Pop music critics of The New York Times weigh in on notable new songs:
• D'Angelo, "Unshaken." D'Angelo takes his time between releases. How he is filling at least part of that downtime? Video games. A fan of the Red Dead Redemption series, he was nudged into contributing an original song to Red Dead Redemption 2. "Unshaken" is lonely cowboy-western soul, produced by Daniel Lanois -- an incantation for those with bleary eyes and unswerving defiance.
-- JON CARAMANICA
• Noname featuring Phoelix, "Song 31." A chorus of "oohs" and "aahs" in jazzy chords, circling without resolution, accompanies Chicago rapper Noname as she calmly zooms down her latest stream of consciousness. Syncopating her rhymes rapidly and precisely over the tricky beat, Noname touches on her success without a record label, black representation on TV, mass incarceration, Christmas and all the direct messages she has ignored, among other things. "I sell pain for profit, not propaganda," she declares. Her producer, Phoelix, also shows up as a singer with an enigmatic, equally unresolved chorus.
-- JON PARELES
• Paul McCartney, "Get Enough." Paul McCartney uses AutoTune -- yes, AutoTune -- to sing about lost, lifelong love. "It was a time we were all full of hope/Saw the future burning bright," he sings. "Do you remember?" Now it's the future. And all you can remember is when the Beatles wouldn't use anyone else's sounds, and when an unprocessed voice was enough.
-- JON PARELES
• Post Malone, "Wow." Post Malone's farewell to 2018 is far more exuberant than anything he released last year. "Wow." is boastful but not melancholy -- "I got a lot of toys/720S bumpin' Fall Out Boy" -- and he's largely rapping, with only a flimsy skin of melody. After a year in which his Beerbongs & Bentleys helped set the framework for pop's full-molt evolution, this is unconcerned with formal innovation and blithely cheerful.
-- JON CARAMANICA
• Jimin, "Promise." A fine mist of guitar-pop, "Promise" -- the new solo single from Jimin, of the K-pop juggernaut BTS -- runs in the opposite direction of BTS maximalism. Here he sounds tender and sweet, and the song never moves quicker than a saunter. In the broader BTS oeuvre, it is something of an afterthought, casual and unobtrusive. But that hardly matters: It broke the SoundCloud record for most plays in a song's first 24 hours.
-- JON CARAMANICA
• T-Rextasy, "Maddy's Got a Boyfriend." This quartet writes songs spiked with humorous asides, ska guitar and riot grrrl attitude (so it doesn't sound anything like T. Rex, or the Marc Bolan tribute act from England that shares its name). The group started when its members were still in high school and its second album, Prehysteria, delivers more scrawny indie rock with an extra helping of eye roll. Over the Sleater-Kinney-ish backdrop of "Maddy's Got a Boyfriend," Lyris Faron nurses a wounded heart: "She leaves me crying in the sand/she said she never liked my band."
-- CARYN GANZ
ALBUMS
A- Bad Bunny
X 100pre
Rimas
If 2018 was the year Latin-language musica urbana won chart-topping acclaim, few played a better hand than Puerto Rican trap/reggaeton vocalist Bad Bunny. Dueting with Drake on "Mia," or teaming with Cardi B and J Balvin for her "I Like It" smash, BB has been moving up the mainstream hip-hop ladder with flair while dropping his own hits. For his melancholy debut, Bad Bunny makes a gorgeous buffet from all textures of modern urbana with his slippery monotone baritone -- usually AutoTuned -- front and center of every cool, electro-laced cut.
Starting with the ballad "Ni Bien Ni Mal" and the moody "Quien Tu Eres?," Bad Bunny provokes the topics of each and prods them to reveal their inner urgings. "Who are you to get close to me?" he croons on the latter before ending the track in cutting English. "Solo de Mi" also finds its focus to be Bad Bunny, and, like "Quien Tu Eres?," eventually becomes more aggressive, yet childlike. The jittery "200 MPH" starts from that youthful perspective with partying on the beach as its subject and Diplo as Bad Bunny's partner in grime. No matter whom he's partnered with here (El Alfa, Drake), X 100pre is 100 percent Bad Bunny.
Hot tracks: "Ni Bien Ni Mal," "200 MPH"
-- A.D. AMOROSI
The Philadelphia Inquirer (TNS)
B Swizz Beatz
Poison
Epic
Swizz Beatz doesn't need one grand gesture to define his career. As the hot-wired producer behind the rugged beats, stammering choruses and mellifluous tones of the Ruff Ryders crew, and early hits from Busta Rhymes and Jay-Z, Swizz had bunches of hits that ruled the '90s and early 2000s before trying his own (wonky) hand at rapping. Poison was planned as a multigenre superstar epic (with Bono and Bruno Mars) that would show his command of pop and hip-hop in the present. This version of Poison is not that wide-net cast recording. Instead, this is a sharply cutting, musical and modern take on the Beatz bounce, with nu-school cats such as Kendrick Lamar and 2 Chainz.
Poison's best and most soulful moments showcase Beatz and his guests in their best lights. That's most true for New Yorkers Nas and Jim Jones, who are given their most potently heated, old-school tracks in years with, respectively "Echo" and "Preach." Pusha T benefits from sound and lyrics more humble and holy ("Cold Blooded") than we're used to from his boasts. The best cut, "Pistol on My Side (P.O.M.S.)," featuring Lil Wayne and Beatz's wife, Alicia Keys, on piano, is the deepest, filled with Wayne's vinegary harangues and some bittersweet soul on the side.
Hot tracks: "Pistol on My Side (P.O.M.S.)," "Echo," "Preach"
-- A.D. AMOROSI
The Philadelphia Inquirer (TNS)
Style on 01/15/2019