Fashion
A 100-Year-Old Jazz Legend’s Solo Debut, and 11 More New Songs
Hear tracks by Perfume Genius, Lucy Dacus, Bartees Strange and others.
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.
Marshall Allen featuring Neneh Cherry, ‘New Dawn’
The saxophonist Marshall Allen, 100 years old, has long carried on the legacy of Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist visionary who claimed to be from Saturn; he has maintained the communal big band, the Arkestra, since Ra’s death in 1993. “New Dawn” is the title track from the first album that names Allen as a leader — a debut at 100! — and it’s deep in Ra’s era-melting ethos. It’s a leisurely, jazz-chorded ballad, composed by Allen, with lyrics by Knoel Scott that urge, “Arise and seek / Hear spirit speak.” Neneh Cherry sings with fond composure over sustained strings and a rustling rhythm section, and Allen’s alto saxophone solo scurries down polytonal paths, still frisky.
Galactic and Irma Thomas, ‘Lady Liberty’
Two New Orleans stalwarts, the singer Irma Thomas and the band Galactic, have teamed up for an album due in April, “Audience With the Queen.” Its first single, “Lady Liberty,” harks back to the socially conscious funk of Allen Toussaint songs like “Yes We Can Can,” with Thomas declaring, “Time to shuffle these cards that we’ve been dealt and free ourselves / If you don’t do something, you know nothing’s gonna change.” The horns and bass line strut; the lyrics hunker down for a long siege.
Sunny War featuring Valerie June, ‘Cry Baby’
Consolation isn’t simple in the steadfast soul ballad “Cry Baby.” In her deep-diving alto, Sunny War sings about how she wishes nothing but the best for a troubled friend, but she also knows that “the pain is real” and it’s necessary to “feel what you feel.” Joined on the chorus by an amiably wandering harmony vocal from Valerie June, the song offers empathy rather than false cheer.
Bartees Strange, ‘Wants Needs’
Pressures, insecurities, second-guessing and a deep longing for acceptance all churn together in “Wants Needs” from the indie-rock songwriter Bartees Strange. His coming album, “Horror,” has a top pop professional on board: the producer Jack Antonoff (Taylor Swift, Lorde, Lana Del Rey, Sabrina Carpenter). But “Wants Needs” holds a nervous undercurrent, from its frantic electric-guitar strumming start, to a mid-song swerve into an odd meter, to a direct admission to listeners: “I need you too.”
Perfume Genius, ‘It’s a Mirror’
Perfume Genius — the songwriter Mike Hadreas — juxtaposes opportunity and anxiety, isolation and exploration, in “It’s a Mirror.” He wonders, “What do you get from the stretching horizon?” He knows “My whole life is open just outside the door.” But he also sees “holy terror” when he looks in a mirror. The song is an expansive folk-rock march that’s full of ups and downs, leaving it an open question whether he’ll open that door.
