The first taste of Megan Thee Stallion’s next album is yet another sultry collaboration with a fellow female star. But this time around, Megan sounds like more of a visitor on Dua Lipa’s turf, on a track that prominently centers Lipa’s hook and mines the sleek, radio-ready sheen of her blockbuster album “Future Nostalgia.” As always, though, Megan gets a few eminently quotable lines in: Comparing herself to Cesar Milan, she states, “I gotta let a dog know who really run things.” The over-the-top video is a kind of special-effects-laden, adults-only take on the Hansel & Gretel story, not recommended for those who fear spiders, fire, or, uh, rooms with walls that suddenly turn into butts. LINDSAY ZOLADZ
Florence + the Machine, ‘My Love’
The best Florence + the Machine singles — think “Dog Days Are Over,” “Shake It Out,” “What Kind of Man” — revel in a kind of decadent drama, and the latest, “My Love,” finds the band triumphantly returning to that mode. “Tell me where to put my love,” Florence Welch wails on the chorus, accompanied by an arrangement lightly dusted with disco glitter. The twist is that it’s mostly a lament about writer’s block, but Welch imbues it with all the romantic anguish usually reserved for songs about heartbreak. “Every page is empty, there is nothing to describe,” she sings, though the song itself attests that the drought is over. ZOLADZ
Miranda Lambert, ‘Strange’
Miranda Lambert (with collaborating songwriters Natalie Hemby and Luke Dick) brings the pithiness of classic country to disorienting 2020s pandemic-era realities on “Strange,” the single that previews “Palomino,” her album due April 29. With money troubles, an attention economy and the sensation that “every elevator only ever goes down,” it’s no wonder “Times like these make me feel strange.” There’s some Neil Young starkness in the verses, and Lambert lets her voice scratch and break at times, but she also makes sure the hooks land neatly. JON PARELES
Horsegirl, ‘Anti-Glory’
“Dance! Dance! Dance! Dance!” goes the chorus of “Anti-Glory” by the Chicago band Horsegirl, the first single from an album due in June, “Versions of Modern Performance.” That chorus sounds less like an invitation than an ultimatum; each “Dance!” arrives with jabs of dissonant guitar and a whip crack of drums. Horsegirl reaches back to post-punk and indie-rock with terse, insistent, repeated-note riffs, both deadpan and utterly intransigent. PARELES
Superorganism featuring Chai and Pi Ja Ma, ‘Teenager’
Like painters making use of every color in the rainbow, the members of the pop group Superorganism are unrepentant maximalists. The infectious “Teenager,” the first single from their forthcoming second album, “World Wide Pop,” is an explosion of bubble-gum hooks, wild production ideas and genuinely poignant reflections about growing up. As with many Superorganism songs, the cartoonish excess of the arrangement is balanced out by the singer Orono Noguchi’s shrugging, endearingly deadpan vocals: “By the way, we’re all the same, no need to feel ashamed,” she sings, as still and inviting as the eye of a storm. ZOLADZ
Ghost, ‘Spillways’
The Swedish band Ghost reliably hits the three Ps hard: proggy, punky and poppy. Its fifth album, “Impera,” packs the ambitious sprawl of ’70s rock epics into (relatively) bite-size packages with amusingly confounding story lines. “Spillways,” one of the album’s most straightforward tracks, starts with a pounding piano straight out of Billy Joel’s “All for Leyna” and quickly segues into a sweetly constructed rock tune. Think Bad Religion with “Jesus Christ Superstar” running through its veins. CARYN GANZ
Tinashe, ‘Something Like a Heartbreak’
Tinashe’s expanded version of her heartsick 2021 album, “333,” adds “Something Like a Heartbreak”: an accusation, a lament and a stack of vocal melodies and twitchy electronic rhythms over an insistent bass note. “You didn’t deserve my love,” she decides, choosing scarred growth over pain; after what she’s learned, she’s “thankful that you cracked me open,” she insists, deciding that “I’m another woman — holding onto hope, not hopeless.” PARELES
Tess Roby, a singer and electronic musician from Canada, stacks up two-bar loops in “Up 2 Me”: trickle-down scales, bass riffs, flickering percussion sounds and her meditative vocals, which offer terse considerations of temporality: “calling it like it was/looking at it like it is.” It’s a four-minute track that could easily have circled through its materials for much longer. PARELES
Walter Smith III and Matthew Stevens, ‘For Some Time’
The tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III and the guitarist Matthew Stevens have brought together another quintet of intergenerational jazz all-stars for their third album under the “In Common” title. “For Some Time” is an up-tempo Smith original that sits at the center of the LP, and its key ingredients are a pattering six-beat rhythm from Terri Lyne Carrington; tautly rhythmic bass playing by Dave Holland (who, like Carrington, is an NEA Jazz Master); and a peppery exchange between Stevens’s palm-muted guitar and the pointillist piano of Kris Davis. Coasting among them, Smith carries the melody with loving attention to tone, letting his sound bubble and expand. But before a legit solo section sets in, the track fades tantalizingly, leaving the residue of its rhythm in your ear. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
Father John Misty, ‘Goodbye Mr. Blue’
Josh Tillman’s sharp lyricism often aims for the head — right in the middle of the knowingly arched eyebrow, to be specific — but here he goes straight for the heart. “Goodbye Mr. Blue,” the lovely third single from his forthcoming album as Father John Misty, “Chloe and the Next 20th Century,” is a simulacrum of the ’70s singer-songwriter sound; Harry Nilsson is an obvious touch point, but there are also shades of Jim Croce and even John Denver in the song’s fingerpicked guitars and chatty warmth. “That Turkish Angora is ’bout the only thing left of me and you,” Tillman croons, filtering a story of a relationship’s slow, inevitable end through the death of the titular pet cat. It’s sweet, a little funny, and then ultimately devastating, as Tillman repeats an increasingly elegiac refrain, “Don’t the last time come too soon?” ZOLADZ
Floating Points, ‘Vocoder’
The latest single from British electronic producer Sam Shepherd uses relatively simple elements and, over the course of seven-and-a-half minutes, builds to something sublime. Following “Promises,” his acclaimed, ethereal 2021 collaboration with the jazz saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders, “Vocoder” is a hard pivot back to the other extreme of Shepherd’s considerable range — a bona fide dance-floor banger sparking with hard-driving, kinetic energy. ZOLADZ
