Cardi B’s All-Star Team and 9 Other New Songs

An event recording that sounds like an improvised late-night studio session, “Hot ____” is lean on the edge of reserve, measured on the edge of reticence. Individually, everyone’s verse is dashing, but Cardi B is the most — she plays with the pattern and throws in a few sharp barbs (“I don’t know what’s longer, man, my block list or my list of control / I don’t know what’s colder, man, my heart or my necklace”). This is Cardi at her simplest talent, and it also recalls one of the most appealing qualities of her debut album. 2018, “Invasion of Privacy”: the way he aligned it, subtly and directly, with the traditional New Yorker hip-hop style, a move aimed at naysayers. Is there any left, though? JON CARAMANICA

Breakups are difficult; the collapse of a label deal can be just as brutal and even more costly. “A pen is a gun,” notes English R&B singer-songwriter Raye in “Hard Out Here.” She draws on her rejection by the Polydor label, after having released EPs but no album, to sing “the years and the fears and the smile through my tears”; she also sings about her lawyer and the executives with the “pink chubby hands”. She switches between ruthless rapping and gospel-laden singing, and when she shouts “Baby, I’m bouncing back” over programmed beats, her voice says she will. JON PARELES

Steve Lacy, ‘Bad Habit’

“Bad Habit” is the melancholic tale of a missed connection (“I wish I knew you wanted me”) filtered through the distinct and kaleidoscopic musical personality of Odd Future’s neighbor polymath Steve Lacy. Still in high school when he made his first waves as the guitarist for the eclectic band Internet, Lacy’s precociousness always preceded him. But on the singles the 24-year-old has released from his forthcoming album, “Gemini Rights,” he’s matured into an emotive sound that’s endearingly rough around the edges. “Bad Habit” centers around a simple but distorted chord progression filtered through effects that make the whole song sound like it’s under a fish-eye lens. But about halfway through, it takes a sudden turn to the intimate, when the accompanying instrumentation fades and the spotlight turns to Lacy’s vulnerable voice: “I turn it on, I turn it on. make it rowdy, then go on but I’m not hiding.” LINDSAY ZOLADZ

Sudan Archives – songwriter, singer, violinist and electronic genius Brittney Parks – recognizes and combats prejudice and insecurity in the autobiographical ‘NBPQ (Topless)’, from her upcoming album, ‘Natural Brown Prom queen”. “Just because I’m hard to deal with doesn’t mean I can’t have it,” she raps. The song contains multiple contrasts in less than four minutes, including a North African-flavored modal fiddle riff, two sections rapped with different flows, an interlude of choral harmonies, a resolute march, and plenty of handclaps. “I’m not average,” she sings – and loops – and that’s clearly an understatement. Talk

Dan Snaith has several musical alter egos: as Caribou, he creates textured, sample-based psychedelia, but he releases more direct dance music under the moniker Daphni. Her latest Daphni single ‘Cloudy’, which will appear on the upcoming album ‘Cherry’, is smooth and utterly haunting. A repeated piano riff – very vaguely and probably completely unintentionally reminiscent of that of Jack Harlow’s “What’s Poppin'” – floats weightlessly over a capricious beat. A choppy vocal sample adds life but is never quite cohesive in readable language, making the whole track sound like a benevolent otherworldly transmission. ZOLADZ

Sampa the Great with Chief 187, Tio Nason and Mwanjé, ‘Never Forget’

Rapper and singer Sampa the Great was born in Zambia, raised there and in Botswana, attended college in California, moved to Australia in 2013 and returned to Zambia during the pandemic. ‘Never Forget’ is taken from his forthcoming album, ‘As Above, So Below’, and it celebrates his Zambian roots – “information passed down from generation to generation” – particularly 1970s Zamrock, which fused southern traditions -Africans with rock. A rapid six-beat pulse carries Sampa and his Zambian guests through guitar lines, drum machine rhythms, choral harmonies (from Sampha’s sister, Mwanjé) and traditional Ngoma drumming, linking his boasts to a story deep. Talk

Mother Moor, ‘Jazz Codes’

Moor Mother’s beats, if you call them that, tend to sound like incinerated stardust. She doesn’t move in a way one would quickly associate with jazz, but she’s tradition: a history minor and innovator, a serious intellectual and commentator, speaking in coded confrontation. And after a few years on the international jazz festival circuit — both as a member of Irreversible Entanglements, an acoustic quintet, and as a solo artist — she’s got some marks. His new album, “Jazz Codes,” has an air of intervention, but also playfulness and mystery. There are plenty of features – poets (Rasheedah Phillips, Thomas Stanley), musicians (Mary Lattimore, Keir Neuringer) and singers (Melanie Charles, Orion Sun) are seated – and she pulls excerpts from interviews with older musicians (Amina Claudine Myers, Joe McPhee). She released a 14-minute short stitching tracks from “Jazz Codes” together, and it captures the album’s sense of challenge and reinvention. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

Desperation becomes explosive in “Lose It” from “Last Night in the Bittersweet”, Scottish singer-songwriter Paolo Nutini’s first album since 2014. “I couldn’t find a way out of my worried mind,” he speaks, wishing I could just “lose it for a little while,” as the music swirls around him. It’s a neo-psychedelic, guitar-driven drone that opens with feedback and continues to soar higher, with Nutini letting go of his grater and a choir shouting “yeah, yeah” before he’s swallowed into the quagmire. . Talk

Gogo Penguin, “The antidote is in the poison”

GoGo Penguin has the composition of a standard jazz trio: piano, bass, drums. It’s partly a trick. This English group is also an experience of repetitions and possibilities. A very delicate rhythm and a persistent vamp that rises and falls propel “The Antidote Is in the Poison”, which will be topped with several layers of piano sonorities: open and damped, snappy and sustained, moving in scales or intentional hopscotch. around the world. place in arpeggios. It is a highly mathematical counterpoint that still seems improvised. Talk

Kirk Knuffke, “The Water Will Win”

On “Gravity Without Airs”, cornetist Kirk Knuffke leads the band, but he’s also made himself the new kid on the block. Its supporting musicians, pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist Michael Bisio, have been playing together for more than a dozen years. But Knuffke is indispensable, finding soft edges in Shipp’s growing angular dashes. Earlier in his career, Knuffke sometimes veered antiquity and light. Now, thanks in part to his study of Don Cherry’s music, he’s learned to keep the emotional content front and center. On “The Water Will Win”, a bluesish and rubato incantation, Knuffke leads the trio headlong. Almost immediately, Shipp holds the sustain pedal and covers the keyboard in minor mode, and Bisio alternates between a bass pedal and note tension strings on the upper strings. Knuffke puts tender muscle on bone between them, with his sandy vibrato and slick tone. RUSSONELLO