Ashley Monroe featuring Marty Stuart, ‘The Touch’
Understatement, so rare in current country production, burnishes “The Touch,” a song that promises lasting love. “As long as we’re together, it’s more than enough,” Ashley Monroe sings over Marty Stuart’s lone acoustic guitar, which is virtually the only accompaniment for the first half of the track. Harmonies blossom and more guitars (and Shelby Lynne on bass) eventually join, but the mood stays pristine.
Wisin and Kapo, ‘Luna’
“Luna” hits a very sweet spot between Afrobeats and reggaeton as Wisin, from Puerto Rico, and Kapo, from Colombia, harmonize on a friendly flirtation: “Just you and me in this room on a trip to the moon.” The production (by Daramola, a Nigerian musician based in Miami, and Los Legendarios, from Puerto Rico) is an ever-changing matrix of percussion sounds, electronics and vocal harmonies arriving from all directions. It’s pure ear candy.
Young Thug featuring Future, ‘Money on Money’
Young Thug ended his role in the longest trial in Georgia history, and two years in jail, in 2024 with guilty pleas and 15 years of probation. His first new single, after some guest spots, reclaims very familiar turf: a minor-key trap production, a longtime collaborator (Future) and boasts about money, sex and cars. Only a few lines — “I been in the trenches filled with hyenas” — hint at the hiatus.
The English songwriter Emma-Jean Thackray probes unhealthy mental states with upbeat, jazzy grooves on her new album, “Weirdo.” In “Maybe Nowhere,” a sense of dissociation and futility — “What if I stay? / No one was ever here anyway” — leads her to contemplate oblivion: “Are you beyond or maybe nowhere? / Maybe I’ll join you in the beyond.” She assembles a thick-chorded funk track around a rugged, distorted bass line, countering despair with craftsmanship.
The genre-crunching English band Squid confronts book-burning and surveillance in “The Hearth and Circle Round Fire,” a postscript to its furious album “Cowards.” Distorted bass riffs, turntable scratching and sputtery drumming give way, briefly, to British brass-band stolidity. Then the churning resumes, along with the bitterness of the vocals: “Ring around the flames.” A droning, minute-long coda surveys the ashes.
