Doechii, ‘Nosebleeds’
Doechii was tearful and emotional — but primed with facts — when she became the third woman to win a Grammy for best rap album. She was also prepared; “Nosebleeds” was released almost immediately. Over stark, pushy, bare-bones electronic sounds, she gloats, “Will she ever lose? Man I guess we’ll never know” and declares her readiness for arena concerts: “I look good from the nosebleeds.” The track is barely over two minutes, but its last stretch segues into an entirely different sound: a double-time beat with Doechii cooing that she needs no advice from anyone who’s “never suffered.” The moment was hers to seize.
JON PARELES, New York Times
Lady Gaga, ‘Abracadabra’
She’s overheard your theory that nostalgia’s for geeks — and she couldn’t care less. Lady Gaga mines the sonic and aesthetic shards of her own past on the insistent “Abracadabra,” the third single from her upcoming album “Mayhem.” Fashioning an anthemic chorus out of self-referential nonsense syllables (“abracadabra, morta oo Gaga”) is so “Bad Romance,” but the verse’s thumping house piano refines the more recent sound of her mixed-bag 2020 release “Chromatica” into something sharper and more urgent. Gaga’s not forging new ground here so much as she’s remixing her former selves, reminding her many imitators who they learned their strangest moves from and grasping so strongly at dance-or-die self-seriousness that she somehow ends up doubling back into absurdist fun.
LINDSAY ZOLADZ, New York Times
Waxahatchee, ‘Mud’
Katie Crutchfield, the songwriter behind Waxahatchee, rarely escapes ambivalence. The cozy, countryish, banjo-picking march of “Mud” has MJ Lenderman and Spencer Tweedy singing along with Crutchfield as she tries to sever a guardian-angel relationship where “I might beam with empty virtue / but I’m a feather blowing in your storm.” The problem is that the “girl suffering” might be herself.
