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Folky fingerpicking and new-agey ideas about self-help make “Deeper Well” one of many gentlest however firmest rebuffs conceivable. After musing on astrology and unfavorable vitality, Kacey Musgraves notes, “I’m saying goodbye to the folks I really feel/are actual good at losing my time.” In the subsequent verses, she leaves behind marijuana and rises above the bounds of her upbringing. There’s no rancor, no gloating, simply added shimmery reverberations as she grows up and strikes on. A brand new album of the identical identify is due March 15. JON PARELES
Maggie Rogers desires somebody who will “wreck her Sundays” on “Don’t Forget Me,” the nice and cozy, craving title monitor from her forthcoming third album, which she co-produced with Musgraves’s trusted collaborator Ian Fitchuk. Her buddies’ relationships, she admits, don’t present fashions for what she’s in search of: Sally’s getting married, Molly’s out partying each evening. Rogers is after one thing extra informal — however nonetheless lasting in its personal manner. “Love me til your subsequent any person,” she sings to whoever’s listening. “And promise me that when it’s time to depart, don’t overlook me.” LINDSAY ZOLADZ
Beth Gibbons, ‘Floating on a Moment’
Beth Gibbons — the brooding, smoky-voiced lead singer of Portishead — will launch her solo debut album, “Lives Outgrown,” on May 17. Its first single, “Floating on a Moment,” faces mortality with bittersweet acceptance. “All going to nowhere/all going, make no mistake,” she sings, including, “All attempting however can’t escape.” It’s a sluggish march paced by a loping bass line, regularly enfolding her solitary voice with harpsichord, flutes and a kids’s choir as Gibbons finds a form of peace with the belief, “All we now have is right here and now.” PARELES
The English-speaking Norwegian songwriter Marie Ulven Ringheim, who information as woman in crimson, catalogs poisonous companion conduct as she works as much as a pumping dance beat and a punk-pop guitar blast in “Too Much.” She realizes she’s been inhibited, minimized and gaslit: “For a second I believed you had been honest/But you’ve been dragging me down all of those years,” she sings. It’s a joyful indictment, a name for honesty in spite of everything. PARELES
Brittany Howard, ‘Power to Undo’
Unbridled rage explodes in “Power to Undo” from Brittany Howard’s turbulent new album, “What Now.” She furiously rejects a reconciliation — “How might you need me again after the injury is completed?” — in a roar of distorted funk and jabbing, buzz-bombing guitar. She’s steeling herself in opposition to backsliding. PARELES
J Noa, ‘Era de Cristal’
J Noa, a teenage rapper from the Dominican Republic, delivers soul-baring confessionals at breakneck velocity. In “Era de Cristal” — “Age of Glass” — she particulars struggles with melancholy and anxiousness. “I’m having a breakdown in my psychological well being/I screamed for assist and so they applauded me nonstop,” she sings in Spanish over somber piano chords and a boom-bap beat. An instrumental coda gathers an orchestra — not for triumph, however for stress. PARELES
Angélica Garcia, ‘Juanita’
“Juanita, why do you name me?” Angélica Garcia asks in Spanish, with mounting drama and quantity, over the measured, clip-clop beat of a cumbia. With a voice that leaps and keens like Kate Bush, and with echoes multiplying behind her, Garcia sings about an attraction that surges past the bodily to the metaphysical: “Rhythm pulsing the everlasting waves of the ocean/pulling away my garments, my conscience.” PARELES
Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton, ‘Purple Irises’
Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton — the pop-punk and nation singers whose careers have led them each to actuality competitors exhibits — sing about lasting, age-appropriate love in “Purple Irises.” The rhythmic underpinnings hark again to the Police; the lyrics acknowledge passing years however reaffirm affection: “The manner you have a look at me I swear my coronary heart hits rewind,” Stefani sings. It’s a track for {couples} on guard in opposition to youthful rivals however collectively for the long run, in opposition to the percentages. PARELES
Caroline Polachek that includes Weyes Blood, ‘Butterfly Net’
The model of “Butterfly Net” on Caroline Polachek’s 2023 album, “Desire, I Want to Turn Into You,” was largely a Sixties-flavored folk-rock march that had her singing about “attempting to catch your mild.” Her remake with Weyes Blood — Natalie Mering — is way extra transporting. It has a nervous bass pulse, flickering digital undercurrents and looped vocals. Mering sounds extra pure, Polachek extra bionic, with each of them immersed in a form of digitized craving. PARELES
Charles Lloyd, ‘Monk’s Dance’
The saxophonist Charles Lloyd’s composition “Monk’s Dance” pays homage to the pianist Thelonious Monk, and he shares it with a redoubtable pianist: Jason Moran, who begins the monitor with a skittery, vertiginous, harmonically stressed intro that additionally hints at ragtime. Lloyd, at 85, zooms by and above the tune’s convolutions with Olympian ease as Moran, the bassist Larry Grenadier and the drummer Brian Blade chase alongside. PARELES
