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The rising pop artist Sabrina Carpenter scored a hit with the breathily sung disco throwback “Feather,” but she seems poised for an even bigger smash. Enter “Espresso,” a cheeky, summery tune that just might have the juice to propel her to the next level. Atop a mid-tempo beat that lightly recalls the muffled retro-funk of “Say So,” the song that made Doja Cat a star, Carpenter plays the unbothered temptress with winking humor: “Say you can’t sleep, baby I know, that’s that me, espresso.” Make it a double and get ready to hear this one everywhere. LINDSAY ZOLADZ
In “I’m Back,” girl in red — the Norwegian songwriter Marie Ulven Ringheim — defies the cycles of depression. “It’s not like I wanna die,” she whisper-sings. “At least not now/I love being alive.” Quasi-Baroque keyboard arpeggios pace a track that holds back, recognizes that “Time doesn’t stop for a sad little girl” and surges as she decides, “This time I think I’m found.” One-syllable words; deep breakthroughs. JON PARELES
A highlight from the singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers’s loose and casually confident third album, “Don’t Forget Me,” “The Kill” is a soft-rock breakup song that switches perspective halfway through, assigning mutual responsibility for a near-miss relationship’s demise. “We were both so difficult,” Rogers sings soulfully, “but so invincible.” ZOLADZ
Lizz Wright featuring Angelique Kidjo, ‘Sparrow’
Lizz Wright promises sanctuary, consolation and strength in “Sparrow” from her new album “Shadow.” Folky guitar and fiddle and a quietly insistent six-beat rhythm support Wright’s benevolent, ever resolute voice as she calls on a lover to return. With Angelique Kidjo singing incantatory lines in the background, summoning African roots, Wright recalls stormy, fearful times and vows, “We gonna rise up singing.” PARELES
Margo Guryan, ‘Moon Ride’
Margo Guryan’s 1968 album of gently psychedelic chamber-pop, “Take a Picture,” was rediscovered in the early 2000s by pop crate-diggers like Beck and Cornelius and more recently on TikTok. In the 1950s, Guryan was immersed in jazz, writing lyrics for tunes like Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” and getting her own songs recorded by Dizzy Gillespie, Harry Belafonte and Astrud Gilberto; she went on to write the intricate Top 40 hit “Sunday Mornin’” for Spanky and Our Gang. A new boxed set, “Words and Music,” unveils 16 previously unreleased tracks including “Moon Ride” from 1956, which the jazz singer Chris Connor recorded in 1958. It’s an easy-swinging shuffle with a cheerfully dissonant flute playing alongside Guryan. She recounts a “hair-raising, nail-biting, frightening flight” where she’s captured by moon men, shoots her ray gun and escapes across the “uneven cheese-covered ground” — all with diffident 1950s cool and a hint of a wink in her voice. PARELES
Phish, ‘Evolve’
Trey Anastasio sings as a genial voice of God in “Evolve,” which will be the title track of Phish’s first studio album since 2020. The tune is from Phish’s countryish side, lilting behind a deity who’s having second thoughts about the results of creation: “A million little things to solve/Or not — I’ll let them all evolve.” Phish fans have already heard one version of “Evolve” on Anastasio’s 2020 album, “Lonely Trip,” and lately the band has been playing it on tour. The studio version has changed key and grown a bit too formal, adding vocal harmonies and a string section. No doubt it will loosen up at concerts, still evolving. PARELES
The politically minded South African group Phelimuncasi, from Durban, collaborated in a Ugandan studio with Jesse Hackett, Gorillaz’s longtime keyboardist who sometimes records as Metal Preyers, on the new album “Izigqinamba” (“The Rules”). Its opener, “Gidigidi ka Makhelwane,” is a rhythm-forward track that syncopates briskly chanted, matter-of-fact female and male vocals from Phelimuncasi’s Malathon, Makan Nana and Khera amid hissing beatbox sounds, deep log-drum beats and — out of nowhere — an occasional church bell: serious but definitely skewed. PARELES
Bruno Berle, ‘Acorda e Vem’
The Brazilian singer and songwriter Bruno Berle, and his musical collaborator batata boy, merge airborne ballad crooning and surreal electronics in “Acorda e Vem” (“Awaken and Come”) from Berle’s album, “No Reino dos Afetos 2” (“In the Kingdom of Emotions 2”). His voice is an androgynous tenor further stretched by Auto-Tune; his plea, over two recurring, disembodied chords, is to “Recover the magic/Recover what dissolved in emotions and tears.” PARELES
Phosphorescent, ‘Fences’
Phosphorescent — the songwriter Matthew Houck — laments a rift that’s grown irreparable in the careworn folk-rock of “Fences.” With a trudging beat and hovering pedal-steel guitar, he mingles apology, disbelief and complaint: “You thought I might not see that you were way wrong.” The chorus — “You’re building fences” — brings consoling harmonies to what he knows he must accept. PARELES
The Chilean jazz saxophonist Melissa Aldana pays tribute to Wayne Shorter with a ballad very much in his style: seemingly tentative but moving ahead, harmonically complex but tenderly songlike. That melody emerges as her quintet wafts abstract ideas around her — skittering piano runs, little guitar patterns, distant electronics — that still, somehow, coalesce. PARELES
Carlos Niño & Friends, ‘Love to All Doulas!’
One of the primary collaborators behind André 3000’s instrumental album, “New Blue Sun,” was Carlos Niño, who has recorded extensively with his own fluid assemblages of “friends.” Niño’s album due May 24, “Placenta,” reflects on the birth of his second child, now 1 year old, and like “New Blue Sun” it invokes drone, ambient and ritual music. “Love to All the Doulas” moves in misty, long-breathed arcs, with the hornlike tones of Nate Mercereau’s guitar synthesizer feeling out a melody among beatless percussion and tremulous strings, creating a lingering hush of anticipation. PARELES
