POP/ROCK
André 3000, "New Blue Sun" (Epic)
This album, presumptive winner of the 2025 Grammy for best new age, ambient or chant album, is by André 3000 — one-half of Outkast and one of the most innovative rappers ever. He's playing a variety of wind instruments here, but his primary means of communication is the very peculiar deployment of the low-simmer anti-fame he's cultivated over the almost two decades since his duo's last album. Searching, nonlinear, placid-but-itchy songs are his apparent medium now, but retreat is his real art. It's also what this album invites, either as a matter of absorption or distraction. "New Blue Sun" requires patience, and sometimes rewards it. But mostly it proposes a question: Can someone who was once so present find meaning in absence?
Technically, there are no raps on this album — no words whatsoever. But there's rogue energy busting through the song titles, which are agitated and pithy and slithery in a way the songs themselves are not. The album closer, the 17-minute "Dreams Once Buried Beneath the Dungeon Floor Slowly Sprout Into Undying Gardens," is by turns enchanting and maddening, cloying and majestic. Like the rest of the songs, it doesn't privilege beginnings and endings so much as muse through a variety of middles.
JON CARAMANICA, New York Times
Dua Lipa, "Houdini"
The first single from her forthcoming third album finds the pop phenom linking up with some flashy new collaborators: Tame Impala mastermind Kevin Parker, PC Music experimentalist Danny L Harle and songwriter-for-the-stars Tobias Jesso Jr. While Parker's influence can certainly be heard in the song's punchy, prismatic production, the track is perhaps most noticeably indebted to Madonna's 2005 comeback smash "Hung Up." "I'm not here for long, catch me or I go Houdini," Lipa confidently asserts on the hook, effectively referencing magic if not establishing her own signature trick.
LINDSAY ZOLADZ, New York Times
