POP/ROCK
Doja Cat featuring Teezo Touchdown, "Masc"
"Maybe it's the dude in you that makes you act so vicious," Doja Cat sings atop a sputtering, piano-driven beat on this brooding breakup song from "Scarlet 2: Claude," the deluxe edition of her 2023 album "Scarlet." The track is at once melancholic and playfully androgynous: A steely Doja "has to get masculine" on a cheater, while Teezo Touchdown breaks down and confesses on an emotional guest verse, "I'm not that tough, I need your love."
LINDSAY ZOLADZ, New York Times
Prince, "United States of Division"
"Everybody stop fighting/everybody make love," Prince urged in this song previously released only as a British single B-side in 2004, alongside Prince's album "Musicology." It's six minutes of deep-bottomed polytonal funk — topped with synthesizer jabs and horn lines, goaded by a hard-rock guitar riff — that veers between disenchanted verses and a conditionally optimistic chorus. Prince was hoping for the best but seeing stubborn obstacles, pondering tribalism, inequality and faith all at once and wondering, "Why must I sing 'God Bless America' and not the rest of the world?"
JON PARELES, New York Times
Charli XCX, "B2B"
Charli XCX is a supreme hook maker: tersely melodic and vocally expressive behind neatly generalized sentiments. "B2b" isn't business-to-business; it's the D.J. term, back-to-back, applied to old habits. Charli XCX sings, "I don't want to go back to, back to, back to, back to you," and adds, "Maybe you should run right back to her." The track is pure electro-pop, all synthesizer beats and bass lines, with voice and electronics syncopating tensely until the bridge gets strategically more revealing. "Took a long time breaking myself down/building myself up," she sings. The machine-human interface of electro-pop can still fabricate emotions.
JON PARELES, New York Times
Chappell Roan, "Good Luck, Babe"
The rising pop star sends an ex-lover off with an eye roll on the wrenching, synth-driven tune that allows the dynamic vocalist to do her best Kate Bush. The subject of the song is noncommittal and perhaps in denial of her sexuality: Roan imagines her former flame kissing "a hundred boys in bars" and eventually becoming a man's dissatisfied wife in the aftermath of their affair. But ultimately, Roan chooses herself, singing with all her heart, "I just wanna love someone who calls me baby."
LINDSAY ZOLADZ, New York Times
Khalid, "Please Don't Fall in Love With Me"
Verses pour out in nervous triplets as Khalid processes seeing his ex with someone else: "The fact that I actually started to trust you/Then you broke my heart, someone bring me a tissue or maybe my notebook." But the backdrop is plush and the chorus is even plusher, with billowing vocal harmonies and lofty reverberations. He just repeats the song title, warning off anyone he might find on the rebound.
JON PARELES, New York Times
New releases
• Maggie Rogers, "Don't Forget Me"
• Mark Knopfler, "One Deep River"
• Girl in Red, "I'm Doing It Again Baby"
• Blue Oyster Cult, "Ghost Stories"
