The Playlist: Sade’s Haunting Lullaby, and 11 More New Songs

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/arts/music/playlist-sade-beach-house-kyle-jeremih.html

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Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos — and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. This week, Beach House raises the stakes, Theresa Wayman from Warpaint debuts a solo project and Jeremih drops a slinky EP.

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Sade returns — breathy, benevolent, pensive, resolute — with her first song in seven years, “Flower of the Universe,” from the soundtrack of “A Wrinkle in Time.” It’s a waltz praising a beloved child: a lullaby in minor chords, cradled in acoustic guitar picking and vocal harmonies. At the end, it lingers with unaccompanied voices carrying a keening melody: a mother’s lament, perhaps, for her daughter’s imminent trials. JON PARELES

The first part of “Dive” is what fans have come to expect from Beach House: stately and laconically evocative, with spacious keyboard and guitar chords and Victoria Legrand dazedly intoning, “Tell her something, tell her nothing/Tell her that you waited.” But about halfway through, something stirs: a double time drumbeat that summons tiers of guitars while it signals that stakes have expanded far beyond the personal: “High over the ocean/Waves crash in chemical motion,” she sings. J.P.

Maybe it’s a little late for La Luz to be singing about finally seizing “my golden dream” of moving to California for “one endless summer after another,” since the band relocated to Los Angeles from Seattle back in 2015. But the textures easily overcome the timeline as a basic surf-rock strum and beat stealthily yet rapidly spirals into a psychedelic phantasmagoria, multiplying voices, guitars, drums, reverb and feedback that don’t even need the lyrics to insist, “I do what I wanna do!” J.P.

Occasionally, the cheerful rapper Kyle talks about sketchy things with a sweet voice, and the dissonance is high. But when Kyle leans into melody, and puts his words in service of his sound, he excels. “To the Moon” is bright, clean, certain, an exercise in syllabic rhythm that tells an uplifting story even if you’re not really paying attention to the words. JON CARAMANICA

“Breaking English” is the forthcoming sophomore album from Rafiq Bhatia, a guitarist and electronic-music experimenter; it’s full of unexpected, often unsettling turns. This week he released the title track, which revolves around a bittersweet, casually sketched chord progression from a reverby electric guitar. A mix of wordless voices, shrouded in electric fuzz, begins to swarm. As the drums ease their way into a rattling beat, the choir doesn’t let up: Almost lamenting, almost cooing, the voices end every cycle on a heavy minor harmony, the higher ones anchored by a set of looming sighs in the bass. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

“My love has gone far away and may never come back,” the Malian songwriter and actress Fatoumata Diawara sings in “Nterini,” a Bambara word that can mean loved one, friend or confidant. “He has gone to live in a faraway country.” Every decision to migrate leaves others behind; there’s sorrow, longing, worry, sympathy and determination in Ms. Diawara’s voice. The modal tune shows West African roots while it gathers contemporary layers with each verse, making a 21st-century journey. The video clip, directed by the Ethiopian photographer and artist Aïda Muluneh, makes the desert a picturesque fashion backdrop for Ms. Diawara and a pitiless passage for a migrant young man. J.P.

“I think I know when to stop,” sings TT near the start of “Love Leaks,” knowing full well that the track will stretch to six minutes long. TT is the solo project of Theresa Wayman from Warpaint, and in “Love Leaks” she sets aside Warpaint’s guitar-centered rock for murky keyboards and deep-bottomed drumbeats that conjure a lounge for lost souls. As a sluggish waltz eventually lurches into 4/4, she sings about trying to admit the end of a romance; the track suggests how hard it is to break away. J.P.

“Forever I’m Ready” — the best song on the slinky new Jeremih EP, “The Chocolate Box” — effortlessly takes on the music from H-Town’s 1993 louche R&B classic “Knockin’ Da Boots.” Jeremih is a nimble and not-totally-present singer — he dips in and out above the slowly sauntering beat, sometimes putting his sweetness front and center and sometimes half-alertly reminding you that his capacity for raunch is underappreciated. J.C.

“I see the way the landscape burns/Upturned by the violence,” Nandi Rose Plunkett sings, gazing at a vista that’s at once geographic, political and romantic, and placing what’s left of her hopes in an “undying coast.” Twitchy electronics and a fitful beat underline the anxieties; wordless voices offer partial solace and solidarity, but nothing is guaranteed. J.P.

The guitars on “Dweeb” gurgle and sear, as they do throughout the debut album of the Los Angeles band Teenage Wrist, which blends the elegiac and the industrial. On this song, the band focuses on sweet groans and buzz-saw arrangements while winking at its fluency in Depeche Mode. J.C.

The energy on “Make Noise!” is already starting to bubble over by the time Jeremy Pelt cuts in with a percussive, blade-brandishing trumpet solo around the two-and-a-half-minute mark. That’s thanks to the work of Victor Gould, the pianist, who’s gotten things started with a winding improvisation of his own, and the jostling urgency of the rhythm section: Vicente Archer on bass, Jacquelene Acevedo on percussion and Jonathan Barber on drums. “Make Noise!” is the opening track on “Noir en Rouge: Live in Paris,” a new full-length from Mr. Pelt. Long a standard-bearing trumpeter in straight-ahead jazz, he plays with a burly, rough-gem tone and an air of bold assurance; it’s all fully on display in this concert recording. G.R.

Ben Frost’s electronic music has used such an extensive palette of timbres — though he favors the sepulchral, edgeless, patient and cavernous — that it’s intriguing what he chose for a track designated as a self-portrait. “Self Portrait in Ultramarine” begins with arpeggios that suggest church organs, submerging and resurfacing amid pools of whooshing pink noise while deeper bass tones loom. Eventually the motion of arpeggios vanishes to leave behind a sustained, suspensefully unresolved coda. J.P.