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Tag: Michelle (Japanese Breakfast)

  • Japanese Breakfast’s Shimmering Sadness, and 8 More New Songs

    Japanese Breakfast’s Shimmering Sadness, and 8 More New Songs


    Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.

    Plucked string tones from all directions create a magical, shimmering cascade around Michelle Zauner’s voice in “Here Is Someone” from the new album by Japanese Breakfast, “For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women).” The lyrics hint at tensions and anxieties, but the track radiates anticipation: “Life is sad, but here is someone,” Zauner concludes. JON PARELES

    Marianne Faithfull, who died in January at 78, kept recording almost to the end. She brought every bit of her scratchy, ravaged, tenacious voice to “Burning Moonlight,” a song she co-wrote that holds one of her last manifestoes: “Burning moonlight to survive / Walking in fire is my life.” Acoustic guitars and tambourine connect the music to the 1960s, when she got her start; her singing holds all the decades of experience that followed. PARELES

    “Letter From an Unknown Girlfriend” is from the Waterboys album due April 4, “Life, Death and Dennis Hopper,” and was written by Mike Scott. But it is sung and played by Fiona Apple, alone at the piano, delivering a remembrance of an abusive boyfriend: “I used to say no man would ever strike me,” it begins, “And no man ever did ’til I met you.” She admits to the charm of the “satyr running wild in you,” but her voice rises to a bitter, primal rasp as she recalls the worst. It’s a stark, harrowing performance. PARELES

    Diffidence turns into resolve in the course of “Sanctuary,” a waltzing duet from “Every Dawn’s a Mountain,” the new album by the Belgian songwriter Tamino-Amir Moharam Fouad. In separate verses, Tamino and Mitski sound fragile, contemplating uncertainty and loss; “I reside in the ruins of the sanctuary,” Mitski sings. But when they connect — asking “Is it late where you are?” — and harmonize, an orchestra rises behind them to offer hope. PARELES

    “I’m a little crazy, but the world’s insane,” the disturbed narrator of Morgan Wallen’s new single contends. His character is a drug dealer who keeps a loaded gun nearby. He’s sustaining himself “on antidepressants and lukewarm beers” and yelling at his TV, “but the news don’t change.” Over steadfast acoustic guitar picking and lightly brushed drums, Wallen sings with chilling, sociopathic calm. PARELES

    The rhythm section from the African rock band Mdou Moctar — Ahmoudou Madassane, Mikey Coltun and Souleymane Ibrahim — has been recording on its own as Takaat, which means “noise” in Tuareg; an EP is due in April. Takaat’s first single, “Amidinin” (“Friend”), keeps the modal riffing and six-beat propulsion of Mdou Moctar, but cranks up the guitar distortion, slathers on echo and unleashes the drums to sound even more ferocious. PARELES

    The Toronto-based vocalist and producer Debby Friday won the Polaris Music Prize for her sharp 2023 debut album, “Good Luck.” She returns with the euphoric electro-pop single “1/17,” a dance-floor confessional that shows off yet another side of her multifaceted talent. “I swear you’re a sign,” Friday sings in an airy atmosphere punctured by percolating synths. The track builds layer atop gauzy layer until it explodes in a burst of club-ready catharsis. LINDSAY ZOLADZ

    The legacy of 1970s Stevie Wonder suffuses “Crash,” with cushy chromatic chord changes and a loping synthesizer bass line supplied by the keyboard master (and co-producer) Greg Phillinganes. Saba raps a no-pressure come-on: “Together we can make time go fast / And if it’s late, I hope you might just crash.” And Kelly Rowland, joining in on choruses, sounds perfectly amenable. PARELES

    Jack Harlow and Doja Cat exchange flirty verses on “Just Us,” a fast-paced track that forgoes catchy pop choruses and focuses instead on dexterous flows and winking wordplay. “I know it sounds like Zack and Cody, this life’s sweet,” Harlow raps, showing his age with a reference to a mid-2000s Disney Channel show. Corny? Maybe, but Doja’s into it: “You a softy, marshmallows and black coffee,” she counters affectionately. The video is full of celebrity cameos that prove how many people will pick up the phone when Harlow calls: Matt Damon, PinkPantheress, John Mayer and Nicholas Braun. Zack and Cody, alas, are nowhere to be found. ZOLADZ

    The long-running indie-rock band Deerhoof can be coy or oblique, but it’s neither in “Immigrant Songs,” a response to America’s sudden, brutal xenophobia. Satomi Matsuzaki gives voice to unrecognized immigrant labor — drivers, cooks, entertainers — over guitars and drums that lilt and intertwine behind her. But for the second half of this seven-minute track, the instruments just scream. There’s no more arguing or persuasion left. PARELES



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  • Ringo Starr Goes Country, and 13 More New Songs

    Ringo Starr Goes Country, and 13 More New Songs


    All things patriarchal, capitalistic and obtuse are targets for Lambrini Girls, the gleefully obstreperous English punk duo Phoebe Lunny and Lilly Macieira. “Company Culture,” a blast at workplace harassment from their debut album, “Who Let the Dogs Out,” revs up instrumentally for nearly a full minute — clattery drums, buzz-bombing bass, dissonant guitar — before Lunny lets loose a brutally sarcastic tirade: “Human resources say I’m asking for it,” she barks. PARELES

    Chrystia Cabral, a California songwriter who records as Spellling, proclaims “I don’t belong here!” with mounting vehemence in “Portrait of My Heart,” which will be the title track of her fourth album, due in March. She sings about a psychological and spiritual crisis — “I need a stroke of luck / ’Cause I kicked down all my angels to the dirt” — in a crescendo of choppy drums, layered guitars and orchestral strings, exulting in the drama. PARELES

    Heartache and heritage mingle on Bad Bunny’s new album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” (“I Should Have Taken More Photos”). Like many of its songs, “Baile Inolvidable” (“Unforgettable Dance”) morphs between current and vintage sounds, underscoring the multigenerational continuity of Puerto Rican music. “Baile Inolvidable” begins as a blurred dirge of synthesizer lines and Bad Bunny’s vocals, mourning a lost romance; “I thought we’d grow old together,” he sings in Spanish, and admits, “It’s my fault.” But the track switches to an old-school salsa jam, with organic percussion and horns and a jazzy piano; the lessons of the girlfriend who taught him “how to love” and “how to dance” have stayed with him. PARELES

    In “What Do I Do” — from “Lana,” her album-length addition to her album “SOS” — SZA answers her phone to hear an accidentally dialed call and the sounds of her boyfriend with another woman. A lean, finger-snapping track backs her as she grapples with the shock in brief, colliding phrases: old loyalties, new anger, hurt, disgust and the clear realization that “It’ll never be the same again.” PARELES

    The Caribbean-rooted British band Cymande, whose first three albums were released in the early 1970s, is about to put out a new one, “Renascence,” after decades of hearing its music recycled as samples. “How We Roll” brings back the group’s hand-played, Afro-Anglo-Caribbean grooves and hardheaded idealism: “We must never lose determination.” Its patient, cymbal-tapping beat and electric-piano chords hint at Miles Davis’s “In a Silent Way,” while the horn lines look toward Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s Afrobeat. And deep-voiced guest raps from Jazzie B, the founder of Soul II Soul, connect across British R&B generations. PARELES



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