EGN NEWS DESK
The tune SZA launched in a industrial through the Grammy Awards, “Saturn,” has now been separated from its credit-card plug and launched to streaming companies in a number of variations; one, the sped-up model, brings out its clear pop construction. But the real-time model is healthier. The tune is a couple of eager for the higher place that her karma has earned: “Stuck on this paradigm/Don’t imagine in paradise,” she sings. Arpeggios glimmer round her; a boom-bap beat brings an undertow. Her vocal strains argue with the beat as she joins generations of Afrofuturists like Sun Ra, wanting past Earth and insisting, “There’s obtained to be extra.” JON PARELES
“Musow Danse” (“Women’s Dance”) is the title observe of the jubilant new album by Les Amazones D’Afrique: a Pan-African, proudly multilingual alliance of singers and songwriters carrying feminist messages to bop flooring. “Musow Danse” is propelled by gritty distorted electronics and conventional drumming; it options Mamani Keïta from Mali, Fafa Ruffino from Benin, Dobet Gnahoré from the Ivory Coast and Kandy Guira from Mali, singing (respectively) in Bambara, Fon, Bété and Mooré, and sharing the refrain, “Rise up African lady!” PARELES
A.G. Cook, ‘Britpop’
On this cheekily named, kaleidoscopically catchy title observe from his upcoming third album, the zany digital producer A.G. Cook turns a easy, hypnotically repeated Charli XCX chorus — “Brit, Brit, Brit, Brit, Brit, like Britpop” — into an alternate-universe nationwide anthem. As prismatic synths bounce off Charli’s more and more processed vocals, “Britpop” recollects the wild effervescence of Cook’s finest work with the avant-pop collective PC Music, however its idea is refreshingly streamlined and direct. Blur and Oasis by no means did it fairly like this. LINDSAY ZOLADZ
Rhiannon Giddens, ‘The Ballad of Sally Anne’
Mark O’Connor’s 1991 recording of “The Ballad of Sally Anne” was so bouncy that its chilling, essential strains may nearly go unnoticed. They’re about Sally Anne’s husband, lynched on their wedding ceremony day: “As he hung from a tree she watched him die.” The longtime Nashville Music Row songwriter (and a novelist) Alice Randall collaborated on the tune, tucking a Black story right into a white musician’s catalog as she usually did. “My Black Country,” a tribute album of Randall’s songs recorded by Black ladies, is due April 12. Quickly following her newfound publicity enjoying banjo on Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ’Em,” Rhiannon Giddens has reworked “The Ballad of Sally Anne” to convey out the haunted grief at its core. It has a brand new, minor-mode tune with fiddle and banjo upfront at first, later bolstered by jabbing horns. Sally Anne’s ghostly quest isn’t a hoedown any extra. PARELES
The lyrics seesaw between wry — “Money makes issues appear so out of whack/Drive away in my blue Cadillac” — and forlorn: “Someone inform me what the hell is mistaken/Nights at all times really feel quiet and too lengthy.” But the music leans optimistic. Like the remainder of her coming album, “Visions,” “Staring on the Wall” is a collaboration between Norah Jones and the producer and drummer Leon Michels. Between his backbeat and her twangy guitar, understated keyboards and reassuring vocal harmonies, it’s clear she’ll make it via her misgivings simply high quality. PARELES
Adrianne Lenker, ‘Fool’
Adrianne Lenker sings about connections — “They say when it’s proper it’s proper” — that may final or disappear: friendship, infatuation, romance, marriage, household. In her feathery, quavery voice, she itemizes varied individuals’s names and conditions amid a six-beat net of picked, manipulated guitar tones, exact however by no means sure. The guitars are prone to bend, float in, stutter or vanish at any second: as fragile and wanted because the human companionship she longs for. PARELES
Kings of Leon, ‘Mustang’
The taut leadoff single from Kings of Leon’s forthcoming album “Can We Please Have Fun” begins with restrained, palm-muted verses over which Caleb Followill deadpans some absurd strains: “A muscle journal subsequent to the bathroom, I’m getting huge and robust simply eager about it.” But finally, after an preliminary fakeout, this seemingly arch tune explodes into the sort of cathartic rock refrain for which the band is thought. “Are you a mustang or a kitty?” Followill hollers. The reply appears to be the previous. ZOLADZ
“How a lot can I take, drowning in my ache?” Baby Rose sings within the opening verse of “Breaking Point” from the brand new album, “I’ve Never Been Here Before,” by the Brooklyn-based producer and rapper Erick the Architect. Over lush strings, his friends sing about being on the brink of despair, however Erick’s rap preaches persistence, endurance and shared effort: “I may by no means swim with out you, tides is popping, we evolve!” PARELES
Kelly Moran, ‘Butterfly Phase’
The keyboardist and composer Kelly Moran, who has labored with Oneohtrix Point Never and FKA twigs, made her coming album, “Moves within the Field,” by meshing stay efficiency with materials she created on a Yamaha Disklavier, a computerized participant piano that may report and reprocess a musician’s efficiency, together with her contact. “Butterfly Phase” layers a number of ranges of exercise: sustained chords, a thoughtfully unfolding melody and plinking, perpetual-motion eighth-notes, the sound of discovering a path via numerous glittering distractions. PARELES
