POP/ROCK
Drake, "Search & Rescue"
"I didn't come this far, just to come this far and not be happy" — so said Kim Kardashian on the 2021 finale of "Keeping Up With the Kardashians," discussing why it was time to split from her husband, Kanye West. That line appears at a pivotal moment in Drake's new song. Hovering above a morbid, anxious piano figure, he raps about the hollowness of being lonely, and after the chorus, uses Kardashian's words but reframes them, making them sound like a lament about the single life. Here are two contrasting forms of despair, played off each other. Drake is pleading for connection: "Take me out the club, take me out the trap/Take me off the market, take me off the map." Kardashian is yearning to be free. But Drake is also a sometime antagonist of West's, and his leveraging of Kardashian's words — an official sample — is unlikely to be understood as anything but a broadside from two seemingly unattached people, who would cause a whole lot of trouble were they to attach to each other.
JON CARAMANICA, New York Times
Lucinda Williams, "New York Comeback"
A characteristic grit and defiance courses through this new single, which features Bruce Springsteen and his wife/bandmate, Patti Scialfa, on backing vocals. The song comes from "Stories From a Rock 'N' Roll Heart," Williams' forthcoming album and her first release since suffering a stroke in 2020. That context adds a bit of weight to the song, but as ever, Williams is gimlet-eyed and unsentimental, singing in her signature growl, "No one's brought the curtain down, maybe you should stick around."
LINDSAY ZOLADZ, New York Times
Peter Gabriel, "I/O"
