is back. This week, the 1975 helped the cause with a track called “People,” and That Dog. did its part by returning after a 22-year break. The Los Angeles band — the singer-guitarist, Anna Waronker, the bassist-vocalist Rachel Haden and the drummer Tony Maxwell — will release an album called “Old LP” in October. “If You Didn’t Just Do It” draws a straight line back to the group’s best ’90s work — sweet, tart, smart guitar rock. CARYN GANZ

A few guitar notes slowly toll and drone as Molly Sarlé (a member of the female trio Mountain Man) meditates on judgment and forgiveness, self-knowledge and understanding others. Her vocal lines unfurl and subside as irregularly as ripples on a pond, floating alone or multiplying in harmony, eventually finding a temporary stillness. PARELES

You don’t ever have to look too deeply into the music of Thelonious Monk to find a Caribbean groove. That’s especially true on “Bemsha Swing,” which Monk wrote with the Barbadian-born drummer and trumpeter Denzil Best, and whose title refers to Best’s home country. On his new album, “Wareika Hill: Rastamonk Vibrations,” the Jamaican pianist Monty Alexander, 75, mines the reggae flavor inside 12 of Monk’s compositions, and this song is, naturally, a highlight. RUSSONELLO

To make “Good Day for Cloud Fishing,” his latest album, the clarinetist Ben Goldberg gathered up the guitarist Nels Cline and the trumpeter Ron Miles — two players with curious minds and patient hands, like his own — and showed them some poems by Dean Young. The trio then played gentle, warmhearted, slowly unspooling music, each piece inspired by a different poem, as Young sat with them in the studio. Unaware of which poem was guiding them at any given moment, he wrote new verses as he listened. “So now,” Goldberg reflected after the recording session, “we have a new poem which is like the old poem filtered through a song.” But maybe don’t worry about all that: Even if you never knew the conceit, there would be plenty to love about this music. On “Reality” (inspired by Young’s melancholic poem of the same name), hear Goldberg and Cline alternate between embracing and giving each other space, as if their instruments were bodies full of heat and pulse, shyness and desire. RUSSONELLO

A nimble-fingered young tenor saxophonist whose career is starting to take off, Roxy Coss begins “Mr. President” in a dust cloud of frustration, painting in spirally smears over the pianist Miki Yamanaka’s dissonant pounds. But by the end of the track — one of seven originals on her new album, “Quintet” — Coss’s whole group is racing ahead, as if to outrun (or outwit, or simply out-punch) the tune’s titular adversary. RUSSONELLO

Billie Eilish’s older brother, producer and songwriting collaborator, Finneas O’Connell, delivers a perky, unambivalent love song with “Shelter.” Sure, it’s in a minor key, but its guitars escalate from foot-tapping syncopation to full flamenco-pop drive. And while he sings about storms and destruction, it’s only because he is sure that “I’ll be warm as long as I’m yours.” He could definitely use some of his sister’s darker instincts. PARELES