The Playlist: Hear Beyoncé Join ‘Mi Gente,’ Plus 9 More New Songs
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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, Chance the Rapper debuts a song on “Colbert,” Torres ends her new album with transcendence and Yeah Yeah Yeahs dig up a track from the “Fever to Tell” era.
Just want the music? Listen to this 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, here.
J Balvin and Willy William featuring Beyoncé, ‘Mi Gente’
“Mi Gente,” the vibrant, twisty, honking collaboration between the global reggaeton star J Balvin and Willy William, currently sits at No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100, which means it has 18 spots to go to match the success of this summer’s breakthrough Spanish-language crossover hit, “Despacito.” Time for a turbo charge. Much like the remix of “Despacito” imported Justin Bieber, the new version of “Mi Gente” welcomes one of pop’s biggest stars: Beyoncé. She sings mostly in Spanish here, clustering her words in the same pattern as J Balvin, which doesn’t allow her voice to roam widely as it generally does, and should. But never mind that: she is donating her proceeds from this song to hurricane relief efforts. JON CARAMANICA
Chance the Rapper featuring Daniel Caesar, ‘First World Problems’
“Next time I’m in church, please, no photos,” Kanye West rapped in 2009, on Jay-Z’s “Run This Town.” If any rapper had found a way to make sacred spaces part of the secular conversation, it was Mr. West, but by that point in his career, he’d come to realize that it went both ways — you had to be prepared for the ways the secular world could impose upon your private worship space.
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It took Chance the Rapper, a devout student of Mr. West, a shorter period of time to arrive at this conclusion. On his new song “First World Problems” — which he debuted this week on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” before the song even had a title — Chance sounds exhausted and burdened. “I go to church, they want a flick/I wanna flip the table,” he raps.
This meditation on burnout is really a series of winces. Chance confesses to being an absentee parent, a bad cousin, missing his high school prom, being busier than a hummingbird. For two and a half verses, Chance bathes in his melancholia. But midway through the third verse, he finds a reserve of energy, not to serve himself, but others: He talks about dirty water in Flint, and bent knees and the hypocrisy of bigots. So much horror in the world: He can’t slow down now. J.C.
Torres, ‘To Be Given a Body’
On “Three Futures,” her third album as Torres, the songwriter Mackenzie Scott uses an electronic foundation, slashes of electric guitar and her full-throated voice in songs about her own physicality, from a simple act of claiming space to sexuality and mortality. Its final song, “To Be Given a Body,” offers both culmination and transcendence, contemplating the mystery of incarnation. A fast electronic ticking is joined by low, irregular heartbeat thuds; the harmony is a shifting cluster of sustained organ tones. Ms. Scott, with her voice turned pensive and serene, offers a melody that suggests an age-old invocation, singing, “To be given a body is the greatest gift.” Her voice disappears for the last half of the eight-minute song; the organ continues the melody and the beat persists for a while. But for the final stretch all that remains are those sustained tones, a void awaiting new life. JON PARELES
The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, ‘Gram’
“This should never have been a crime,” David Bello sings in “Gram” from “Always Foreign,” the new album by his band, The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, which has always taken an expansive view of how an emo song can unfold. “Gram” is a slightly oblique plaint about how marijuana dealers have been treated as criminals while drug stores profit from more addictive drugs. A cinematic pastorale swells around his earnestly nasal voice: a muffled tom-tom beat, a spaghetti-Western guitar line, a gathering horn section, all eventually subsiding back to patient resignation. J.P.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, ‘Shake It’
Yeah Yeah Yeahs were at their most spindly and deliberate with “Shake It,” a song unearthed for the remastered reissue of the band’s 2003 debut album, “Fever to Tell.” There’s a hint of Latin music in the way Nick Zinner’s guitar hops around in syncopated arpeggios, while Brian Chase’s drums sketch a laconic backbeat. In the huge spaces they leave, Karen O’s voice moves from diffidence to bravado, daring a girl to dazzle everyone on the dance floor: “Take it to a place we’ve never been, out of sight,” she urges. And when the chorus arrives with power-chord blasts, it sounds like she was heeded. J.P.
Mark Guiliana, ‘Jersey’
Mr. Guiliana is a drummer now best known for playing on David Bowie’s final album, the darkly magnificent “Black Star.” That’s just one highlight in a wide-ranging career, but you’ll be forgiven for hearing echoes of Bowie’s warm-blooded elegiacs on Mr. Guiliana’s latest, “Jersey,” out today. He just released a video for the title track (this is a live version, captured at the Brooklyn space National Sawdust) with a speckled and dreamlike aesthetic — and an overlay of Doug Aitken-like abstract highway shots — that matches its windswept and soaring sound. On tenor saxophone, Jason Rigby dials up his solo even higher than on the record, fashioning arpeggios that bristle and heave, skimming energy from the chunky provocations of Fabian Almazan’s piano. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
Cecile McLorin Salvant, ‘If a Girl Isn’t Pretty’
On her new album, “Dreams and Daggers,” Ms. Salvant continues her mission of turning up America’s unseemly soil. Most often, she does it by combing through the expurgated pages of the Great American Songbook, singing tunes of bewildering political incorrectness, like this one. She’s always in on the joke, but does that remove the sting? “If a Girl Isn’t Pretty” — written in the midcentury by, you guessed it, two white male Broadway composers — is the sound of a paternalistic shrug, a headshake of gee-shucks empathy. But Ms. Salvant’s approach can change by the line, throwing light from all sorts of angles (hear her when she gets to “She just never gets to bat”). She’s matter-of-fact and conciliatory; sarcastic and well past caring; creased for a moment with chagrin. G.R.
Stormzy, ‘Gang Signs & Prayer’
The London grime rapper Stormzy visualizes his back story in a 15-minute video using songs from his album — brooding orchestral tracks with proud, rapid-fire rhymes — released earlier this year, “Gang Signs & Prayer.” A sensitive-looking boy in a rough Anglo-Caribbean neighborhood is bullied and then drawn into gang life with the “bad boys,” but there’s a happy ending: turning to music, eventually he can buy his mother a house. The action, and Stormzy’s muscular presence, could help translate his thickly accented rhymes for an American audience. J.P.
Wolf Alice, ‘Heavenward’
Rarely does an elegy sound as triumphant as Wolf Alice’s “Heavenward,” from this English rock band’s new album “Visions of a Life.” Ellie Rowsell sings, “I’m gonna celebrate you forever/And long to see you when it’s my turn,” amid countless layers of vocal harmony and vaporous shoegaze guitars. Wolf Alice has a raucous hard-rock side that’s not heard in the song; it’s shown, incongruously, in the quick-cutting “Heavenward” video clip that presents the band as a sweaty touring whirlwind. The song doesn’t need it. J.P.
Matt Mitchell, ‘Gluts’
Mr. Mitchell’s first album for Pi Recordings, in 2013, was a duet with the drummer Ches Smith. His second was a quartet date. The small-group approach made sense; Mr. Mitchell’s piano playing is a master class in density and overlay and multi-level thinking. But now we’ve got something else on our hands: “A Pouting Grimace,” out today, features 10 thronging compositions for a 13-piece ensemble. (It includes, for instance, Patricia Brennan’s marimba, Katie Andrews’ harp, and Scott Robinson’s bass saxophone.) Together the instrumentalists make a carefully sculpted cacophony, rich and tawny and dry. It often sounds as if Mr. Mitchell has pulled out individual elements of the piano’s acoustics — the impact of a hammer on a string, the shudder of low notes on the soundboard, the overtones of a dissonant cluster — and distributed them across a fleet of instruments. G.R.
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