▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. Angélica Garcia: “Juanita”
A tip of my cap to Jon Pareles for putting this striking track on a recent Friday playlist: I am now anxiously awaiting whatever the California-based musician Angélica Garcia puts out next. “Juanita” prances with a cumbia-inspired rhythm, but Garcia also creates a haunting, almost sinister atmosphere with buzzing synths and a wrenching vocal performance.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. Yaya Bey: “Chasing the Bus”
“I swear to God you gon’ feel it in your body when I leave you behind to go and party,” the Brooklyn-based R&B musician Yaya Bey threatens, venomously, on this slinky slow-burner. I loved her 2022 album, “Remember Your North Star” — a swiftly moving 18-song collection full of Bey’s singular personality — and am curious to hear how she’s evolved on its follow-up, “Ten Fold,” which will be out on May 10.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
6. Usher featuring Pheelz: “Ruin”
If you’re still recovering from Usher’s impressive Super Bowl halftime show, or if you are recovering from an injury sustained after it made you try to dance on roller-skates, check out Usher’s eclectic new album “Coming Home,” which Pareles recently named a Critic’s Pick. This plaintive breakup ballad, which features production and a guest verse from the Nigerian musician Pheelz, shows that Usher’s signature croon is still as buttery as ever.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
7. Sasha Alex Sloan: “Highlights”
“It’s been this way my whole life,” the singer-songwriter Sasha Alex Sloan sings on this bona fide tear-jerker. “Sometimes it feels like you only love me for the highlights.” Singing in a hushed register and accompanied by sparse guitar playing, Sloan tells a vivid, emotionally piercing story of unrequited affection, perhaps from an absent parent: “You were there for birthday cakes and had a smile on your face,” she sings. “But where were you when I was lost?”
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
8. Vampire Weekend: “Capricorn”
Vampire Weekend is back with an ode to those too often neglected, late-December babies: “Capricorn, the year that you were born finished fast, and the next one wasn’t yours,” sings Ezra Koenig, crafting a metaphor that speaks to a larger sense of generational displacement. The song — which will appear on the band’s album “Only God Was Above Us,” out April 5 — has a weightless prettiness about it, until it’s complicated on the second chorus by some satisfyingly crunchy distortion.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
9. Jessica Pratt: “Life Is”
Finally, here’s one I meant to add to last week’s Friday playlist: the utterly bewitching leadoff track from the folk singer Jessica Pratt’s forthcoming album, “Here in the Pitch.” If you had heard “Life Is” out of context, you would be forgiven for thinking her a contemporary of ’60s folkies like Karen Dalton or Tim Hardin, but Pratt’s music is more than just retro revivalism. Her chiming voice and densely atmospheric arrangements make her songs come alive, glowing like portals to an alternate version of the past.
