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The Playlist: The Black Keys’ Fuzzy Stomp, and 10 More New Songs

Hear tracks by Helado Negro, Juice WRLD, Justin Moore and others.

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The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney have returned with their first new song since 2014.Credit...Alysse Gafkjen

Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.

The fuzztone is cranked way up on “Lo/Hi,” the first Black Keys song since 2014. It’s the kind of garage-boogie stomp that the band never left behind. Singing about desperate loneliness and 180-degree mood swings, the Black Keys reach back to a late-1960s combination of primordial three-chord simplicity (hinting at Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky”) and overdubs galore. Between the group handclaps, a gang of guitars and the whooping, wailing backup vocals, it’s a far cry from the early Black Keys’ two-man-band austerity — but with the old wallop intact. JON PARELES

A folky waltz tells the story of an adolescent romance, deploying details with a concision akin to Paul Simon: “Morrissey apologists, amateur psychologists, serial monogamists, we went to different colleges.” There’s no happy ending, and Phoebe Bridgers’s production surrounds the acoustic guitars with distant, shadowy strings that hint at the song’s higher stakes. PARELES

Lauren Mayberry, frontwoman of the Scottish band Chvrches, has a voice that’s tart, serrated and soaring — it cleanly pierces through everything around it. That makes it a sleek, albeit unexpected, complement to the production of Marshmello, whose music is restlessly and relentlessly dopey. On “Here With Me,” Mayberry is a beacon of reason, singing with ramrod posture while the song wiggles and wobbles behind her. JON CARAMANICA

“And I haven’t lost my mind thinking about you/And I haven’t lost my breath shouting all the things we’re about to do,” sings Helado Negro — Roberto Carlos Lange — in “Pais Nublado” (“Clouded Nation”), a subdued bossa nova with an electronic penumbra from his new album “This Is How You Smile.” His songs are often bilingual in English and Spanish and built on electronic underpinnings, though “This Is How You Smile” welcomes acoustic guitar as well. The album muses on desire, Latinx identity, change and rhythm, hinting at places where history and politics have intimate repercussions. PARELES

The drummer and composer Kendrick Scott will release an album next month titled “A Wall Becomes a Bridge,” featuring his long-running quintet Oracle (plus the turntablist Jahi Sundance on about half the tracks). Scott invests seriously in the ancient ideal of music as a healing force, and the notion that through focus and attunement, he might create sounds that resonate with our particular moment. He’s one of more consistent bandleaders in instrumental music today, with original music that feels consequential and distinguished in spite of its adherence to an airtight, contemporary-jazz aesthetic. With Joe Sanders on bass, Mike Moreno on guitar, Taylor Eigsti on Fender Rhodes and John Ellis on soprano saxophone, Oracle douses your ear in textures that are thick but aerodynamic, and on “‘>>>>>>>>>>>Mocean” Ellis’s liquid melody cuts against Scott’s constant patter, feeding the band two different kinds of fuel. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

Why wouldn’t the guitar on “Who Shot Cupid?” rest somewhere between flamenco, new age and early emo? Juice WRLD has become one of the most promising figures in hip-hop by almost completely dismantling the genre’s usual structures. That’s plain throughout his new album “Death Race for Love,” but the thickly layered moaning vocals on this song — “All the drugs I did, they weren’t worth it/now I'm worthless/I hope my new lady thinks I'm perfect” — show just how far Juice WRLD is able to bend hip-hop, turning it into something soft, interior and elegiac. CARAMANICA

An album of newly unearthed recordings by the Texan songwriter Townes Van Zandt (1944-1997) rightfully makes “Sky Blue,” a previously unknown song, its title track. It’s a terse, low-fi, solo, fingerpicked glimpse of chronic despair: “No good reason to be livin’/Been lookin’ high and low,” he sings. PARELES

In his decade-long country music career, Justin Moore has been rabble-rousing and retrograde, a stern guy and a goof. Finally, he’s found a song that captures both sides of his duality. “Jesus and Jack Daniels” is delivered with a smear of Randy Travis stoicism — mom parents via the good book, and dad via the bottle: “When we messed up she’d fill us up/with the scripture and a Baptist hymn/and she’d pray we’d be a little more like her and a whole lot less like him.” CARAMANICA

The music is an elegantly melancholy bolero. But the words to “Temes” (“You Fear”) are a challenge, defying a machismo that pretends to be romantic but is actually about maintaining power, sometimes violently. “If my freedom is your dispossession/and my body is the recipient of your whim/If my shadow is behind your figure/Why do you fear me?” iLe (Ileana Mercedes Cabra Joglar) sings. And in the desolate video clip, she pulls herself together after a sexual assault. PARELES

Backed by Soundwalk Collective, Patti Smith recites dire words by Antonin Artaud about how “A mortal folly comes over the world.” Her tone is steadfast, as if partaking in a ritual; she sings like a stoic lullaby when she reaches the lines, “Here where the mother eats her sons/Power eats Power: Short of war, no stability.” Around her, Sound Collective constructs a pyre of creaky, echoey fiddle lines and drumbeats that build to an apocalyptic rumble. PARELES

Like many of Carla Bley’s melodies, the tune to “Ida Lupino” is a simple, songlike thread, snaking through a set of chord changes that gradually tweak the pressure around it, thickening the air and then letting things go slack again. On this version, by the young jazz combo Lioness, Amanda Monaco daubs at single notes on her guitar, painting little shapes around the alto saxophonist Alexa Tarantino’s dewy, unhurried treatment of the melody. Underneath, the drummer Allison Miller keeps a steady beat going, hardly deviating from her cool, eighth-note pattern, even when sparks momentarily start to fly. RUSSONELLO

Jon Pareles has been The Times's chief pop music critic since 1988. A musician, he has played in rock bands, jazz groups and classical ensembles. He majored in music at Yale University. More about Jon Pareles

Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic for The Times and the host of the Popcast. He also writes the men's Critical Shopper column for Styles. He previously worked for Vibe magazine, and has written for the Village Voice, Spin, XXL and more. More about Jon Caramanica

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